Enlightenment Made Easy

A rough guide on achieving cosmic oneness

Do you remember this thing?

In 2005, office-supplies retailer Staples unleashed that cherry-red tchotchke onto the world. It sort of became the Rubik's Cube of the slacker generation. Go ahead and press it, and whatever resistance stood in your way melted by the wayside. If it didn't, well then that was OK too. The important thing is that you tried, or at least considered it.

Sour-faced receptionists, so-called Directors of First Impressions, hid behind the object along with oversized Hanispree monitors to avoid human contact that held the threat of being anything but EASY.

We humans want paychecks and affection. Respect and loyalty. Results and leisure time. All those things must be earned, of course. And how does one earn things? EFFORT. If you're anything like me and you like your origami pre-folded, then welcome to the human race. If Staples decided to sell an EFFORT button, it would be the dullest gray imaginable and no one would press it.

Before I begin casting aspersions at the entire human race, let me confess that I'm just as guilty. I want to go the Ashton Kutcher route of jiu-jitsu and get a brown belt without sparring. I want to obtain six-pack abs sans renouncing daily six packs of Sierra Nevada Hazy IPA.

I'm the worst example of the human race because I want to gain enlightenment without having to undergo the scarification, the bruises from slamming into demons coming the other way, or the lacerations from angels’ wings as they beat me to the top.

There has to be an EASY button for getting there. There has to be a hack for achieving moksha. There must be an elevator carved into the rock face of Mount Qaf. Isn’t surrendering and yearning for enlightenment enough? I have to fill up a cargo jet with EFFORT before it can leave the runway?

Things are looking up. There’s hope after all. Dig this.

Ubering to the Gates of Heaven

Wanting to locate God, I decided I would simply make an image. I had just finished constructing a golden calf out of bronze when I got an email from one Moshe3488@gmail.com. The subject line read:"Re: idolatry. Why it's wrong.”

In the email, this Moshe cat asked that I cease and desist from worshipping the golden calf and urged me to open the included pdf attachment. Dare I? Well, I had already made the stupid decision to open the email, so what harm could come from downloading the pdf?

No harm, it turned out. It was a list of ten things to do and not do. Life guidelines, in short—but certainly not a path toward enlightenment. Then I got to thinking:

Can Uber take you straight up to the pearly Gates of Heaven? Wow. I just checked the app. Like, wow. They can. A driver was eight minutes away. Now I had to figure out if I should tip the driver or not. If I didn't, the pearly gates might magically scoot away a few hundred yards, by which time my jilted driver will have sped away in his black Volkswagen Jetta. If I did tip, what's the point of heaven? I mean, who wants to be a saint when you no longer have to be?

I scotched the idea completely when my anxiety over having to ride in the back seat of someone else's car became just too much. What if he were the Zodiac Killer? Or even worse, a listener of Reggaeton? Too bad. Uber was my first choice and things didn't just pan out. I got charged five bucks for the cancellation. The takeaway was that I had gotten the ball rolling. I had surrendered and yearned. And now I had options.

Airbnb in the Garden of Eden

Luckily, I learned from a friend that there's an AirBnB in the Garden of Eden. The Yelp reviews have it at a less-than-solid 1.5. That's good enough in my book. But I couldn't help but wonder: shouldn't the place have a perfect 5 rating? If not, no wonder Adam and Eve cut their stay there short. Do you really think they would have gotten themselves evicted if their digs had been perfect? Dont believe everything you read, and even less of what you hear.

I had to do a little research into this mystery. Buried at the bottom of the 2 reviews (1.5) were a bunch of petty gripes about the lack of space.

Eve23 wrote, along with a 1-star review, this: “You can't swing a cat without running into a river. There's four of them. Four! Wtf! All my boo and I need is one—one to serve for aquatic sports and baptisms. Every time I make my boo chase me, I slide down an embankment and fall in. That in and of itself is not so bad, but the water makes my hair frizzy. Even worse, all the trees look the same, so it’s easy to get lost. Do yourself a favor and don't come here! Anyway, I hear Shambala is a better establishment, but it's a bit far. Idk, might be worth the trip.”

