Last night I rapped for a little while about outlaws and why I like them, and the flack they sometimes get from others for living by no rules but their own. But there is another reason why I love outlaws. For me they are the perfect metaphor for the pathway to enlightenment.
In my considered opinion, *most* of the men and women in human history who have realized their enlightenment have done so by being outlaws. At some point in their lives they decided to stop following the advice or the "laws" of others, and follow only their own. You need look no further than the Buddha for an example. Yeah, he studied with a few teachers during his early days. But he rejected them all, and in the end wound up "studying" only with the Self. And that was all that was needed to realize the Self. That is essentially his message, and in my opinion it is still true, all these centuries later. Many in the spiritual community are *offended* by the idea of DIY (Do It Yourself). They come up with all sorts of intellectual arguments for how it isn't possible for a self to realize Self all by itself. They repeat the stuff they've been told (and, more often than not, *sold*) by teachers who told them that they *needed* a teacher to realize who they are. They go on and on like Ron does about how a guru is essential, and how doing exactly what he or she says is essential to become enlightened. Well, to echo Cuba Gooding, Jr. in Jerry Maguire, "Show me the enlightenment!" We were all told for years or decades within the TM move- to Just Follow Instructions. "Do what we tell you to do and you'll become enlightened." Yeah, right. We all know how many people in the TM movement *that* worked for. And then I look at other spiritual traditions and what I see is that the guys and gals who get written about *as* enlightened beings are the ones who *didn't* follow instructions, who *didn't* do exactly what they were told to do. For the most part, the people whom history records as the enlightened were outlaws. For a while they tried doing things Somebody Else's Way, but in the end the thing that enabled them to realize their enlight- enment was finding Their Own Way. I could go on and on and on, listing the enlightened of the past whose life stories suggest that they were outlaws. It's pretty easy to do; there are far more of them than there are stories about people who realized enlightenment by doing what they were told. But instead, since I know that this is going to push some buttons, I'll ask those who still believe that one *can* become realized by doing what you're told to do (or that that's the *only* way you can realize enlight- enment) to provide some examples of this. Show me the enlightenment! Trot out some examples of someone follow- ing Someone Else's Path and getting enlightened by doing what he or she was told to do. We've certainly seen Ron trying to do this here, and I think we've all seen how believable his claims that all these people are poppin' into enlightenment are. I would suspect that there is not one person here who believes it. But *Ron* believes it, and obviously believes firmly that if he does everything he is told to do, for long enough, that enlightenment will be the result. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I'm not convinced. I think there is great value in the moment in which one *rejects* doing what one has been told, and does Something Else instead. That moment often is referred to by the enlightened as the pivotal moment in their lives in which the seed of realization was planted. It may not have actually been *doing* the Something Else that "caused" realization, but just making that decision to no longer be reliant on Someone Else's Path in almost every case revealed their *own* path to them. And that path led them home.
