Becoming Findable

Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality

In my new book, I propose versions of enlightenment that don’t require an escape from our world’s gorgeous pandemonium, but thrive on a wildly disciplined engagement with it.

Throughout an unpredictable weave of unruly stories and genre-fluid texts, I cross-pollinate exuberant activist passions with drug-free explorations of altered states.

I invite readers to have maximum fun as they experiment and improvise with imaginative spiritual practices. How can we cultivate wisdom that’s both grounded and ecstatic?





The book is available at all online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here.

It’s also available here:

Bookshop

Barnes & Noble

Amazon


The ebook will be available in a few days.




BECOMING FINDABLE: Excerpt from the book

What does it mean for us to “become findable”? How do we do it?
The playful art of becoming findable is not about chasing the goodies we want but creating conditions that enable the goodies to find us.

Imagine making ourselves visible and attractive to opportunities.

Imagine positioning ourselves in the path of luck and destiny.

Imagine sending irresistible signal flares into the great unknown.

Imagine: We can’t control what comes, but we can influence who sees us, recognizes us, and knows where to look for us.

Imagine preparation, not pursuit. We don’t hunt but ripen.

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Here’s a news flash about all the hustle-culture clichés like “manifesting our dreams.” Many of them are based on the exhausting premise that we must obsessively chase down the treasures that will fulfill us.

With steely gleams in our eyes and gritty heroism in our hearts, we supposedly have to force reality to bend to our will through rugged determination and positive thinking.

The spiritual industrial complex perpetrates the same dirty trick with awakening. It sells us the idea that enlightenment is a prize we achieve through the accumulation of meditation hours, retreats, purifications, reading holy texts, and maybe some mortifications thrown in there, too.

If we just push hard enough, we will break through to the other side. Our Enlightenment for Rebels shuns the gospel of hustle and the spiritual industrial complex. We ignore the bootstrapping propaganda that says grind harder. For us, becoming findable is a subversive triumph. Our method is stranger and more elegant: ripen ourselves.

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Think about how a flower attracts pollinators. It doesn’t chase bees. A lilac bush never zips around the garden trying to coax insects to visit.

Its brilliant strategy is to become so vibrantly itself—so fragrant, colorful, and rich with nectar—that pollinators can’t help but find it.
The lilac’s work isn’t to engage in pursuit but to develop its full lilac-ness. The playful experiment of flirting with enlightenment has similarities.

Awakening isn’t a possession we hunt down and capture. It arrives when we make ourselves findable to the rhythms and rhymes of grace.

This inverts the stodgy spiritual narrative. Instead of asking, “How do I corral a big shiny batch of enlightenment?”, the question morphs into “How do I cultivate the kind of soul that enlightenment recognizes? How can I position myself in the path of awakening?”



Here’s a five-step guide:

First, we get clear about our signals. What messages are we broadcasting into the world? Not what we hope we’re broadcasting, but what we’re actually emanating through our choices, attention, and energy.

Maybe we say we want awakening but we’re still performing the small self ’s drama: stalking status, accumulating grievances, defending our righteousness, and clinging to our wounds as identity.

In that case, we’re almost certainly unfindable. We are camouflaged as our false self. Enlightenment can’t detect us because we’re dressed up as the type of character that enlightenment avoids.

But let’s say we soften our defenses and question our certainties. We get curious about obstacles we might be generating. Then we begin emitting a different frequency that could make us more visible to the robust versions of enlightenment.

We Rebel Enlightenment aspirants call this “spiritual ripening.” We can’t make the fruit be ready faster by yanking on it, but we can focus on ensuring it has sufficient sun and water.

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A second cagey strategy we can invoke to become findable is to situate ourselves in the path of awakening.

Do we want to rouse ourselves from our habit minds and studied ignorance so we can dwell periodically amidst luminous curiosity?

Then we will study people who have done it, not as celebrities we adulate but as field guides to the mysterious territory. We practice one of the myriad varieties of meditation, not compulsively but consistently.

We put ourselves in situations that crack open our chronic cycle of anxieties, like nature, art, sex, service, deep conversation, dancing, and singing. Getting educated is helpful. We can be wise and inquisitive fools who inhabit enlightenment-rich environments. We locate ourselves in ecosystems where awakening circulates.

Musicians don’t get discovered by sitting alone in their apartment. They play open mics, jam sessions, and every gig they can get. They collaborate with other musicians and speak highly of those whose artistry and soulfulness they enjoy. Do they know friends who know friends who are talent scouts? They lubricate such connections.

Similarly, awakening doesn’t usually find us while we’re scrolling Instagram and complaining about our ex. It grazes us when we’re positioned where lucidity and illumination like to hang out.

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Here’s a third tender trick for becoming findable: Prepare ourselves to recognize awakening when it cruises into our vicinity.

The obvious secret is that enlightenment may come disguised. It shows up on an ordinary Tuesday while we’re washing dishes. It edges its way into our intuition during pauses between thoughts and transitions between appointments. Maybe it swoops down on us when we momentarily forget to cling to our tormented story about who we are.

Let’s hope we’re not rigid in our expectations about what enlightenment looks like, fixatedly anticipating floods of white light and cosmic consciousness and throbs of bliss. If we are, we may miss it when it shows up as simple, clear, ordinary grace.

Here’s a fourth tiny little gigantic action we can undertake to become findable: Remove obstacles that make us unfindable to awakening, enlightenment, or illumination—or, as we like to name it, Blazewake!, Truthflash!, or Soulburst!

Is there anything blocking our signals? Maybe it’s spiritual ambition. We’re so driven to achieve enlightenment that we can’t see we’re already in its midst.

