Enlightened or Disappointing?

Spiritual lessons from Thor: Love and Thunder

In the 2022 film, Thor: Love and Thunder, supervillain Gorr the God Butcher doesn’t start out as a wanton exterminator of Gods.

He starts out as the most devoted of God-followers. 

But Gorr, played by Cristian Bale, makes the cardinal mistake of actually meeting his divine Master. The meeting is disappointing in the extreme. 

God, in this instance, turns out to be a selfish, petty, and prideful piece of work. Sure, he has some powers, but he snarkily scoffs at his disciple’s belief in eternal life and disses “lowly” humans in general. 

It takes but a second for Gorr’s love and devotion to mutate to hate and wrath.  Having discovered that he’s dedicated his life to an a-hole minor deity who doesn’t care about human well-being, Gorr vows to kill all Gods with the super-sword of God doom that his wrath has now attracted. He embarks on a quest for revenge. 

What’s missing? Maybe recognition that the God projection was a manifestation of Gorr’s own desire and lack of clear seeing? That his longing was real all along despite the mistaken object of affection? That he’s still expressing spiritual longing, but in kill mode? 

Appropriation fail

Spiritual traditions from India and Tibet have bequeathed to us an unfortunate Gorr the Disciple-Turned-God-Butcher habit. I’m talking about the habit of referring to teachers in diverse conditions as “enlightened” or “totally enlightened.”

We do this to teachers we barely know, to teachers others have deemed enlightened, and to teachers we’ve read about in books where inconvenient details are often omitted and pedestalizing details added. 

When an Indian teacher from my former lineage died, I was among the first to receive an email about the event. The time of death was reported as a bit after 2 am. 

Later that same day, the details had changed. Now his death was listed as “on the stroke of midnight.” 🙄

This is one example among probably zillions.

Western students have mainlined this hagiography¹ habit, ramped up by our vast lack of direct experience with accomplished teachers. 

Most of us simply don’t know what realization or actual spiritual authority looks or feels like. 

We idealize mediocre or even abusive teachers and get into a lot of trouble. We sing the praises of teachers, whether or not those praises are earned. We then are disappointed and angry when teachers display behaviors or emotions that don’t conform to our projected image.

We also live in an enormously titan culture. We are deeply immersed in self-image fashioning, image branding, humble bragging, competition, and emotional manipulation. These lifeways are so normalized, we often do not notice when teachers are serving up these instead of real accomplishment. I mean, we don’t notice when we are doing it, so how could we notice anyone else doing it? 

They’ve got your number

God realmy or titany teachers profit off of the ease with which Westerners can be played. They don special clothing and/or assume special spiritual voices. They post goo goo eye headshots and advertise faux résumés with exaggerated spiritual titles. They spend a lot of time on social media shopping their self-image and subtly or not-so-subtly grooming us in what they want us to think of them. Some teachers are performatively shocking or domineering and nasty just so you’ll think they really have “it.”

Teachers from India and Tibet can easily bank on Euro-Am naiveté and racism, mirroring back to us our ignorant projections of “Eastern” spirituality. I mean, basically all they have to do is show up in a dhoti or robe. They see and understand our caricaturish versions of “saintly,” “divine,” “authentic,” “crazy wisdom,” “humble,” and “pure.” The fact that we largely don’t even notice the game being played is another aspect of our naive or supremacist orientation. Who’s supreme now? Cha ching. 

Savior Culture

Whether or not we are Christian, many if not most Euro-American seekers have deeply absorbed the view that we are broken and need saving. We deploy our inebriated expectations of spiritual teachers in order to take refuge in the idea that someone else can save us from ourselves. 

A student once let drop that she thought I was “like Jesus.” I knew I was in deep trouble. I mean, does anyone really know what Jesus was like? As a person? 🤣 Projection upon projection. 

Somewhat later, when it turned out that I was not conforming to her version of Jesus-like behavior, adoration turned into Gorr-esque, God Butcher rage. 

The unacknowledged through-line was longing. Same in love as in hate. But longing for what?

Solid spiritual teachers in Indian and Tibetan traditions don’t offer salvation or even quick fixes for our so-called problems. They offer us help. They offer us accompaniment. They offer to share whatever they’ve realized because they recognize that others have a capacity for realization, too. They are somewhat more awake humans walking with humans. 

As my Dzogchen teacher, Namkhai Norbu said: Working together, students and teachers find a way. 

WTAF is “enlightened”? 

I’ve encountered many definitions of enlightenment. The simplest one is “self knowledge.” You know the nature of the self, of reality, of God. These three are the same.  

This knowing far exceeds intellectual understanding. It is a direct perception that is also an immersion. Since what you are perceiving and immersed in is the self, your own self and the self of everything, knowing the self also is equal to an embodiment. Direct perception of the nature of the self is equal to the embodiment of greater wisdom, virtue, clarity, compassion, and skillfulness. And, humor. 

Turns out, God is really, really funny, which may account for all of the vaudevillian enactments of enlightenment now playing on planet earth.

We can grow into more knowledge of how things actually are. We can have some realization. But my encounters with that primordial wisdom of living presence blasted away any ideas I might have been cherishing about a final spiritual destination or even the possibility of “total enlightenment” in a human being.

