Tyler says I’m nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don’t fall all the way, I
can’t be saved . . . I shouldn’t just abandon money and property and knowledge.
This isn’t a weekend retreat. I should run from self-improvement, and I should be
running toward disaster. I can’t just play it safe anymore . . . Only after disaster
can we be resurrected. ‘It’s only after you’ve lost everything,’ Tyler says, ‘that
you’re free to do anything.’ What I’m fe eling is premature enlightenment. (61)
We hear the same sentiment in Choke when Victor tells us that “You [have] to get right to the
edge of death to ever be saved” (3), as well as in Invisible Monsters when Brandy says, “‘Our
real discoveries come from chaos,” and “‘You have to jump into disaster with both feet" (258,
260). As the Zen saying goes, you have to die on the mat to live. Victor’s understanding of
enlightenment, though, is about as superficial and self-serving as that of Fight Club's narrator:
for Victor, “enlightenment” means being “comfortable and confident in the world;” that, he says,
“would be nirvana” (38). One would freely agree with this sentiment were Victor not making this
statement about an online porn site he liked as a child which was composed of pictures of “this
one dumpy guy dressed as Tarzan with a goofy orangutan trained to poke what looked like
roasted chestnuts up the guy’s ass” (36). The “premature enlightenment” the narrator of Fight
Club experiences is merely his ego fighting back. Until he fully embraces emptiness and
nondualism by going “right to the edge of [the] death [of his ego] to . . . be saved” from the
word of suffering, he will continue to greedily grasp at delusions of spiritual self-grandeur. As
Dogen says of premature enlightenment, “Though you are proud of your understanding and
replete with insight. . . you may loiter in the precincts of the entrance and still lack something
of the vital path of liberation" (On Zen Practice 13).
If he were truly trying to achieve liberation as Reed claims, it seems contradictory to
desire the destruction of the planet as a way to “force humanity to go dormant or into remission
long enough for the Earth to recover” (Palahniuk, Fight Club 116). Though this idea might have
a romantic appeal for radical environmentalists, a Buddhist practitioner would not say things
like: “I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests.
Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone . . . I wanted the whole world to hit
bottom" (114-115). Indeed, in this one-page diatribe, the narrator uses the first person T and
“my” twenty-one times, highlighting the stranglehold maintained by his ego. Several of those
T s , as with the two quoted above, are paired with the word “wanted," which is truly the
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