The Inverted Pyramid Scheme of Enlightenment
Let’s talk about spiritual enlightenment. You know, that lofty goal of self-realization, the grand finale of the cosmic show where you finally get it. We imagine it as a pinnacle, the top of a mighty mountain we must climb, laden with backpacks full of mantras, vegan recipes, and well-thumbed scriptures.
But what if we’ve got it all upside down? What if enlightenment isn’t a mountain, but an inverted pyramid?
Picture it: a massive, ornate pyramid, balanced precariously on its tiny, sharp point.
That single, infinitesimally small point? That’s the Truth. It’s simple, stable, and unbelievably direct. It’s what’s left when you strip away everything that changes. It’s the silent, constant awareness that’s reading these words right now. It has no name, no form, no frequent-flyer miles. It’s just… is.
The instructions to get there are almost insultingly simple: “You are not your thoughts. You are not your body. You are not your job title or your political opinions. You are the awareness in which all that stuff appears and disappears.” Done. That’s the whole teaching. Pack it up, we’re going home.
Ah, but we humans are never satisfied with simple, are we? We look at that beautiful, simple point and say, “That’s it? I can’t build a five-day retreat around that.”
And so, we build.
From that one simple point, the great, wobbling, inverted pyramid of stuff begins to rise. This is the fluff. The base of the inverted pyramid is a sprawling, chaotic metropolis of doctrines, dogmas, rituals, and rules. It’s the thousands of books explaining the one thing that needs no explanation. It’s the heated debates over whether the cosmic turtle is a sea turtle or a tortoise. It’s the secret handshakes, the special diets, the certificates of enlightenment, and the merch table in the lobby.
We spend our lives exploring this massive, ever-expanding base. We become experts in one corner of the pyramid (“12th Century Gnostic Chanting, Subsection B”), convinced it holds the key. We run from workshop to workshop, collecting spiritual tools like they’re Pokémon, hoping the next one will finally be the one that makes us feel complete. We’re so busy navigating the pyramid’s sprawling surface that we forget the entire structure is resting on the simple point we started with.
The joke, of course, is that you were never on the pyramid. You are the point. You’ve always been the point. All that other stuff—the beliefs, the practices, the frantic search—is just the elaborate, top-heavy structure you built on top of yourself, seemingly in an effort to find yourself.
So, maybe the path isn’t about climbing higher. Maybe it’s about courageously dismantling the pyramid. It’s about letting go of the complex answers and getting comfortable with the simple, silent reality they were meant to explain. It’s about having a good laugh at the absurdity of building a skyscraper just to find the ground you were already standing on.
Nalla Madras 