Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
ROBERT WOLFE: Well, to think in terms of a path is to think in
terms of starting out from somewhere and arriving somewhere,
and that probably is one of the most problematic elements in
terms of looking at this matter. All of these teachings tell us that
what we're looking for is here, Now. So if it's here and Now,
there's no place we need to go to find it. We don't need to set out
somewhere, head in some direction to find what is here and Now.
So we speak of the path, that is the picture that's presented, it's an
idea that we're going to start out Now, and we're going to arrive at
some point later where this that what we're looking for will be
found. And obviously the sages continually tell us that are not the
case, but what we're looking for is here, Now. So that's the
problem with this metaphor of the path.
But from the standpoint of what you might call the seeker, or the
seeking, there often arises in a person's life an occasion when they
question the nature of existence, and in some cases that question
becomes so prominent that a person basically follows through on
that question to its conclusion. And so in that sense, you might
say there's a path, but what I'm saying is that to think in terms of it
being a path where you're going to someday get somewhere that
you're not already, that's the difficulty there.
WIZARD: Well said.
ROBERT WOLFE: Thank you.
TRIP: There's a million different ways of saying the same thing,
but I thought your take on enlightenment was interesting. And
I'm sure that you feel that the point of enlightenment is more than
one thing. But you say, "The point of enlightenment is to sever the
bonds of our selfishness". I thought that was interesting, because I
think most people think of it as freedom.
ROBERT WOLFE: Basically, it is freedom, in other words, to the
extent that selfishness dominates our life, there are problems
created by that selfishness. And that is a situation, the problem of
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