PEACE AND ENLIGHTENMENT IS FOR YOUR TAKING

We have been accustomed to think that enlightenment is the result of an arduous search for an altered state of consciousness. Enlightenment is not normal; it is the result of years of hard spiritual labor, struggle, and most of all, self-purification. You will have to pay your dues in order to be/achieve enlightenment. It is like everything else in our human society, nothing worth having come free. To get a little recognition for personal achievements, people boast and tell stories of great sacrifice and suffering in order to get some value-added attention to our lives? As with every personal achievement (like that of any fishing story), to be appreciated, it has to come with a sense of bragging rights so to enhance ones personal standing. I could go on illustrating the many mental attitude and fallacies related to our perception of personal success, but this will do for now.br / Enthusiasm is nothing in particular or extraordinary. It is normalcy itself. Think of it as a state of contentment in activities. It is a state of mind when you are one-with-yourself doing the things you do when unobserved by others (or free from judgment). Like being lost, reading these sentences while scratching yourself or picking your nose unabashed. Think of it as being of one mind doing one thing with no differentiation caused by judgment, validation, resentment or desire. I used to tell my daughter before a public performance, dance as if no one sees you, sing as if no one hears you, in other words, and be one with what you do and not self-conscious (I should know I am an expert of being self-conscious).br / To be of a split mind (“I” and “that,” “those,” “this and that”) is perfectly ok and very human indeed. To have an ego, an “I” feeling, is both a blessing and a curse. It all has to do with proportionality. Too much self-consciousness interrupts spontaneity and hinders free expressions. Being less self-consciousness, on the other hand, it may be important to count our blessings and hope we are a likable individual. The redeeming quality of it all is that our human specie by nature is social; we are a herd animal that relies on each other’s for welfare and comfort. That means if a person (do to some mental problem) has lost his/her self-organizing abilities, then we as a society come forwards to assist. To survive and function as a well-adjusted human it is necessary to self-actualize, but equal to that, we also need to allow us self to rest in our existential of me-ness with no interrupting mental self-editing. Have you ever tried to force yourself to fall asleep and been successful at it? We all have been in that situation. No matter how much one tried the attempt, remain unsuccessful.br / There is the saying, “Before enlightenment, I toil on the land as a farmer, now after archiving enlightenment; I work on the land as a farmer.” All what changed were my perception and neuro-associative meaning to the word toil, it is now an activity. Think about it and look around yourself, is there anything you see that do not have a particular nature attached to it, an existential value, motion, or motivating propensity. Activities are built into the very shapes of an object, not only that, it is the form (of the object) itself. An object is a dynamic wholeness that holds the thing-ness (an appearance) together. What we in the West refer to consciousness is not necessary the motivator of an activity, consciousness is more likely an after effect thereof. Motion (behavior/activities) is energy being expelled and consciousness being revealed. It is important to know that energy is consciousness complementary other half. According to Eastern tradition energy and consciousness is the same, just two side of a coin, so to speak. Neither can exist without the other. Energy activates consciousness and consciousness shapes energy. Reality demands an operative and cognitive faculty to exist in order to appear. The day you realize this to its fullest extent, you have indeed gone mad to the world. As crazy as it may seem, your lunacy maybe a measurement of the degree of your enlightenment. Back in the eighties while visiting Benares, India, I once came upon a group of sadhus lost in ecstasy dancing naked at the bank of river Ganges. This was not considered out of the ordinary; people watched them with veneration and reached out to them for blessings. This was my initiation to mystical India and was one of the triggers that set me on to my own personal quest for truth. Considering the artist lost in ecstasy entertaining the public while unaware to their presence. We have all seen a musician lost in joy while improvising melodies of perfect delights.br / Enlightenment is here and now for your taking. No need to wait for a specific moment to arrive in some distance future. All what needed is genuine unconditional love for what you do and are. It is not in ‘who’ you are, it is in ‘activities’ you are. Remember, expressed consciousness expels energy (behaviors) and while expelling, consciousness is revealed. It all lies at the existential based of every form. You are born destined to have a particular behavior, to exercise a particular activity and while living, doing it well, I mean, extremely well, to the point of non-differentiation between the activities itself and the doer. To achieve the ecstasy of a musician, you have to be one with what you do, which means, you will have to attain excellence in its application. The same goes for everything we do from gardening to truck driving. No activity is insignificant or unimportant. We are talking about the law of dharma (entitetic nature) as it pertains to every single individual. Now, one may argue, what about good versus bad activities. Evil is always present in some form or another, so maybe a cautioned note is prudent. What we need to know, is that there is cause and effect to all behaviors/activities. The law of karma rules us all. Which means that all psycho-physical activities, none excluded, will have to be inspected for selfish tendencies and undesirable motivation. This is where mindfulness comes to play, which means that we stand back a little before initializing a conscious act (certificated needed). Of course, this can only happen after one has realized the difference between trance and ecstasy. An individual that has come to know his true nature does not need to worry. For such individual a happening just happen, pure and simple and happiness is…, followed by none.br / This articled was inspired by a story I heard this morning on NPR, Morning Addition, October 30, 2009, Sufjan Stevens: Finding Inner Peace In Traffic, see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId