The Enlightenment Cycle
- The study of enlightenment, that is to say, that which we go through to become enlightened, is really a reorganization of our perceptual body or our perceptual field. We learn to see life more directly and more clearly.
- Enlightenment is not just a little burst of light. It means that your mind has become one with the universe, with all things.
- If you want to experience enlightenment in a simple way, all you have to do is stop your thoughts. When there is no thought in the mind, no thought of no thought, when the mind is quiet and it rests but is fully alert, we experience a little bit of enlightenment. A little light will filter in.
- Awareness is infinite. And I want you to understand that enlightenment is not something that is attained or reached by a select few. I mean, obviously it is attained or reached by a select few, in that very few people seem to attain it or reach it. But that’s not because it’s incredibly hard. It’s just not incredibly popular.
- Enlightenment is endless. There’s no end to it. There’s no beginning to it. It’s perfect. It goes on forever. It’s part of you. It’s part of me. It’s part of everything. That perception, if it gives you joy, is there for you to have -- if you learn to meditate, if you practice mindfulness, which is simply learning to be in very happy and positive states of mind when you’re not actually sitting and meditating.
- When your life becomes clear and pure, like clear and pure water, like the snow in the Himalayas, like the wind, when your mind is clear and your view of life is unobstructed, then you’ll be at peace with yourself. You’ll be happy.
- But true enlightenment is beyond words to express. I’m just suggesting, as others have, that there’s something perfect on the other side of pain and limitation and frustration, and that’s life -- in an unmodified form. It’s what we come out of; it’s what we return to.
- It’s entirely up to you. That’s the beauty of life, in my opinion. We can’t necessarily always help what happens to us. We’re born into poverty, we’re born into wealth, we’re born into something in the middle. But we can do something about our condition. Sometimes we can’t even do anything about our social condition, but we can do something about our condition, our condition of light. We can meditate and practice mindfulness. We can do it in a mansion, we can do it in a jail cell, we can do it in mediocrity. It really doesn’t matter.
- What matters is that we gain control of our mind. We can’t always control the circumstances of our lives. We try as best we can. But what we can do is gain control of our mind and direct it towards that all-perfect light within ourselves.
- So -- meditation and mindfulness. These are the things that we are interested in -- how to go beyond pain, fear and limitation, how to experience that brightness.
- To get a new view. That’s what really renews us, isn’t it? When we suddenly just break through those barriers, those limitations, when we do something we’ve never done. That’s wonderful. Then energy floods us and our consciousness is lifted. That’s what meditation is.
- The mountain of enlightenment, of course, is inside of us. It’s inside of our mind. And we’re climbing that mountain every day. Our life is that mountain. The mountain is complicated. It has a lot of sides, a lot of paths. We can traverse them. We can go up the mountain, down the mountain, around the mountain forever and never reach the top. The top is enlightenment -- the complete awareness of life without any mental modifications, the highest viewpoint. Not the best, but the highest unobstructed view.
- Our thoughts, our desires, emotions, angers, fears, loves, hates -- these are clouds that come between us and the light of the sun. When those things stop, when thought goes away, and fear and anxiety, alienation, depression, even hope -- even hope -- when these things clear away, there’s light, perfect light, an all-encompassing light.
- What’s so hard about being happy? What’s so hard about giving up fear, giving up hate, giving up anxiety? It would seem to me that these are very sensible things to do -- to be happy forever, to see beyond this cosmic dream that we call life and see other dreams of the cosmos, dimensions of mind, of time, space and things beyond that. To go to the very center of the mind of God, to be that, to become aware of our infiniteness, is the goal of Buddhism -- one of the goals.
- Let’s say that the process of becoming enlightenment itself is simply a process of getting out of the way -- if enlightenment is there, if it exists, which of course it does. Take my word for it. It’s something incredible, better than you can possibly imagine, fabulous beyond comprehension, ecstatic beyond wonder, beautiful beyond seeing and understanding. And if it’s already there inside us and all things, all we have to do is get something out of the way that’s causing us not to see and experience that; and that’s us. It sounds silly, but it’s true.
- So in Buddhism, we meditate. We make our mind quiet by learning to focus on the chakras, release internal energy that we call kundalini, and bring ourselves into clear and high states of consciousness. We go up on top of the mountain or as high as we can get. When we’re on top of the mountain, we look around and we gain a new view of things. Then we come down a little bit and we lead our daily lives. But we don’t quite come down as far as we were before. Then we climb up a little higher in our next meditation and then we come down again, not quite as far as before. Gradually we go up to the top of the mountain of enlightenment. Well, there isn’t really a top. It’s sort of like the Himalayas. Once you get way up to the top of one, you see that there are a lot more mountains, and there are more ranges to climb, and they seem to go on forever, as far as the horizon, and that’s good enough for me.
