Are you enlightened?

She said, "Do you think you are enlightened?"

I said, "Yes, but you don't see it because you have gotten to know me, you see the human side of me and think that means I am not.  As if being enlightened means one is no longer human!"

People always want to judge, but I do see it in myself, do you see it in yourself?

You see, I know that her ego sees me, and it has labeled me, good and bad.   Her ego tells her I am this and that according to her own experience.  Because I have known her a long time, I know her and her ego.   She does not know me, or my ego.

You see, I could see her smirk a bit when I said I was enlightened.  Most people do smirk when they hear something like that said out loud.  What she does not understand, is that part of being enlightened is being aware of one's humanness.  To be one's Self, one must recognize and be in harmony with one's humanness.  Think about it.  If D. T. Suzuki was sitting in front of us right now, he would look like any other human being.  Sir Suzuki happens to be one of the more respected authorities on Zen Buddhism.  Carl Jung does not write a forward for just anyone's book you know.  But doesn't Sir Suzuki have his own demeanor, personality, quirks, preferences, and funnies?  From the outside one cannot tell a difference between the one who meditates every day and the one who does not.  I doubt anyone could pick D. T. Suzuki out of a crowd simply because he is enlightened and understands reality.  Suzuki said something like, learning to meditate is not the miraculous cure everyone makes it out to be, but it will change your life forever after all the same.  The one who meditates knows something, a huge something that those who cannot meditate do not know anything about.  That is, how their own mind works.  It cannot be expressed, only known.

This is the reason the spiritual path requires a great deal of alone time.  To know one's Self one must be alone.  Understanding one's Self in regards to the universe is something that can only be experienced alone.  To become aware of the whole one must be fully aware of their own complete and unique individuality; there is no duality in reality.  No one can tell you who you are; you will only know that after being alone.  The power of spending time alone cannot be underestimated.  It can be sensed in those who have not made the journey. 

In the Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, there are purports after the versus explaining them in great detail.  To sum it up, god is telling a warrior to kill his own family on the battle field.  The warrior and god are having a discussion about this because the warrior does not want to kill his family in battle, but god explains to him why he must.  Think about this.  God is telling this warrior to do what he was meant to do.  God does not have opinions about good and bad, only humans do.  God tells him to rise above his material attachments and act god-like in all things.

Expressing it this way might cause some to think this is justification for murder, as we have all seen religions do for thousands of years, but it is more subtle than that.  God explains to the warrior that his family is bringing about their own death because they will not let go of the fight.  That is the issue at hand.  The warrior’s family could turn and leave the battlefield, but because they refuse and maintain their pettiness, the warrior must fight them in battle.  The warrior must stand up for himself.  It is not love to turn the cheek in matters of injustice.  It is not love to allow wrong doing for the sake of non-violence.  For some reason, which seems to be cultural, when we read this kind of thing we think we should all be the same way, but that is the point of it; we are all supposed to be our own way.  We are not all warriors, which means we are not all supposed to kill those who oppose us.  We are not all supposed to be healers like Christ.  The problem is, for some reason, we all have this expectation that people should be some one certain way and all the same way at that.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The moral of the story is not to kill; the moral of the story is to fulfill one's purpose free of material attachment. 

For some reason, when it comes to spirituality, we think attaining enlightenment means we will all be the same peace loving hippies or something.   Christians seem to believe they will all be just like Christ if they can just figure out the god thing.  This is an unquestioned lie that we pick up before we were old enough to understand.  We are not all supposed to be just like Christ, or anyone else.

This has been a frustrating experience in my life.   When I talk to people about my ideas they often feel like it is "my" way that I am attempting to convert them over to.  People often think that I am trying to get them to be like me or something.  This is not the case.  The issue at hand regards us having the same understanding about reality.  If you did not know about gravity before you met me, and I explained gravity to you, would you be just like me all of a sudden?  I mean, explaining gravity is just a little smidgen of knowledge about the totality of the universe, especially considering the complexity of life here on earth.  So does new knowledge about morality mean you are just like me?  I hope not. 

I think the reason it seems like it is "my" way to people is because it is so far outside of what is "normal" to them that the uniqueness of what I say means it is somehow mine.  In reality, it is not my opinion, I simply did the research.  If we all did the same amount of research, if we were all actually educated, we would almost completely agree.  I know this because I do know a few people who have done the same amount of research and we come to the same conclusions, give or take some semantics. 

Understanding what is going on around us will not make us all the same.  No matter what we do our Self will be attempting to express itself in its own unique way. 

No matter what our opinions of reality are, it is happening all the same. 

"From the very beginning nothing has been kept from you, all that you wished to see has been there all the time before you, it was only yourself that closed the eye to the fact.  Therefore, there is in Zen nothing to explain, nothing to teach, that will add to your knowledge.  Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only a borrowed plumage."  D.T. Suzuki

There are not many things more powerful than consuming the lifetime of one man's work in a mere one hundred pages.  What took a single man a lifetime to develop can be consumed by another in a matter of hours; that is true power.