Why Enlightenment Means You’re Everywhere

And Then You Can Weave Like My Grandmother

On the Plaza in Taos. Artwork created by the Author using ImageFX. PS-It actually looks like the Plaza in Taos, which surprised me.

The nature of Enlightenment is a little odd. I saw the Universe and became its Bod.

So Bod rhymes with God, but only one should have a Capital. Bod, of course.

***

What does sex have to do with Enlightenment? The first book of Osho’s I ever read was Only One Sky: On Tilopa’s Song of Mahamudra. I had never heard of Tilopa, or Mahamudra, Tilopa’s word for Enlightenment. One time I had to laugh. This utter idiot, Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan monk who had relocated to Colorado, and was known for alcoholism and womanizing, also wrote a book on Tilopa and his Song of Mahamudra. He said that Mahamudra means “Great Symbol.” Well, it does. I bet even ChatGPT could tell you that. Maha is great, just like Mahayana Buddhism, the largest branch: Mahayana means Great Vehicle. (I sort of like that. It sounds like a Chinese EV commercial.)

Mahamudra: Mudras are those cool hand gestures. A mudra is a symbol.

OK, Chögyam, you are correct. But the poor dude showed that he actually had no experience of Enlightenment or even a distant echo, about as close to Enlightenment as distantly hearing the water drip in your bathroom. Osho said Mahamudra, remember, it’s Tilopa’s word for Enlightenment, means Orgasm with the Universe.

I had never heard of Raye, either, but while watching a cool series, Black Rabbit, on Netflix, I heard her sing What a Difference a Day Makes:

[embed]

Osho sings because he knows what the word Enlightenment actually means. Chögyam Trungpa could have just been Joel Osteen.

Oh god, I’m being mean! A lot of people love ‘ol Chögyam. But … Even I’m puzzled. My subconscious wanted to connect him with Joel Osteen? Well, he didn’t have the really really oily hairdo. He didn’t operate out of Houston. Did he have a fancy car? I don’t know. Osho had the infamous 93 Rolls Royces. Chögyam probably drove a Toyota. Nothing wrong with that, I guess.

But Subarus are better.

I digress! But you know, that’s what life does. One moment you’re having a coffee, reading news, maybe writing on Medium. And the next moment a kachina flies by your window.

On a fast train through New Mexico. Artwork created by the Author with ImageFX.

What am I doing? Just hinting at Enlightenment.

Because all you can do is hint.

Orgasm with the Universe.

In my growing experience, if I become Time Itself, then I dissolve in a field of energy which, well, it’s a Fast Train through New Mexico, maybe visiting my Navajo Grandmother,

Artwork created by the Author with ImageFX

And helping her direct traffic.

Artwork created by the Author with ImageFX

I’m being presumptuous, you know, and I realize it. I’m actually just a Jewish boy from Arkansas. Really. I used to tell my kids that it actually does make sense: Jews and Arkansans are both people with no respect for authority.

I have a funny story. Perhaps it points to the pure absurdity of my own life experience.

When I was a kid in Little Rock, I was a Boy Scout, the proudest member of Troop 28 you could find. My best bud, Finley Williams, got me to join. Troop 28 was sponsored by the 2nd Baptist Church in Little Rock. You have to realize the significance of this: Everybody’s a Southern Baptist in Arkansas, or at least we used to be. One Baptist Church in Little Rock wasn’t enough. So we had two. Maybe there was a third. I don’t know. There could have been.

Anyway, we had these bright red neckerchiefs, our Boy Scout troop, that is, that had a picture of the church and the slogan, written below, that said

The troop that prays together, stays together.

I loved it!

No respect for authority, even then.

Another tale … Our own rabbi, Seymour Atlas, who was from Mississippi and sounded like William Faulkner, somehow talked my parents into sending me off to yeshiva — Jewish religious school — in Memphis when I was in the 9th grade. He was hoping I would become a rabbi, too. He must have subconsciously picked up on my past life as Reb Levi, that is Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, a Hassidic rebbe of some note, let’s say, a bit farther back.

If you’re curious, I discuss finding out about him here:

[embed]The New Mexican Light And a Surprising Discussion of Enlightenment, From Science.medium.com

My Navajo Grandmother loves the story, too. I bet she’s friends with my real grandmother, Tillie, from this life! I know they’d like each other. Tillie, who came over from Poland with her younger sister, Sophie, somewhere around 1905 I’m guessing, ended up growing up in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I still don’t know how that happened. But you know, we are all from everywhere. Perhaps. Does Diné, the Navajo language, sound at all like Yiddish? No… But -

I have to further digress. Once, while visiting the Palace of the Governors, the seat of the Spanish government in New Mexico (uh, some years ago), which had been made into a New Mexican history museum, I just happened to be there when they were having an exhibit about the history of the Jews in New Mexico. I knew about the Secret Jews there, back during the Spanish Empire: You see, the hideous Spanish Inquisition operated out of Mexico City back then, too. The Jews had been kicked out of Spain in 1492, as well. You had 3 choices: Leave, convert, or die. And, as you know, the Catholic Church had developed really sadistic ways of forced dying. Oh boy.

The Conversos, though, were not particularly trusted. So many of them, to get as far away from the Spanish government and their holy Catholic henchmen, moved to the Spanish overseas places in the Americas. Well, you know, the Spanish Inquisition, having nothing better to do than murder people, set up an office in Mexico City. Well, the furthest away you could get from the Church and the government was *Santa Fe de Nuevo México. *So the Jews have a long history there.

What I didn’t know, and found out from that history exhibit, was a further migration: German Jews in the 1850s! The story is this: After the failed revolutions in Europe of 1848, all the Napoleonic reforms which had given Jews civil rights were rolled back. So before Tillie and her sister and parents left to escape the Czar 50 or 60 years later, there was a wave of German Jews who came to America. Some of them made it as far as … New Mexico!

So here I was looking at the exhibits. There’s this guy about my age looking too. We start talking. It turns out he grew up in the New Mexican hill country between Taos and Santa Fe. His Mom was New Mexican and Native American, too, I think. His Dad was New Mexican and Jewish. He had served in Vietnam and the whole nine yards, but really didn’t even know about his Jewish roots. So here he was.

And I was a Jewish Arkansan Boy Scout who married a Scots/Irish woman from NW Montana.

Anyway, that’s who we all are.

It’s a lesson for today.

***

Damn, if you read me, you do have to be prepared to go everywhere.

So Osho says Enlightenment actually means Orgasm with the Universe.

So who would you rather have an orgasm with, a chatbot or the whole Existence itself?

‘Ol Chögyam Trungpa never had a clue.

I say this with some confidence.

And I don’t agree with Osho and his 93 Rolls Royces. I know his excuse: He wanted to show that the real nature of Enlightenment is Energy, not removal from the world. I also love what Bodhidharma told the Emperor of China back around 500 AD.

The Emperor, as the story goes, asked the B what the essence of his teaching was? Bodhidharma simply said “Emptiness, no holiness.”

Perhaps the Secret Jews of New Mexico understood this. Perhaps the German Jews arriving in the 1850s, true strangers in a strange land, did, too. My Navajo Grandmother does, I’m sure.

Oh, Osho and the 93 Rolls Royces. Osho, and I hate to say it, but it’s true, was a bit naive. The energy and the All I can do is cry in thankfulness for it all of the guy’s Enlightenment that he really did attempt to share with the entire world was/is … How can you even describe it?

But, and it’s puzzling, he didn’t fully appreciate the perfidiousness of some of his followers who would take it and turn it into fascism. Sheela, his 2nd secretary, who he entrusted with setting up the new commune in Oregon, certainly did. After she and all her creepy lieutenants got on a Rajneesh Airways DC-3 and fled the country, people in the commune started coming to Osho and telling him what had happened in the three years he had been in silence. It really was rather horrible. He went before everyone, in public, and told the whole story about “Sheela and her band of fascists.”

Osho once described how J. Krishnamurti was too trusting and his secretary or whoever he was took advantage, and, I think, lifted a lot of loot.

The first time I saw Sheela, when I went up to Rajneeshpuram for Osho’s birthday the first winter they were in Oregon, Sheela gave some big “welcome to the birthday” speech in the airplane hanger, the biggest thing they had built at that time. There was a fucking Rolls Royce there, a birthday present she had got for him. Her vibes were flat out ugly, and I knew something bad was afoot. Really. Witness to history, as they say.

Wow, what a lot of digressions this one has been!

© “John” Lesly Levin 2025

If you enjoy my work (all the different kinds of it lol) then follow me on my pub, Tales of Improbable Magic. If you do, I might tell you how to put LSD in your coffee. But I hear mescaline will do.

Osho Reading James Joyce at an outdoor cafe in Paris, c. 1926, waiting for George Gurdjieff to show up. Artwork by the Author using ImageFX.

A somewhat fictional version of the old Spanish church at Ranchos de Taos in New Mexico. Artwork by the Author using ImageFX.

Me and my lovely Girlfriend enjoying an afternoon on the Plaza in Taos. There’s a line in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: This didn’t happen, but it’s true anyway. Artwork by the Author using ImageFX.