- People who practice meditation correctly, who follow the pathway to enlightenment, who learn to love and not hate, who learn to control themselves and go beyond personality to something more perfect, know that ecstasy. You can know that ecstasy. It’s inside of you. It’s inside of all things. It’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s one of those Buddhist riddles. We like riddles in Buddhism.
- Life is a circle, you know -- that’s what we believe as Buddhists -- or a series of circles that are all existing simultaneously, and we move around the circle for a while, and if we know how, if we’re skillful in meditation, we can get into another circle and move around that. We move around these silly circles forever throughout eternity, and we’re all those circles, and there is emptiness within them and beyond them. Right now we’re somewhere in the circumference of the circle -- looking across, looking behind us, having just passed through something, going towards something. Enlightenment is a circle. Meditation brings us to that circle. Eventually, it brings us to the center of it. Eventually, we become enlightenment itself, somewhere down the line.
- Enlightenment is endless. There’s something new at every moment, in every moment. But if we’re in the same state of mind, well then, we just self-reflect. We just see ourself in that moment, and things are dull and kind of gray and kind of boring, which means that we’re not very awakened, are we? On the other hand, if at every moment the world is bright and shining, which it truly is, by the way, then we’re in a steady stream of light. We’re on the pathway to enlightenment. Meditation and the practice of mindfulness over a period of time will help you live in the states of brightness.
- So we try to be mindful of the moment, this moment in incarnation, in awareness, where we’re alive and experiencing whatever life is putting before us and putting us through. And we try to be bright and positive and understand it, but it’s fleeting. Nothing lasts. Youth fades. Flowers fade. Passion fades. But life itself goes on forever. And when you know that, you figure, “Well I might as well learn how to deal with this life thing since it’s gonna go on forever; since I live forever in one lifetime or another or one body or another, I might as well learn to do it right because it will be better for me.
- To be happy forever, to see beyond this cosmic dream that we call life and see other dreams of the cosmos, dimensions of mind, of time, space and things beyond that. To go to the very center of the mind of God, to be that, to become aware of our infiniteness, is the goal of Buddhism -- one of the goals. Along the way, to be as kind to others as possible without thinking that we’re particularly wonderful because we are, perhaps, kind.
- The light is already there. It’s all-present. It’s perfect. It’s enlightenment. But something is obscuring the window, the view, the mirror of self-reflection. As they say sometimes in Zen Buddhism, there’s a little speck of dust on the mirror, and that’s us -- our personality, our view, our loves, our hates, our desires, our self-importance, our self-pity, our-selves. Or perhaps a deeper self is that light that’s on the other side of this being we conceive of ourselves to be, what we experience.
- As an enlightened teacher of Buddhism, I’d like to welcome you to the pathway to enlightenment. I’d like to encourage you, based upon my own personal experience and the personal experience of countless others, to meditate -- to be more positive, to engage in the practice of meditation, to learn how to do this wonderful thing, to make your mind still in a crazy world, where everybody’s at war with everybody and certainly with ourselves.
- Now, becoming enlightened doesn’t mean everything works out your way. I mean, some people have dime-store definitions of enlightenment, and they think, "Oh, well, if I become enlightened that means I’ll get everything I want." Untrue. It means you won’t want anything. It means that you will be happy, and if things go your way, you’re happy, and if things don’t, you’re happy. That doesn’t mean you’re a moron who doesn’t care. It means you’re in a state of understanding, You have the depth where you see yourself in an incarnate body going through time and space in the lifetime, and at the same time, you’re beyond all this -- not spaced out, rather conscious.
- It makes the colors more vivid, the moments of life more important, and at the same time, the immediacy of the pain is not as important, really, because we see eternity. The transient arises and falls. All things end. New things begin. And we have the perspective of eternity to view that from, and so when things don’t work out, we can accept that joyfully, quietly, sometimes with laughter. When things don’t work out, we can accept it. When they do, we can celebrate that too.
- Because our happiness is not dependent upon what occurs to us every day, physically, in the world, or the changes our physical body undergoes. Our happiness comes from within, our experience of endless stages of consciousness, of ecstasy, of bliss, of brightness, of beauty, of love -- things that are within us. If we meditate, we become conscious of these things.
- One of the things I’ve learned is that most people don’t care much about enlightenment and the truth. You know, they’d rather watch the Home Shopping Network, and maybe that’s another kind of enlightenment and truth. But you might, and it really doesn’t matter if anybody else cares. If you’re the only person who cares, then that matters the world for you, and you should find yourself a teacher of enlightenment.
- True teachers of enlightenment are hard to find. The popular ones, of course, usually aren’t enlightened because how could they be? They just tell people what they want to hear. The unpopular ones usually are [enlightened] because they tell you the truth, and who wants to hear that? Not the people who watch the Home Shopping Network, no offense to the Home Shopping Network intended.