THERE IS NO JED MCKENNA
Once upon a time, there was an age of gurus.
If you were a serious seeker after the Truth, you needed a teacher, but not just any teacher. You needed a special kind of teacher called a "guru". Tradition dictated that this someone should be viewed as a representative of God, a person who was indistinguishable from the path itself, someone you could pour your devotion upon, someone who could make decisions for you better than you would make them for yourself. In losing yourself to the teacher you would, ideally, dissolve into Godhood.
Fortunately or unfortunately, no matter what level of spiritual realization any guru could attain, they never actually achieved Godhood, at least no more so than you or your Aunt Matilda have. As long as they stuck around in a human body, they remained flawed and corruptible humans with limited personalities and a tendency to reproduce their own cultural conditioning for their constituencies. Giving over your authority to any other human is fraught with challenges. As I am sure you know by now, I don't recommend it.
In some contexts and languages, "guru" simply means teacher, in the basic sense of the word. To be a so-called "spiritual" teacher, you don't need to represent yourself as a superhuman. You can just be a person. We can all be teachers to each other. You can have as many as you want.
The age of gurus has given way to the age of auto-didacts. All the gurus (true, false, and in between) have written down their teachings, or had them transcribed or reproduced. Seekers can read the books and make their own paths, drawing from all the wisdom sources in the world, mixing and matching retreats, satsangs, and workshops along the way. That also means seekers can get spun around, follow false leads, devote themselves to unhelpful practices and people, and get caught for decades in counterproductive intellectualizations and distractions.
While Maya is the creator of this maze, many gurus bear responsibility for compounding and confounding the matter. To find your way out of the maze, it may be time for an anti-guru.
An anti-guru doesn’t ask you to submit your authority to them. They do the opposite. They remind you over and over to find out for yourself what's true, for you. An anti-guru would never suggest devotion to anything other than yourself. They take the attention off themselves and put it back on you. An anti-guru may point, gesture, reflect, nod, or perhaps go so far as to gently push. However, their actions are like a mirror and all you ever see in one is . . . you.
The ideal anti-guru would be someone who doesn’t even exist. You could learn from them without having to join their religion or adopt some temporary belief. You could take advantage of their guidance without getting caught up in their human presentation. In the postmodern era, in the age of the auto-didact, an imaginary anti-guru can do things that real gurus never could.
Jed McKenna is an imaginary anti-guru. He doesn’t exist and never did. Having said that, here’s a little on how I, Jed McKenna, came to "appear" to exist.
Some years back, I met a man we'll call the Editor. He wanted to write a series of books about enlightenment. He had a good idea and good marketing but lacked one essential component. He was not himself enlightened, or Truth Realized, as I refer to it - at least not at the time. A rather serious deficiency if one is to write on the subject.
I was the only Truth Realized person he knew, so he asked me if I would act as a consultant. I created the name Jed McKenna for the character in his books, a variation on Ken McMordie, the name given me by my adoptive parents some 70+ years ago.
Ken McMordie
Ken Mc -------
---- Mc Ken --
Jed McKenna
Over a series of interviews, the Editor asked me questions about myself and modeled the Jed character on my ideas, my personality (such as it was), and my responses to various hypothetical situations. He would place me in Jed role and inquire, for instance, what I might say if asked a particular question, and then use my answers in the imaginary conversations that took place in the stories.
While I don't know with certainty what the writing process was, my impression is that those first books were written by what might be called a "committee" involving at least two other contributors, and that he later worked with a series of ghost writers. I don’t have any knowledge about whether any of the later writers were Truth Realized, or simply skilled writers on the topic.
In any case, I only consulted on the first trilogy, which I, perhaps not surprisingly, consider superior to the subsequent books. By the time my role in the project was complete, the Jed character was his own person, in some ways remarkably similar to me and in other ways quite divergent. Sure, he was and is just a fictional character, but so are we all. My life, at least, is based on a true story. The Jed McKenna books are works of true fiction: entirely fictional, but no less true - as paradoxical as that sounds.
Some time after the first trilogy was published, I decided I might like to interact with Jed McKenna readers. There was no real or solid Jed, but there was a sizable group of readers evolving who had been exposed to my ideas through the Jed character. I envisioned the possibility of developing those ideas further and assisting interested people in an online community. I wanted to provide a forum for students, and some support and guidance in their efforts toward Truth Realization. I used the name Jed McKenna in these forums as a way of continuing the teaching happening through the books. There was no one out there who was more Jed than myself, and indeed no "real" Jed who might object.