Maybe it’s perfectionism. We’re waiting and hoping to someday be pure enough and good enough.

Maybe it’s bitterness. We’re so armored against disappointment that numinous revelations can’t reach us.

Becoming findable for enlightenment might require subtracting more than adding. It may mean banishing the static of spiritual ambition and saying no to the practices that are just ego reflexes in disguise. Then maybe we can say yes to the elegant presence that has been there all along.

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Here’s another not-so-top-secret technique we can harness to become findable: Trust the timing that isn’t ours to control.
The seed germinates when conditions are right: enough water, oxygen, and light, plus the right temperature range.

Likewise, the blessed breakthrough of higher, deeper awareness erupts when it’s ready. We can’t force it to arrive faster by wanting it harder or meditating longer.

The timeline may be slightly under our control, but mostly not. Our main job is to keep doing the patient work of preparation. Continue practicing and questioning and cultivating receptivity, even when nothing seems to be happening.

Here’s a sweet-and-sour corollary: Becoming findable to awakening is a practice that usually works on a scale that’s only slightly visible. We’re creating conditions whose effects might not mature for years.

This is at odds with the spiritual hustle narrative, which says we have to grind ourselves into transcendence NOW through the pure force of will. Let’s sing the chorus one more time, louder and with a twist: Enlightenment is already looking for us. It has been searching and scanning for us forever. The universe wants to wake up to itself through us. We mean this literally. It’s not metaphor or poetry.

But enlightenment can only locate us if we’re not camouflaged. We’ve got to show up as we are—confused, earnest, excited, broken, willing, eager. That’s how we become fully visible. We emit a fragrant beam of YES that awakening recognizes: “Here is a soul who’s ready—positioned in my swath and prepared to receive me when I arrive.”

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Now here comes the bridge of our tuneful anthem, the penultimate echo of the lyrical theme: The practice of becoming findable is an act of rebellion—not with raised fists and shouted rants, but with a subtle, nuanced devotion that undermines the whole game.

The mainstream spiritual market and the secular hustle culture are, beneath their surface differences, running the same operating system: You are not yet enough, and achievement will fix that.
Becoming findable refuses to feed that system. It says our souls are already legible to grace; the task is to stop concealing our gorgeous essence under greed and ambition.

In the framework of Enlightenment for Rebels, this isn’t a retreat from the world but a deeper engagement. It trusts reality’s own momentum rather than trying to override it with willpower.

We rebels aren’t storming the gates and jamming the traps that are supposedly guarding the lucid wild treasure of blissful realization. We are making it easy for the lucid wild treasure to find us.

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PS: The practice of becoming findable for enlightenment isn’t separate from enlightenment itself. The preparation, positioning, and ripening comprise the awakening.

The seeking and the finding aren’t separate. We’re becoming findable because that’s what awakening looks like while it’s in
progress.




To hear the song WORLD KISS, whose text appears in the book, GO HERE.




Here’s another excerpt from the new book:

Pleasure, Bliss, Ecstasy, and Gleeful Zest as Spiritual Fuel

Many spiritual systems the world has inherited regard pleasure, bliss, rapture, ecstasy, elation, and related super treasures as troublemakers and distractions. The so-called “lower self” is greedy for such wasteful irrelevance, the saintly authorities say. “Begone foul deceivers!” they imply or declare outright.

How many zillions of us have been taught, often with dire and threatening tones, that feeling really good leads us away from life’s essential goals? Holiness and sanctity are likely to accumulate in us only if we shun the supposedly inferior temptation to bask in delight.

Of all the idiocies foisted on humanity, this one is among the most egregious. We are in danger of veering into apoplexy as we contemplate such a criminal delusion. We’ll try to be civil.

In both our extensive mythic explorations of dreamy truth and our scientific investigations of hard-core reality, we have gathered incontrovertible evidence that pleasure is a central necessity for any spiritual quest that actually works.

It’s a sensory instrument. A tuning fork. A feedback system. A way the body says, Yes, this. More of this. Keep headed in this direction. You’re getting closer to home.

We’re not talking about the jittery sugar-high of addiction or the perverse, jangly thrills that sabotage health.

We mean the rich, ennobling euphoria and exhilaration that arise during encounters with smart fun: inspiring us to love ourselves more, expanding our capacity to love others, leading us in the direction of our shining dreams, and helping us solve our knotty problems.

The eruptions of these life-giving nourishments might come through the stimulation of our senses, emotions, or imagination. They don’t yank us away from the sacred. They are among the sacred’s favorite ways of snagging our attention. Evolution didn’t give us many reliable compasses, but this is one of them.

Our comprehensive research reveals that when we feel genuinely good—not inflated or superior, but resoundingly buoyant—our ethics improve. We’re more patient and curious. Less brittle and defensive.

When we’re swooning or even just shimmering with delectation, we see other people more clearly. They’re not obstacles or mirrors of our lack, but fellow creatures doing their best with the weather systems inside them.

By contrast, chronic deprivation, especially when dressed up as virtue, tends to make people tight and pinched and resentful of anyone who looks like they’re enjoying themselves.

Self-denial doesn’t reliably produce saints. Often it just produces people who are very good at pretending they don’t want what they want.

Those who know how to feed themselves often have a super-capacity to give without keeping score. Their generosity leaks out sideways. There’s surplus.

Here’s our very-well proven hypothesis: Compassion grows less from being twisted up about suffering and more from inhabiting joie de vivre so fully that we want others to feel it too.


To read the rest of this article, GO HERE.