What is enlightenment?

Heart Not Head

"Enlightenment is the journey back from the head to the heart. "

 --Ravi Shankar via @SandraSmilovits on Twitter

Ever since my heart vs. head epiphany, I have been trying to get out of my head and into my heart more and more. My friend Loretta sent me this picture to help me out. 

It is a photograph of the drawing Ketut Liyer gives to Elizabeth Gilbert in the movie Eat Pray Love to help her with her practice. It looks a lot like enlightenment to me. 

What does enlightenment look like to you? How do you define it? Send me your picture or definition via the comments, I would love to add it to my collection.

Drying in the Sun

"Seizing my life in your hands, you thrashed it clean
On the savage rocks of Eternal Mind.
How its colours bled, until they grew white!
You smile and sit back; I dry in your sun." 

--Rumi, from Daily Om's A Year of Rumi course

This is not the post I was planning to share today, but that one still needs a little ruminating, so I am substituting with a little Rumi.

I have signed up for the Daily Om's course A Year of Rumi and I am really enjoying it. Some of the poems I do not understand AT ALL, while others really speak to me.

Like this one. It feels like what life does to each of us every day and like what it might feel like once our colors bleed out until they turn white and we become enlightened, drying in The Universe's sun.

I look forward to that moment.

What do you REALLY want?

--From The Seattle Times online edition, February 7, 2011

What are you spending your time on?

I came across this video by chance, while reading the newspaper on the web, and it helped me to experience a moment of clarity.

Towards the end, Rocket Rivers says about Jordan, “I'm not really surprised by him because he puts in the work....he's in the gym two or three hours a day....so, of course, it's going to pay off,” and the thought came into my head, “What do I want badly enough to spend two to three hours a day on?” 

My answer was: Enlightenment.

Now, of course, I don’t really know what that means….but when I think about it, I picture some kind of revelation, some kind of transcendence, some kind of....peace….of the kind that I feel I have been searching for all of my life.

So I have decided to rededicate myself to meditation. To spend 2 or 3 hours a day not thinking, not doing, not moving. Just allowing. Just breathing. Just being. Because if you really, really want something, you have to put in the time. You have to put in the work.

My Examined Life

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

--Socrates

If this quote is true my life must be worth living and then some. Monday I was propelled into yet another existential crisis. 

This has been a pattern of mine over the years. I am humming along, thinking that all is well when all of a sudden I read something or hear something or experience something that calls into question my whole life and how I have lived it up to this point. 

Right now that "something" is the book I quoted in my post from last week, "Sex at Dawn."  I have not even gotten to the sex part yet and it is blowing my mind.

It is about the evolution of our species and the authors' assertion is that we basically took an evolutionary wrong turn around 10,000 years ago that has led to most of the evils of the present day: war, disease, famine, reality television. 

This idea that we are all living an unnatural life is both comforting and highly disturbing. 

Comforting because it affirms my life-long feeling that things are not quite right in this life. That things could be - and should be - a little bit (or a lot bit) different, easier, less complicated and confusing, simpler. 

Highly disturbing because there is just no way to go back. Nothing anyone says or does (short of some 2012 predictions that is...) is going to turn back time on the development of agriculture (the "wrong turn" Ryan and Jetha speak of) and the industrialization of Western society.

So where do we go from here? How do we live when our whole lives have turned out "wrong?"

And the answer is: I DON'T KNOW. 

Whenever I start thinking too hard about something too big this is where I end up.  At I DON'T KNOW, and I DON'T KNOW is not a pretty place. 

I end up paralyzed by the need to know, while the words I DON'T KNOW just keep reverberating more and more loudly in my head. I DON'T KNOW. I DON'T KNOW. I DON'T KNOW. 

When this happens, everything is called into question and it is all I can do to function. I just wander around thinking and repeating, I DON'T KNOW, I DON'T KNOW, I DON'T KNOW. 

My dad always said that when I started to say I DON'T KNOW, he thought that it meant I DID know, but I didn't want to admit it because it was something too big or too scary. 

I think he was right. 

This time my I DON'T KNOW was calling into question my whole life and not just mine, the whole life of my species. That's a pretty big I DON'T KNOW. 

So here's what I DO KNOW: I do know that I don't know where we came from or how we got here or even if there is a God. I don't know if I believe in a random collision of atoms or a white-bearded man on a throne or even intelligent design. I don't know if we should be living in roving bands of hunter-gatherers or our individual castles in concrete jungles. I don't know - yet - what I truly believe about Heaven or Hell or past lives or angels. 