I should interject here that when I used the phrase "my ideas" in the previous two paragraphs, I didn’t really mean to suggest that the ideas were mine. I have been a collector of eclectic ideas for decades. More often than not, I can't tell whether I originated an idea or whether I’m just passing it on from someone else. For that matter, the other people whose ideas I’ve collected probably themselves couldn't tell where their ideas came from. We're all just circulating and combining and extending the ideas that were in the field before we got here. There is only one consciousness, and it doesn't come with a copyright.
The first online forum turned out to be a bit of a shitshow. I didn't fully appreciate how much even spiritually-oriented people are inclined to fight and insult and try to one-up each other when given a free rein platform. After letting that play itself out for far too long, I started an improved forum with more moderation. At the same time, I developed an online course (The Navigator Series) for more serious students, ones who wanted to dig in and do some work and have a more one-on-one relationship with me
When I say "me", of course I mean Jed McKenna, even though there is no Jed McKenna. There is only a role being played. That's just as true about you as it is about me.
A funny twist on events began with a participant from the forums. We'll call her the Stalker. In an email dialogue, I suggested she might visit Cambodia, where I was living. I was simply suggesting that she'd like the country, as she had nothing good to say about where she was. To be clear, I was not suggesting that she come visit me personally. Unfortunately, she took it the other way and wound up quite disappointed when she arrived. She apparently decided that trying to find me and follow me would serve to reduce her feelings of disappointment. If you’ve ever had a stalker of your own, you know that they're perfectly happy to devote all their time and energy to their "hobby", and so she managed to spy on me, photograph me, and even confront me, and my friends, in person. Unfortunately, stalkers and journalists have a lot in common, so it was pretty easy for her, as the former, to pass herself off as the latter! She threw up a website that’s easy enough to find, chronicling her stalking activities and internet research. The result is a work of hybrid fact and fiction including some amusing, if irrelevant, tidbits from my pre-Truth-Realized life.
At some point, as controversy arose online about who the "real" Jed McKenna was, the Editor felt the need to distance the Jed McKenna books from the Jed McKenna forums. He added this disclaimer a few years back to his Wisefool Press website:
"Jed McKenna is not an active teacher, online or off. He does not engage in social media or forums. He does not give classes or workshops or accept money from students. He has no teachings or products other than those offered by Wisefool Press and our international publishing partners. Anyone claiming to be Jed or to speak for him is misrepresenting themselves."
It’s a fascinating paragraph to study. The first three sentences are absolutely true. Jed McKenna is a fictional character and so can not be an active teacher or give classes! The fourth sentence is a little more in the pulling-wool-over-eyes category. How can a fictional character have teachings or products? The final sentence, however, is where we see the true power of the postmodern anti-guru! On the very webpage for Jed's books, it clearly states that, "Anyone claiming to be Jed or to speak for him is misrepresenting themselves." All the books supposedly written by Jed McKenna are misrepresenting themselves. Any online forum or class supposedly administered by Jed McKenna is misrepresenting itself. There is no Jed McKenna. Truth (with a capital-T) is certainly stranger than fiction. What passes for "truth" most of the time is just a form of fiction anyway.
If the whole thing isn't strange enough for you yet, then think of Jed McKenna as a sort of collective. Unlike most collectives, which operate as unified fronts, this one consists of multiple divergent cells with no communication between them and no agreed upon guidelines. The Jed McKenna project is apparently too big for any one person to be in charge of it.
This explains why the Jed McKenna books are written in such diverse styles, why my style is so untamed in comparison, and why even "my" style varies between my introductory level course, and the advanced level course I have been developing over the last two years. The former was written entirely by me, while the latter is a collaboration with my more organized colleague, Zara Songull. All of us, in our varied ways, speaking with the voice of the non-existent Jed McKenna.
If you want to know who Jed Mckenna "really" is, he is the sum total of you and a growing group of serious seekers who are prepared to let everything go and in return gain the universe. As with "you", a "personal" Jed does not exist and never did.
It used to be that if you met the Buddha on the road, you were supposed to kill him. Now the Buddha comes pre-killed. Look as hard as you want for Jed. All you'll ultimately find is the mystery of your self.
Let any controversy be put to rest once and for all. There is no Jed McKenna, and there never was. There is no guru, so it’s a good thing you don’t need one.
Love ya,
Jed McKenna
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