Is Enlightenment Something or ???

Enlightenment may be more illusion than real. Not that it isn’t ‘real’, mind you. After all just as Something and Nothing produce each other, so do ignorance and enlightenment. So, what does enlightenment correlate to anyway, ‘Something’ or ‘Nothing’?

If you see it as ‘Something’, then it correlates to obvious, bright, light, life, full, sudden, special, etc. If you see enlightenment as ‘Nothing’, then it correlates to mystery upon mystery, darkly visible, death, stillness, emptiness, perpetuity, impartiality, the constant, and such. Thus, by expecting enlightenment to be ‘Something’, you will miss it… if it is indeed ‘Nothing‘.

Live life we must, until we take our last breath. The biological instincts driving us to resist entropy run deeper than any enlightened ’singularity’ occurring in our brain’s mind. Enlightened or not, our original animal nature still runs the show. The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath [our] feet each moment, regardless. It’s simply natural justice. In the end, we are all in the same ‘life boat’ together. And so naturally, the sage has no mind of his own. He takes as his own the mind of the people. So much for enlightenment. Although, it does serves as an excellent bio-hoodwink!

Maybe what we really long for is an enlightened life. Everyone can live an enlightened life whether or not they have suffered the ’solitary’, ‘desolate’, and ‘hapless’ conditions of enlightenment. Through the ages, many have laid out ways to go about this. Each way has its champions, each saying “This is the best way!”. Sometimes this turns out to be a way to avoid taking ‘the beam out of thine own eye’, as Jesus put it. Mostly, I reckon such touting of a ‘best way’ is just a symptom of tribal instinct… or a combination of these two.

The ‘best way’ I’ve found is to simply care enough about the my life’s moment-to-moment, and not what I actually end up doing in that moment-to-moment. For me, it boils down to the life I actually want to live. For the most part it is a matter of quality versus quantity. As a life of pleasure (fun) ceased to feel meaningful I found I had no choice but to take a path such as Buddha’s to heart. The great way is easy when there is no other choice. Most all of the difficulty comes from thinking that one has a choice!