Dirty Enlightenment: The Inherent Perfection of Imperfection

Dirty Enlightenment is a stripped-down, radical presentation of the Nature of Reality and your spiritual place in it. In actuality, you are a miraculously present infinite field of transcendental being presenting itself to itself as subtle radiant energy of pure intelligence. This truth is consonant with the view of Dzogchen, Kashmir Shaivism, Advaita Vedanta, Kundalini Yoga, primal Buddhism, and with all radical spiritual traditions. Since this is already and eternally the sole condition, the spiritual challenge is merely to recognize that this is the case, with no special conditions or abilities needing to be cultivated, nothing in one's life needing to be changed or improved in the slightest. With the simple recognition of the nature of your actual condition, you are freed from the confused implications of any misinterpretations of what your condition is, that you may have been laboring under. This recognition is available since it is clearly displayed by every aspect of your experience, and will be discovered by direct investigation without preconceptions. In actuality the only "spiritual" problem possible is misinterpretation, which can give rise to beliefs in separate existence, dependency, vulnerability, inadequacy, failure, death, etc., etc., whereas in fact none of these imagined conditions actually exist at all. The apparent "imperfection" that you may believe your life to be, is in fact already and inherently an entirely transcendental, miraculous eternal perfection, and it can be easy to discover this fact with self-verifying certainty. Peter Brown presents this understanding from several perspectives, as direct description, meditative aphorisms, and question-and-answer discussion, with a personal retelling of his own path of discovery.

My ＂spiritual＂ life proper began in 1973, when at the age of 22 I had the extreme good fortune to receive ＂Transmission＂ from Pino Turolla. In the clarity I attained at that time I realized that my entire life had led up to that event, my character and obsessive nature regarding exploring Reality conspiring to the inevitability of the ongoing unfoldment that was quickened at that time, finally to bear fruit in more recent years. The pattern of Life is indeed astounding, a symphony of meaningfulness and profundity becoming more itself as it spirals out/inwards over the spiderweb of time... After that quickening I redoubled my spiritual explorations, driven to strive to make some sense of what had happened, was happening, to me, what this exceedingly strange circumstance of my experience was, in the context of both my own inspirations and various more traditional approaches to these matters, including Raja, Jnana, and Bhakti Yogas (and being dragged kicking, screaming, and bleeding through Karma Yoga), Quabalah, Western occultism, Tarot, Shamanism, Dzogchen, Taoism, Tantra, Buddhism, and Kashmir Shaivism, among other spiritual traditions; and the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, Bhagavan Nityananda, Nisargadatta, Longchen Rabjam, Lao Tzu, Hui Neng, Aliester Crowley, Jesus Christ, Neem Karoli Baba, and Austin Spare, among many others. Finally in a quiet moment in 1997, recovering from cancer at the time, on a sunny February afternoon, sitting alone in my living room, a tiny opening of realization gently flowed into appearance, the entire universe fractally crystalizing around it in instantaneous virtual ripples, eating all separation, all event, even all Being, into absolute indescribable Radiance, of me/it/everything/nothing laughing/crying/wonder, as it ever was and ever will be... The accumulation of perspectives that were acquired over the course of all that (unnecessary?) exploration of traditional philosophies enables me to correlate ideas from within those traditions, when useful, in the context of a more direct, pragmatic, non-jargon-laden presentation of the direct discovery of the mystery of what YOU are, that I have named the Yoga of Radiant Presence.