Forget Enlightenment … It’s Already Here.

Every so often I get asked about enlightenment, or nibbana, or nirvana – which Wikipedia describes as:

“… a spiritual revelation or deep insight into the meaning and purpose of all things, communication with or understanding of the mind of God, profound spiritual understanding or a fundamentally changed consciousness whereby everything is perceived as a unity.”

I’ve got no idea why people ask me about it because I’m not enlightened.  Nor am I concerned with enlightenment or expect it, or even want it. About the most I could say about my relationship with enlightenment is, I am somewhat more enlightened than before I began meditating. I know this, because I see how I’ve changed – my behavior, my abilities, my emotional resilience, my intuitive sense – and definitely my health, have all changed for the better. I’ve become more flexible – not only physically, but emotionally as well, and though there is occasional anger, sadness or confusion, whatever arises passes away a hell of a lot more quickly now than they did before I began meditating.

So as much as the world around me has remained as fascinatingly unpredictable as it always was, the man who lives this life has become more able in his abilities to live in it, and make sense of it.

There is a delightful Zen parable that sort of stands to the side of what I’m saying:

One day the Master Joshu announced that a young monk had reached an advanced state of enlightenment. The news caused some stir. Some of the monks went to see the young monk [Kyogen]. “We heard you are enlightened. Is that true?” they asked. “It is,” he replied. “And how do you feel?” “As miserable as ever,” said the monk.

And so it goes – though the mystery and mythology of ‘enlightenment’ persists as the ‘holy grail’ of meditators everywhere, it doesn’t happen a the supernatural epiphany that it’s sometimes characterise as – nor does it switch of our personal reality from the mundane to the heavenly. And neither does it come as a earth shattering flash of light. Rather it comes slowly, as a series of subtle insights, in which successive veils of delusion become transparent, and we’re changed just a little more as a result.

I write about this process, because that is indeed what it is, in the last chapter of a book I never published:  ‘Love & Imagination’. Though the book was somewhat over-ambitious and flawed as a result, the last chapter always spoke to me.

It begins with a quote from the Buddha, which when I first came across it, perfectly crystalized the human condition.

‘Enlightenment exists solely because of delusion and ignorance; if they disappear, so will enlightenment. Therefore be on guard against thinking of enlightenment as a “thing” to be grasped at, lest it, too, should become an obstruction. When the mind that was in darkness becomes enlightened, it passes away, and with its passing, the thing which we call Enlightenment passes away also.’

Many teachers profess to be enlightened or pretend to it, and many are famous for it, and there are many radically different views of what it actually is, but there are almost none who speak with the clarity of direct experience. Only the Buddha and a few Zen teachers spoke of it with some authenticity, though even then, confusion about enlightenment has persisted.

As well as the quote above, the Buddha said:

“There is a sphere of influence that is beyond the entire field of matter, the entire field of mind, that is neither this world nor another world nor both, neither moon nor sun. This I call neither arising, nor passing away, nor abiding, neither dying nor rebirth. It is without support, without development, without foundation. This is the end of suffering.”

Many people have turned this simple description into an impossible fantasy in which they assume the Buddha is speaking of enlightenment as another dimension to which one is somehow transported to – a place where all the other enlightened people are – the equivalent of the Christian notion of ‘heaven’. Others are seduced into believing that enlightenment is an ‘altered state’, such that at the first sign of bliss or some ecstatic vision in meditation, they believe they’ve become enlightened, often with disastrous consequences.

The mistake they all make is in trying to understand enlightenment with an unenlightened mind, which needs to fit everything into what it already knows. But by definition, enlightenment can only exist beyond the boundaries of our current experience. For this reason, enlightenment cannot be anticipated, or created or described. It can only be experienced. For this reason, the Buddha never actually described enlightenment, as much as indicate it by specifying everything it isn’t.

In this, he was not referring to a different spiritual or physical state to the one we already have, nor was he speaking of a magical place.

The world stays the same. The only change to the ‘stuff’ of the world is as it exists in the mind. That is, at the coming of enlightenment, our view of life and the world is stripped clean of preconceived ideas and notions, and desires, fears and worries. All the usual mental concoctions that our reality is usually filtered through are so emphatically gone, that even the propensity for them has effectively evaporated.

Of this, the venerable Thich Naht Hanh said: “Nirvana is the extinction of all notions. Birth is a notion. Death is a notion. Being is a notion. Non-being is a notion. In our daily lives, we have to deal with these relative realities. But if we touch life more deeply, reality will reveal itself in a different way.”

Or, as Acharn Chah said: “Enlightenment is simply when the heart is at peace with what is.”

When all concepts, notions, beliefs and conditioned thought forms have been seen to be transparent and without substance, in the bare awareness that is left, all that remains is enlightenment. As such, enlightenment is so innate to existence, as to be the beginning point of everything – the most fundamental state of being.

For this reason it could be said that we do not attain enlightenment, so much as reveal it by cleaning away the reactive mental muck that obscures it. In the state of flow that remains, mind is calm, expansive, aware and insightful, and selfless, no matter what happens. This is the freedom from suffering that is so much talked about in Buddhism – not a heaven, or paradise – simply here and now as they are, rather than what we always make of them.

Most usually enlightenment occurs as a series of insights and realizations in which the mind gradually softens, letting go of its attachments piece by piece. Of this, Iries Shah, the Afghan teacher in the Sufi tradition once wrote:

‘Enlightenment must come little by little, otherwise it would overwhelm.’  

As such, once enlightenment has reformed our view, the mind adapts, and though we have simply lost the mental mud most people spend their lives puddling about in, we live the same mundane life we lived before.  As the Zen saying goes:

“Before I was enlightened, I chopped wood and carried water. After I became enlightened I chopped wood and carried water.”