But most negative reviews rambled on about a somewhat nasty resident you had to share space with. Adam18 yelped (2): “This regular patron used to mosey around, singing the praises of an oak tree, but now he sort of just slithers around. Don't know what came over him. Doesn't sound much like a threat to me, not having no limbs. So maybe we'll stay a few nights there. There's not much to do here, which is I guess the point.”

When I went to book a stay in the Garden of Eden, I learned that it had been permanently closed. Was it because it wasn't lucrative or because that slithery fellow refused to get vaccinated? No idea. Sad, really. The place seemed so, whatchamacallit, EASY. You just had to give the tree removal service ample room to work. Supposedly their stump grinder lost electricity and they left the job site, never to return. They never bothered to collect their equipment. Weird.

Drizly Soma to Your Front Door

For the longest time, we've been told that achieving enlightenment requires many lifetimes of trials, tears, tribulations, and enduring the spiritual equivalent of listening to Reggaeton. Bullshit. Now, as never before, the elixir championed by the ancient Greeks to enhance those Eleusinian Mysteries can be brought straight to your door by adult-beverage mobile service Drizly. Most establishments that sell soma do require you sign a waiver stating you will refer a customer. Every purchaser fails to become a repeat customer. After all, enlightenment is a one-time thing. So they need new customers. Don't worry: it's not a pyramid scheme. The referral program may resemble such a polyhedron as promulgated by Kufu and company, but it's not a scheme. The fourth dynasty didn't roll that way, and neither do sellers of soma. That would be dishonest.

Much to my chagrin, the driver never made it to my place. He got lost and, from what Drizly's customer service agent told me, quit on the spot. He underwent life-changing hallucinations and decided that money was the root of all evil. He's now a mendicant somewhere in the Himalayas. Drizly really does have to hire more reputable drivers. I'm thinking about writing in to suggest they do extensive background checks and drug tests on their hirees. And before they go to make their deliveries, the drivers must breathe into a breathalyzer. The last thing a customer wants is to have his soma slurped up by a driver too pleb to know what he or she is drinking. It's not a lager, knucklehead. It's the elixir of eternity.

Fuck. This is taking more effort than I had hoped. Back to pressing the EASY button.

*Note* (Some maintain that we do live in a perfect world. Alcohol can be brought to your door)

Doordash Ambrosia

Perhaps not getting inebriated is the key to obtaining everlasting cosmic oneness.

If the food of the gods is good enough for Zeus and all his bastard brats, then it should be good enough for me. I do have celiac disease, so I am hoping ambrosia is not too high in gluten. Fingers crossed.

I chose ambrosia over manna because the latter has dairy. I'm not lactose-intolerant but Jamba Juice's Manna Madness with a shot of wheatgrass is NOT karma-free. So wish me luck.

Things were looking promising. Unfortunately, when I got my Styrofoam container, meant to be hermetically sealed (no less than by wing-footed Hermes himself), I noticed that the lid had been tampered with. I've never partaken of ambrosia, but I hear it's red in color. The Doordash driver had telltale smears of what looked like pomegranate juice all along his jaw. A big row ensued, with me threatening litigation and he threatening to kick my ass. Damn it. I thought this would be it. Hermetically sealed? More like pathetically sealed.

Final Thoughts

This is taking too much effort. I think someone needs to angel-invest in an app that facilitates facilitated enlightenment—a sort of third-party app that streamlines all this, which is amounting to way too much effort to even make enlightenment that appealing, never mind desirable. And I'm not talking about subscription services of salvation. That still requires pressing that dull gray button.

I need a break from the Great Work. Maybe after engaging in unspeakable acts for a few months, I'll gain a fresh perspective. For now, I need to be less hard on myself. I need to focus on self-care. It's OK to not be OK. Netflix and chill.

Do you know what? Screw this!

I like Arthurian legend as much as the next person, but know this: I don't buy into the Sir Galahad hype train one bit. He gets dibs on the Holy Grail for being abstinent? Smug-ass punk. Just look at him:

Merlin! I don't care that he has a Virginity Rocks T-shirt under his chainmail. All those buxom lasses floating about and he keeps it together? Until you slap a polygraph machine down in the middle of the Round Table, I'm not leaving!