Enlightenment is an incremental affair that never concludes. We’re always approaching and drawing nearer, but not arriving.

Our lives can become extraordinary through spiritual practice and grace. We can become more or less enlightened, but we will always be in some immeasurable middle.

This means that for students to work with teachers, they have to face their fears about themselves and the groundlessness of life without the promise of being saved by someone else’s presumed perfection. 

Even the most realized teachers have never caused a single other person to become enlightened. We still have to deal with ourselves. 

Students also have to recognize and bring their projections about spiritual teachers, spiritual life, and received ideas about the path onto the path. These projections must be destroyed so that students can see more clearly how teachers actually are. In the relative absence of such projections, students can do a better job of avoiding harmful teachers and feel more confident in learning from good teachers. 

When we project “total enlightenment” onto human teachers, at some point, if we are lucky, our disappointment will cause us to re-evaluate and get more real. 

If we are unlucky,  we might remain perpetually enraged like Gorr. Or we might use our perceptions of “lack of enlightenment” as an excuse to protect small self and never begin at all. 

Being okay with our own humanness

All of us, teachers and students alike, are equally reflective of the enlightened natural state of existence. In this way, we are all as they say in Dzogchen, “perfect from the beginning.”

But our desire for some kind of mundane perfection in our teachers is a mirror of our own fragility. And also our lack of understanding of the nature of the mundane world. 

Many people feel shame. They cannot tolerate making mistakes without feeling humiliated, and they hide bits of themselves they find to be unacceptable and unsavory. They also cannot tolerate groundlessness and doubt. All of this amounts to a lack of intimacy with oneself and others and more loneliness.

We need to unlearn shame, stop being afraid of doubt, and fall in love with groundlessness. We also need to learn that wisdom is inherent in all of our foibles and failings.

I was always impressed by how intimate my best teachers were with students. I don’t mean in a sexual way. I mean that they let their students into their lives. They let students see their full humanity. And they freely expressed themselves in a natural, spontaneous way that had not a hint of the self-fashioning airs of those who want to be seen as “enlightened.”

I learned from them that being more immersed in the natural state of wisdom looks like the free play of a human who no longer has anything to hide, who delights in the unbound expressiveness of the creation, and finds human foibles, including their own, funny and poignant rather than shameful. 

Seeing the burden of shame and secretiveness and self-denigration lifted in their teachers is good for students. 

As the great teacher Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche said: 

Making mistake after mistake, I walk on the authentic path,
Confused and confused, I search for the unconfused nature,
Forgetting and forgetting, I rely on unforgetting mindfulness.²

Good teachers can show us how to make mistakes, be confused, and forget while still waking up. And that it’s all fine.

Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche

As my own clarity has increased, I’ve come to know that teachers with significant realization never intentionally hurt or manipulate or use students for personal pleasure or gain. They have touched the heart of reality—that compassionate, beneficent fountain—and they only want to embody that more fully.

It really doesn’t matter how highly regarded a teacher is or what titles they hold. If they are in it for themselves, they aren’t really in it. And if we want to be able to make more discerning choices, we have to be willing to let go of our fantasies about teachers—idealizing and skeptical alike. 

Patrul, my love

One of only two photos of Patrul Rinpoche

I feel a special kinship with Patrul Rinpoche, a wandering 19th century Tibetan Nyingma teacher. 

One of the reasons is that he was just so darn real. Like this:

When I consider my own conduct, I can do nothing but laugh.
When I consider the conduct of others, I can do nothing but sigh.
Just now, whatever comes to mind is distressing.
Whomever I lay my eyes on, it’s depressing.
When nature's elements rise up as enemies, I feel completely fed up with the universe!
When hypocrisy, pretense, and deceit rise up, I feel completely fed up with those who inhabit the universe!
Regarding the endless river of bad karma, seeing how all of life is spent without meaning, I feel completely fed up with people!
I just am completely fed up with it all!³

What would happen if you met such a teacher, but rejected them because they were supposed to be “enlightened” (according to your definition). What if you had the idea that teachers should never be fed up with life, never depressed, never sick of other humans, and with perfect conduct?

I’ve always been deeply moved by the humanity of my teachers. I find mercy in the fact that there is so much spiritual opportunity in the circumstance of humans guiding other humans. And I wouldn’t study with a teacher who didn’t know this. 

At the same time, what we perceive as limitations are aspects of wisdom. That is the ultimate realization. Everything all at once from the same source.

Many years ago, I had a teacher who had taken on too many projects. I noticed that he looked tired and somewhat anxious. I asked him sympathetically, “Feeling overwhelmed?” 

He hesitated. And in that gap, I knew he was trying to decide if it would undermine his spiritual authority to admit to being overwhelmed. Was it okay for a spiritual teacher to be human?

Yes, it is. Not only okay, but necessary, if we want to discover, slowly and incompletely, whatever enlightenment might be.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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1. Hagiography - a biography that idealizes its subject, most often applied to spiritual biographies.

2. https://www.ktgrinpoche.org/songs/mistake-after-mistake

3. Ricard, Matthieu. Enlightened Vagabond (p. 137). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.