So life goes on – nothing is enhanced, nothing glows brighter than it is. There is no substantial change in physicality, or place, or even of perception when enlightenment occurs. The basic personality characteristics of the person remain essentially the same. The only essential difference is that our Self sees itself very clearly and knows its limitations. Where before our conditioned Self thought it was our entire universe now it knows it is merely functional – a temporary vehicle for our life experience. 

Indeed, it goes further – in that every experience we have brings with it a new self, which must be let go of along with the experience – a vast river of momentary ‘selfs’ coming and going continuously. And though each life experience and the ‘self’ that came with it is precious, none is so precious that we must suffocate it by clinging to it, or filling it with fear or desire.

As Longchenpa, a 14th century Tibetan Buddhist Master says:

“Since everything is but an apparition, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, One may well burst out in laughter”

Many, in describing enlightenment, have used the notion of ‘emptiness’ – they speak of enlightenment as ‘no mind’, or a ‘void’. From this, we could mistakenly infer that enlightenment must be some profoundly nihilistic state in which everything we are has been annihilated. It implies that enlightenment is tantamount to a profound state of mental apathy, or ‘vacantness’.

And this misconception seems affirmed when we’re told that the ultimate objective of every dedicated Buddhist is to extinguish all mental attachments, habits, addictions and cravings – which could lead to the assumption that with all habits gone, only a mental void could remain – something which, for many of us, would be a vision of hell, because after all, what is left of a life if it lacks our desires and habits. Surely without these things we would be reduced to apathetic idiocy?

But the notion of enlightenment as a ‘void’ has nothing to do with these nihilistic interpretations.  

I’ve practised with two, perhaps three enlightened monks, and each of them was an extraordinarily dynamic, decisive person and they all had wonderful senses of humor and incisive intellects. The only difference between them and me was that they had total command of their conditioned Self, whereas my conditioned Self still had command of me. As such they wore their sense of self like clothing, to be put aside when it had no use – while I remained trapped in the labyrinthine concoctions of my self, still struggling to be free.

So this notion of ‘emptiness’ or ‘void’ does not refer to any lack of intellect, nor does it imply an emotional vacuum. Rather the emptiness refers to ‘the mind beneath the mind’. That is, the mind that remains when all the conditioned dross accumulated throughout our life, has been made so transparent that it exists only if, and when needed. So then, when the conditioned mind has been made redundant, what’s left?

Awareness.

And it’s awareness we’re reaching for as we practice meditation and mindfulness. We’re practicing ‘separating the chaff from the hay’, so to speak – letting go of everything – all the conditioned thoughts, reactions, desires and fears we’re constantly building out of the bare sensations of living. All of it mental pollution that only wastes mental energy.

As we keep practicing this ‘separating the chaff from the hay’, we find the smoke of thinking becomes more and more subtle in the mind, and emotional reactions become less intense. All the things that usually obscure awareness become transparent and unimportant, and an apparent ‘emptiness’ appears.

And yet the emptiness is full.

From out of the apparent void of awareness, our authentic intelligence appears – the intelligence of knowing. It does not arise as thoughts, nor is it feelings, nor is it localized to our singular Self. It arises from the spaces between our thoughts, in much the same way as the quantum particles of the material universe arise from the apparent emptiness of space. And it exists beyond the boundaries we’ve always assumed were the boundaries of ‘me’. And we realise the Buddha was right – enlightenment was always there.

Like love, it was never something we get, or own, or make. It only needed to be revealed.

And it reveals itself slowly. There’s no before or after – no flash of light. Enlightenment comes in many stages.

And we realise that life has always been leading us to enlightenment. It led us along the path of our mistakes, difficulties and faults, while at the same time giving us small tastes of its latent possibilities – exquisite moments when, having forgotten ourself, we suddenly experience a snatch of unity with the world around us. This kind of awareness comes spontaneously, usually when we have forgotten ourself:

• When a syncronicitous, or ‘extrasensory’ event makes us wonder whether we are more interconnected with the universe around us than we thought.

• When absorbed in a moment of the divine, in music, art. A friend once described listening to Mozart as “disappearing into perfection for a while’”.

• When an act of kindness brings a flush of gratitude.

• When we are absorbed in a state of innocent wonder at a glorious sunset, or some extraordinary natural phenomenon.

• When we give without needing reward or recognition, or when we wholeheartedly appreciate someone else’s triumph or good fortune.

In all those moments we lose our name, our title and race and become brilliantly alive. We also experience tastes of enlightenment in the exhilaration of challenge:

“In a chess tournament, when players attention has been riveted for hours to a logical battle on the board, they claim that they feel that they have been merged into a powerful ‘field of force …”

In so many ways, like a compassionate teacher, enlightenment keeps gently tugging at our sleeve, begging us to follow. And meditation trains us for these moments. Each time we practice letting go, the heavy cloak of our cultural conditioning becomes a little more subtle – a little more transparent. And we become a little more aware. And with increasing awareness comes a calm knowing, and inspiration, and a sense of empathy and quiet joy, and it feels feels gentle and deep.

So we keep on practicing. We keep learning how to let go. It’s all we can do. And though sometimes it feels as if we’re getting nowhere, we never give up. In this way we slowly move closer to enlightenment.

………………………………………………………………..

Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’  is available now. Just click on the links below:

AMAZON PAPERBACK                                               – AUD $26.40 

KINDLE eBOOK                                                             – AUD $11.99 

AUDIOBOOK  (including ebook & MP3 exercises) – AUD $25.00 

………………………………………………………………….