All of us have seen the interview conducted by admiring journalists after someone has run up to a cliff and jumped off it into the abyss with nothing but a hang glider to hold onto. Or after jumping off that nine hundred feet high bridge in West Virginia on Bridge Day with a bungee cord tied to an ankle. And they say the same thing. “I feel so alive when I leap from the cliff (or jump from the bridge). It’s a thrill I can’t live without.” Then they tell us that we should be like them, that getting thrills is the primary purpose of life.
They don’t know what Buddhists know. Maximum ignorance may be defined as the belief that the objective world is very real and definitely worth exploring intensely through thrilling adventures in it, coupled with the belief that the subjective world is real because it is what experiences the thrills but isn’t worth looking at because all the fun is in the action and excitement, and the subjective self is just the passive beneficiary of all that fun.
Maximum enlightenment (if there is such a thing) is then defined essentially as the opposite, i.e., the belief that the objective world is illusory, coupled with the belief that one’s ultimate subjectivity is also illusory. Thus, both object and subject are empty at maximum enlightenment, i.e., there certainly is no independent self that obtains enlightenment.
Enlightenment is the realization that the objective world and the subjective world are the creation of a deluded self that cuts reality into those two worlds.
So the thrill seekers looking for maximum enjoyment in the objective world by withdrawing from the subjective world share something in common with those looking for maximum enjoyment in the subjective world by withdrawing from the objective world. Both believe that reality is divided into outside and inside.
Enlightenment is to go beyond subject/object (and to go beyond concepts such as going beyond). The nature of reality, the dharmakaya, is indivisible. Until we see that there are no two things we will continue jumping off cliffs and meditating in caves. But the former leads to deeper ignorance, and the latter leads to awakening. The thrill seeker can look for bigger and more frequent thrills and can find them. The meditator can look deeper and deeper for the self and will never find it.
Both begin their search for fulfillment filled with stupidity, believing in the subject/object delusion. One of them gets stupider, the other gets wisdom.
