Sitting in a cafe on the Grand Place in Brussels, sipping a fine Trappist beer, I find myself pondering the above question.
"Beer goggles," for those unfamiliar with the term, are a guy thang. That's what your buddies say when you tell them that you met a 10 at the bar last night but woke up with a 2. "You were wearing beer goggles, man," they say. Well, amidst all this talk recently about what constitutes the Ultimate Reality, I find myself at loose ends because I don't believe in one. Oh, there might be one, but I am not convinced that any human being has ever "known" what it was or "understood" it, much less experienced it fully. Why? Because we're always wearing beer goggles. Waking state? Beer googles. CC? Beer goggles. UC? Beer goggles. Thoughtless samadhi? More beer goggles...just really dark ones, so that you can't actually experience thoughts or perceptions of the world around you, just eternity. In other words, I can't really get it up for discussions of "Which is higher -- UC or some other kind of 'reality'?" because I don't really think of things that way any more. To me, states of consciousness (SOCs) are just beer goggles that we put on, and through which we perceive the universe *while we're wearing that particular pair*. It's like we have a whole wardrobe of beer goggles avail- able to us. Some are just ordinary Ray-Bans (waking state), others are all gold-and-glitter covered like a pair of Elton John glasses (GC), and some are like mirrors (UC), so that looking through them at the world convinces us that we're really looking at our Selves. But IMO they're all beer goggles. I am not convinced that it's even *possible* to experience life WITHOUT beer goggles in place, so the whole question of whether a SOC can be the "ultimate" SOC is moot. Aspiring to achieve or realize one particular set of beer goggles strikes me as kinda silly. Dedicating one's life *to* achieving or realizing one particular set of beer goggles strikes me as even sillier. I'm content with whatever set I find myself wearing at any particular moment. Through some of them, the world looks like a 2. Through others, a 10. But the world is always the same. And when you wake up, it's going to be beside the world, not the way you perceived it through any particular set of beer goggles. Just my opinion.
