halfway done

After a lovely week meeting with friends old and new who very kindly revealed that they not only read my blog from time to time but are also interested in what I am up to, I thought I would post some of the thoughts that solidified during conversation on the topic of enlightenment.

Enlightenment is a word that a lot of people use to mean different things, but here I am referring to a state which is accessible to all humans regardless of their culture, which has been in the past held as a high spiritual attainment in a variety of faiths.  There are different techniques for doing it, and these as well as the individual will affect the progress along the path, though there are also some features common or at least common-ish amongst all paths.

Some fun facts:

Enlightenment is not an end point of the path, though it is an advanced attainment.  The path never ends, one is never finished.

The state of enlightenment is an advanced point along a particular path of development, but it doesn’t mean that you can do anything else really well, like sing or drive.  And the jury is still out on that reincarnation stuff.  Nor does being enlightened mean you are in a continuous state of oneness with the universe— reliable sources say that not even the highest master is always at that place.

Part of the confusion about enlightenment based on my experience so far seems to be that insights occuring during the meditative state are quite reasonably circulated amongst non-meditators, people apply these insights to their own lives, and no doubt get some benefit and personal growth out of it.  But I have found that there is something very different about experiencing these insights firsthand, while in the meditative state, that somehow makes a deeper or at least different sort of impression.

Insights I have had: I might experience something like my arm relaxing, which feels good.  And then there is a voice in my head, my own voice that is very often talking to me in my head, that says, “hey, that’s relaxing, let’s do it some more or remember it and try to repeat it.”  On the one hand that’s great, on the other hand it’s totally unnecessary, since the feeling of goodness seems to come packaged as one with the experience and the little voice doesn’t need to tell me that it feels good— I already know this simultaneously with the experience.  And listening to the little voice, which I will now start calling the “mind,” distracts me from what is actually going on, which is whatever the next experience after my arm relaxing is.

So I see that the mind is sort of trying to take credit for what is going on by telling me about it after it has already happened, and that it is both distracting and unnecessary.

And while the whole call my attention to something good so I can try to repeat it later thing can be beneficial, I have also while in the meditative state observed that the mind in trying to repeat a previous desireable state or avoid a previous undesireable one is in fact sort of creating an image of the previous state and reacting to it, and that this image is just more mind.  So the mind splits itself into separate parts and those parts start reacting to eachother.  You will have experienced this any time you have a conversation in your head with someone that isn’t there.

I’m not saying talking to someone that isn’t there is not wholly without benefit, but I know I can get quite worked up about my own imagination of a person and that can be distracting me from what is actually going on, and not an accurate representation of that person at all, and very unhelpful when I next see them.

In general with all the suffering I see in the world I think there is lots and lots of this fabrication of images within the minds of people wanting or avoiding things that are actually instances of their minds spinning out of control and interacting within themselves.

Right.  So you probably know all this already, and maybe pondering these thoughts will be of use to you, but the point is that experiencing these things while in the meditative state, as I said, does something different than working with them outside the meditative state. 

This something different causes changes in the real world (not the mind) irrespective of culture or faith which leads to a sequence of experiences along an endless path, of which one has been labelled, “enlightenment.”

End of update, thanks for listening :-)