By Robert K.C. Forman, Ph.D.

On January 4, 1972, at 4:00 in the afternoon, on a 9 month long meditation retreat, I went through a spiritual transformation. My sense of who or what I was shifted. I suddenly became utterly separate from all that I did, said or even thought. You couldn't miss it. My sense of who I was became what they call 'universal consciousness'. And it turned out to be permanent.

I didn't know what had happened to me. It would take me some ten years of regular meditation, graduate work in religion and study of the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures before I came to understand that what had shifted in my life that afternoon was at least a good chunk of the very enlightenment that the ancient texts had been describing and that I'd been pursuing.

The reason I struggled to understand it, and why I'm telling you this, is that what had happened to me wasn't at all like what it was cracked up to be. It didn't make me happy. It didn't end the worries and fears that had led me into the spiritual path to begin with. An infinite silence at my core, yes, but I wasn't better off in any obvious way than I might have been.

Enlightenment just ain't what we expected, and it's not what I was after. I'd dare say it isn't what any of us on the spiritual path who live post modern, post-Freudian, post true-believer, sexually active, mortgaged lives actually are after either.

Paul McCartney wrote a little ditty about enlightenment, calling it "such a joy, joy, joy". Joy, joy, joy this wasn't!

In my work organising spiritual teachers and leaders, I've had occasion to interview five people with virtually identical enlightenment experiences. They all had similar reactions: interesting, yes. Important, yes. But they still struggled in the rest of their lives.

Harvard scholar Jeffrey Martin has been studying subjects who report enlightenment. Very little of how they are in the world, he says, is unusual. They often maintain their addictions, their mental disorders, their racial and gender biases, and so on. He finds virtually no differences in their personalities.

'Enlightenment', moksha, nirvana, Christ Consciousness, means something very specific. It can be seen most clearly in a famous passage from the Upanishads:

Two birds,

Inseparable companions,

Perch on the same tree.

One eats the fruit,

The other looks on.

The first bird is our individual self,

Feeding on the pleasures and pains of this world;

The other is the universal Self,

Silently witnessing all.

To be 'enlightened' is like being two 'birds' at once. One part of us pecks noisily and flutters about. It's the half that lives our outer lives. The other half just 'looks on'. Whatever we might do or think, the active and noisy part of us is 'silently witnessed' by that second bird, the quiet 'universal Self'. That second half of us knows consciousness in some unusually deep way; and it remains aware of or 'witnesses' whatever our active side does or thinks.

The same is seen in Buddhism's famous Dhammapada: "the mind is kept independent of its own thoughts. (¶45)" We stay independent of whatever we see or think: one part of us sees and acts; the other doesn't. Again, we're like two birds.

Don't mistake this for an emotional disconnect, by the way. It's more a deep sense of remaining peaceful and unchanging while the changes take place around us.

Enlightenment then is a shift in the structure of who we are. What we see, think and feel keeps going as before, but we remain at some deep level unconnected with it.

That's what happened to me in 1972, and to the others that I've interviewed. There's a lightness that comes with this shift, a sense of freedom in what we're about that it seems to foster. It is as interesting as it is valuable.

But, by itself, it wasn't enough for me. Nor is it enough for most of us moderns. It doesn't make us good at our jobs, it doesn't even make it clear which job we should do. It doesn't help us be a good wife or husband. It's a sense of spaciousness, of freedom, yes, but it's not a personality transplant.

What then would be enough? What are we complex moderns really after spiritually?

An answer came to me at a rock and roll birthday party of a friend. It was a hoot, a riot of laughing, singing along and foot stompin'.

During a set break I sat next to a well-known local Zen teacher. I'd heard quite a lot about her and she seemed lovely sitting there, all primly folded hands, erect head and pressed white gown. So I sat down next to her. I asked about her kids. I asked about her Zendo. I asked with a smile how on earth she kept her robes so clean?

She responded, quite correct, earnest, slow voiced and monosyllabic. You know: the distant and impenetrable sage act.

It was like chatting with a wall! I never learned where she was born, what she liked, whether she was divorced. Not once did she really smile!

After a little while, I gave up. A Zen student soon wandered over and sat on the floor, literally at her feet. Suddenly she was all low register and stately Zen sage voice. She actually seemed relieved that she could now play guru.

She was, I suspect, swimming in the 'universal self' that the Upanishads describes. She is, I hear, a wonderful teacher. But honestly, I found her frozen nearly solid, with nary a shred of personality or vulnerability or doubts or playfulness. There was no way to contact her as a person, much less as a woman. God save us from some such a bloodless 'universal joy!' This just can't be right!

What healthy spirituality should facilitate isn't this, I found myself thinking. It's full-bodied freedom. The freedom we feel in the 'universal self' is, or should be, lived in every corner of our everyday lives. What we're after today must include spreading our arms to it all, to the whole cornucopia of human feelings, doings and ways of acting.

Freedom does not mean having only a free inner self. It means whole, complete and full-bodied freedom. What I think we're after in our complex lives is all of it, a complete life. We're after being able to use our heads, our intellects, as well as our hearts. It means being able to love and have wonderful sex, and equally able to dance with abandon at a rock and roll party.

What we're after is to be utterly non-resistant to joy and pain and love and loss and boredom and knowing and not-knowing: wide open to the whole paradox that is the life of a human being.

What makes a life spiritual is its range, not just its inner workings, and not just its shift in structure. Certainly the serious 'sage act' doesn't make it spiritual. Life is alive. The more alive you are in the more ways, the more flexibility you live – and vice versa. The truly spiritual can flow any-emotional-where, without any hesitation whatsoever. Rock and Roll parties are times for foot stompin', not slow talking; flirting, not sharing dark secrets. And if you're free in all things you can enjoy their outrageous excitement just as much as you can delivering a good 'dharma talk'.

Real spiritual freedom can go deep and serious and funny and raucous and thoughtful and can plan with a spreadsheet, happily, each when the time is right. The free can play alone, play with another and play in a work group without holding back.

Real spiritual freedom lives wide open in the juicy paradox that is being a multi-hued human being.

Lord let me dance to that old rock and roll music and sit comfortably on the meditation cushion and weep with melancholy when I lose a loved one and think creatively with my buddies and love the gentle curve of a woman's back, each at the right moment. And all on the settled groundwork of the Vast Infinite.

Such full bodied freedom includes the tears that well up with unabashed love, the easy smile that comes from a fully resolved conflict, the silence that can only be known by being it, and laughter, real belly laughter at the Rabbi, the Priest and the Minister who walk into a bar. And in the midst of it all, grounded in the sacred, it is as non-resistant as the wind.

What I am envisioning is 'enlightenment plus' if you will. It means we're effortlessly appropriate under any circumstance—on the settled ground of spiritual awareness.

Now that's a spiritual telos worth pursuing!

Robert K.C. Forman, Ph.D. is the author of Enlightenment ain't what it's cracked up to be – a journey of discovery, snow and jazz in the soul, to be published by O Books in late October, and this article is based on the book. He is Executive Director, The Forge Institute; Founding Executive Editor, Journal of Consciousness Studies; Associate Professor of Religion, CUNY (ret); Honorary Doctor, Lund Universeity (Sweden) and lives in New York State.