I know what I have been taught and told and read about, but what I TRULY BELIEVE is still eluding me. That's why I read and write and think and meditate and do everything I do. To try and figure it out. That's why I am here. 

I'll keep you posted.

 

The Wisdom of BOTH

"Do not cling to anything, to any idea; because clinging is the bondage, even to the idea of enlightenment."

--Osho

"To gain enlightenment, you must want it as much as a man whose head is held under water wants air."

--Zen saying

Whenever I give my husband a choice between two things his answer is always the same: BOTH. 

It used to drive me CRAZY because I was raised in a world where you can't have BOTH. You can have one or the other, but not both. In his world BOTH is always an option and it is always the one he chooses. 

These quotes came, less than two weeks apart, from my Wisdom of the East Mini Day-to-Day Calendar. I had to laugh when I read the second one, because I remembered liking the first one and posting it on my fridge. 

I quickly found it and posted them together, held up by the same magnet, side by side. 

Every couple of days I would read them, laugh, and then put them back together where they belong.

Some days I know it is my desire for enlightenment that gets in my way.  I am trying too hard and by trying, missing the point.

Other days what holds me back is that I do not want it nearly enough. Because achieving enlightenment would mean giving up things that my ego values like pride, jealousy, gossip, righteousness and anger.

On the days when I pause and ask myself to decide - really - which of these quotes I believe to be TRUE the answer I get is always the same: BOTH 

Or as the Buddha said, "I gained nothing at all from supreme enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called supreme enlightenment."

Qwest for the Best

"Do not present a false and unworthy picture of yourself to others, and do not accept such a picture of them yourself."

--From A Course in Miracles

A couple of weeks ago a man came into the credit union on a Saturday and walked up to my teller station. I was not having a good day. 

I was still recovering from my write-up and feeling a bit insecure and unsure of myself at work and I had not gotten a good night's sleep so I was very tired. 

I had helped this guy before and he always seemed a bit arrogant to me, but I had never had a particularly negative interaction with him. 

As I did his deposit I asked him how his day was going. His response was, "Obviously better than yours since you're working and I'm not." He said it not with empathy, but with glee. 

The same glee my sons use when talking to each other about something they have that the other one wants. "I got to watch TV and you didn't....I'm going to a birthday party and you aren't....I have enough money to buy a new Lego set and you don't!" 

He couldn't have made it much clearer if he'd thrown in a, "Na-na-na-boo-boo."

I paused - and bristled - for just a moment, then straightened myself up and smiled, continuing to process his transaction, but saying nothing. 

Inside of course I was thinking, ASS-HOLE.

I finished his transaction, handed him his cash and said, with a terse smile, "Have a nice day."

His response? "Thanks, I will. Better than you I'm sure now that I've ruined it for you." Again, with the glee.

That did it. I smiled, a wide, but angry smile and said very clearly, "You didn't ruin my day. If I didn't want to be here I wouldn't be here."

I could tell he was stunned as he stammered out, "W-w-ell, that's a really good attitude to have." I nodded, but said nothing more, silently sending him on his way.

When I went home that afternoon I told my husband about the immature ASS-HOLE I had at my station that day. Then I pretty much forgot about it.  

But guess who was back at the credit union and back at my teller station this Saturday? 

As he walked in, he looked in my direction and I could see it in his eyes: he expected me to hate him. He expected me to treat him poorly, with disdain and vengeance. 

In that moment I felt a wave of compassion for him so great that it actually made me smile a big, wide smile. 

I greeted him warmly, "Hi! Come on over."

And what came next was priceless. The surprise in his face at not being hated made him look like a little boy, expecting to get into trouble for breaking his mom's best China, who gets a big hug and an "it's okay" instead.

When I asked him about his day he told me he was taking his kids on a tour of Qwest Field and I said I thought my kids would love that. He fell all over himself, promising two or three times to tell me how it was the next time he came in. 

I was so glad in that moment that I had not presented a false and unworthy picture of myself or accepted a false and unworthy picture of him, but rather looked for - and found - the best in both of us.

"Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening."

Zen saying

Human by The Killers

"The most important element in facilitating an upward movement in consciousness is an attitude of willingness. "

David R. Hawkins, MD, PhD, Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior