Am I enlightened?

Great Debates
21

Thudlow Boink: “Personally, I find this sort of philosophy too negative, passive, and pessimistic for my taste. But if it works for you…”

Contrary to this common view of the first two noble truths, Marley23, in response, is spot on. It is anything but negative, but rather an acknowledgement and acceptance of the state of the ego, and likewise, living through, and at the constant whim of, the ego’s insatiable desires.

The next two noble truths in Buddhism explain how there is a way out of this cycle of suffering, and it is the eightfold path. But I don’t even think it takes 8 steps. I would break it down to this:

  1. *Learn how to silence the mind, *and in doing so, feel the bliss of the present moment. The mind is the source of all suffering. If you can quiet your mind, you can experience life as it is, and not by what you have overlayed upon it by way of your conditioning.

2.* Rather than forming attachments, accept the present moment as it is* (as a constantly changing entity of which can only be what it is), and form a constant sense of gratitude for the things you have, and, likewise, a sense of acceptance for the things you have not. This also includes attachment to your body, your mind, and your beliefs.

3.* Do not be at the mercy of society’s (and your own), ultimately arbitrary, judgments and labels.* Such methods at understanding our world not only will come up short (due to the inherant nature of language), but also limit an entity to a singular conceptualizaton, and imply all of what something is not. In this way, if you label something as bad, you limit your ability to see the goodness in it. Likewise, if you label someone as evil, you limit your ability to see your common ground with that person, which could be a way to bridge your gap and come to peaceful resolution to any conflict.

    • Understand that you have the ability to react to events however you’d like. * With the absense of attachments or judgments, now you see that you were causing your own suffering by having had such arbitrary, mind-made conceptualizations.

One interesting anecdote I would include which is related to this (4) is one in which a friend and I encountered a nice car with an intense keying of profanity on the side. My friend started empathizing with the owner of the car, and actually got a bit enraged himself, saying such things as, “A man doesn’t touch another man’s car. That is off limits. How dare this person wreck such a fine car” etc. The response which came to me was interesting. I said, “If we are to feel sorry for someone, I feel sorry for the one who keyed the car. This is because we know, through evidence, that the person who felt they needed to key this car, felt enough rage and discomfort to commit such an act. They may have felt a strange sense of satisfaction after, but I am sure it didn’t end there. That person probably told their friends, bragged about their “victory”, all in an attempt to get others to side with their righteous keying cause. They likely carried with them remnants of the original rage which caused the act, perhaps for hours, maybe days. Meanwhile, the one who was keyed, could have simply looked at it and laughed at the misguided futility of the other person’s action. They could have been, albeit unlikely, of no-mind, non-reactance. The point is, there is a GUARANTEE that the one who acted aggressively felt some sort of anger in their heart. But there is no such guarantee that the one who was the receiving end of the anger felt anything at all. So I pity the aggressor.”

"A wise man once said “If you believe you are enlightened, you are mistaken. True enlightenment comes only when you realise this.”

Yeah, I knew this would come up eventually. The idea is that a person who is enlightened, in a Socratic sort of way, would never acclaim himself to be so. The problem is that somebody claiming to be enlightened would, presumably, only be doing so to appease his ego (IE: get attention, praise, etc), and therefore, cannot be enlightened after all.

But I would say this. If I am, in fact, enlightened, awakened, wise, etc, then I will be the first to admit that this potentiality exists in all humans, that it in no way makes me better than anyone else, and that it is, instead, simply a matter of becoming aware of this capacity which makes the difference.

22

"22 uh?
Am I enlightened? That’s your title.

Are you a hot chick? Got any pictures? That’s all I need from a 22 yr old."

I do not define myself by my age. Apparently, age is an important label for you. But let me remind you, wisdom does not come from books, nor time. It comes from an opening up from within. Do not confuse wisdom and knowledge. They often are correlated, but as we all know: correlation does not imply causation.

By disregarding my ideas due to my relatively young age, you are doing exactly what my last post warned of. You have certain associations with “22”. You then apply them to me, without actually taking into account anything I have said, or anything I could potentially say. Your label has actually blinded you to the potentiality of the moment.

23

Marley23: “That’s basic Buddhism, true. But you’re presumed the existence of a teacher and a lesson, which is quite a tall order. What’s the source of your view that someone or something is trying to teach us a lesson?”

There is no “trying” to teach us a lesson. The lesson is, and does not need to try. Likewise, there is no EXTERNAL God, standing up on a cloud, crossing His fingers, hoping we catch on. The lesson is the one which that we teach ourselves. Going back to religious theology, let’s take the parable of the “Fall” and “original sin.” This, to me, symbolizes the reason for individual consciousness: "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; read: relativity, rather than absolute oneness, which would be the alternative. We choose to enter this life for the experience of relativity and the knowledge of experience and individual expression. In other words: to experience the lesson inherant within the relative realm.

Insofar as teachers are concerned, there is no separate teacher, as everything in life could be considered a lesson, and/or a teacher. A rock is a teacher. A flower is a lesson. The question is, do you see the wisdom in the rock or the flower? Can you teach yourself such a lesson? Christ did when he pointed out toward the lillies and said “And why ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the fields, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” (Matthew 6:28-29)

But a lilly, to the egoic mind, is nothing more than a lilly.

24

Enlightenment is not a condition of intelligence, culture, or age. Anyone can be enlightened at any time. It is a discovery of self, inner meanings of life and detachment. Yes, you speak the words of an enlightenen person. Do not get discouraged here, stay the path of love.

25

Your explanation doesn’t make sense. Lesson can be drawn from anything, I agree, but you can’t reasonably say they are the cause of anything. You said the most important reason we suffer is “to teach a profound lesson.” Perhaps you wanted to say that we suffer because we’re ignorant, but your wording makes it sound like either we are suffer because someone wants us to learn a lesson (which you’re now rejecting) or because we’re trying to teach ourselves a lesson (which doesn’t make much sense). Likewise, lessons don’t exist independently of learners.

Again, this sounds like a series of major assumptions that raises more questions than it answers.

26

I admit to having led a fairly sheltered and privileged life myself, but I suspect that it’s not very easy to lose ones attachments to things like eating, drinking, breathing, not being crushed to death by collapsed buildings, and so forth. In theory, sure, if you could just “lose your attachments” to those things, poof!, no more suffering–but that first step’s a doozy.

27

Oh yes, Friedah35, I forget a second, maybe honkingly-obvious question: if people suffer so they can learn a lesson, why does that suffering exist? It seems less efficient than a universe in which those conditions don’t apply. If everything wasn’t temporary, it sounds like people wouldn’t need to suffer because there would be no lesson to learn. Sounds simpler and better all around, to me.

It’s notoriously difficult, actually. :wink: And your comment does raise the question of why people need to die, which is another good one for our enlightened guest.

28

Well, I think now you are helping me fill in the gaps. We do suffer because we are ignorant of our own ability to discontinue our own suffering, and following the logic we established before ( All life is suffering, All suffering stems from desire), it is as simple a matter as removing our desires. The method to do this is by controlling our egoic mind, preventing it from attaching to temporary pleasures or things, and replacing the attachment with in-the-moment gratitude. We also must remove the constrictions of labels, in defining our lives, and understand that we can react to our life’s circumstances in absolutely any way we want, including complete non-reactance, if we so choose.

But someone does want us to learn a lesson. Ourselves. What that lesson is? Only we can decide that for ourselves! You say this doesn’t make sense, but I am not talking about our conscious self, and I am certainly not talking about the egoic neurotic mind, but I am talking about the heart, the non-mind, that which exists without the mind, the stage where the mind steals most of the show with its needless drama and narrative, but which existed before the mind, and which will continue to exist after the mind, the part of our consciousness which unites us with the whole. Are we aware that it is possible to be intuned with this part of ourselves? And how can you do it? Silence and stillness of the mind.

I totally agree. They co-exist to the point that the line is blurred between them. The teacher will learn from the student, as the student will learn from the teacher. They may learn different things, but each will be appropriate respective of the other.

You could lose your attachments to such vital body necessities to life if you did not have attachment to the body. If you did not define yourself by your current life in your current form. You eat, you breathe, you drink because you want to live. You do not NEED to live. You CHOOSE to live. And thus, you continue living. But if all these vital resources were cut off, and you knew you were to die, would you accept this fate and surrender to reality? Or would you struggle, curse, and live your last moments in complete self-imposed agony? Either way, you are going to die. The person without attachments does the former. The person who is defining himself by his egoic persona does the latter. In the end, the same result occurs, only one died without suffering, and the other suffered extensively.

I believe in such a realm. I believe we choose to enter this realm of relativity because there is no sense of individual experience in the realm which you described. Think of it this way: Imagine the ocean, in all of its collective glory. Now imagine a drop in that ocean. If the drop is never separated from the ocean, it follows that it can never know itself separate from the ocean. It will always be defined by the ocean. In this way, when do you ever peer out onto the ocean and say, “I see a nearly infinite number of individual drops of water right now!” No, you say, “I see the ocean.” So if a drop represents consciousness, and the ocean represents collective consciousness, then the drop would certainly need to remove itself to experience its own individual conscousness, independent of the collective. Is there value to such an experience? Certainly. Is it efficient? Relative to what? Again, the drop can not come to “know thyself” unless the self is a defined individual entity cut off from the whole. At the same time, the drop can never appreciate the grand flow and comfort of returning to the whole if it does not separate.

We need to die because that is the nature of the realm of relativity. Knowledge of good and evil, life and death, beginnings and endings. The alternative to this is complete oneness in a realm of no-time. Like with the drop/ocean metaphor, you cannot understand the nature of one, without the other.

29

Isn’t Nirvana enlightenment?

I was just listening to them today… am I enlightened? :slight_smile:

30

No, you clearly haven’t gotten to the, “I thought I was so smart, but I realized I know next to nothing.”, part yet. That part is the beginning of the road to enlightenment. :wink: However, you’re on the road that leads to the road to enlightenment. :stuck_out_tongue: Turn left at the Wendy’s.

31

Actually I’m still at the, “I think I’m a real smart ass, but I realized I know next to nothing” phase after I turned left at Wendy’s… and stopped at Starbucks for a 5 dollar coffee. :cool:

32

I have actually generally heard it described as being negative in a technical sense. In that one is negating attachments.

33

This reminds me of that poster who used to start really odd threads in GD about the nature of knowledge and so forth and then claimed no one understood his true message when people questioned him. (Okay, that could describe a lot of people…)

34

What little enlightenment we get in life is always on the downstroke.

35

Let us not look into the rear-view mirror and convince ourselves we are actually looking ahead.

I don’t need anyone to understand me. In fact, it would not upset me in the least if nobody did. In this regard, I have no set expectation. This prevents me from emotional attachment to said certain set expectation, which if not experienced, could lead to my own self-imposed suffering. All in all, the idea of “oh, pity me, and my lonesome in understanding!” seems very silly to me.

Further, I am actually requesting that people question me. That was exactly my OP.

36

I would also add that, while I think anyone could have the ability to experience enlightenment, it is certainly not the case that anyone has the ability to articulate the experience of enlightenment. In fact, I would say a complete articulation of enlightenment is inherantly an impossible task. The experience is filtered by words, which is then filtered by the receiver’s interpretation of the words. The true message, the true experience, is lost in translation. It is then up to the receiver to be inspired by the attempt at the articulation to find it for him/herself.

I would say this though; an excellent quote I recently came across, “Stillness is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation.”

37

I had been looking for this quote as I view it as a very important one in life, but I could never remember the quote. Instead, I’d just use the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Lyric: *“If you have to ask, You’ll never know” *

But that quote is much more… educated. Though RHCP still is quite nice too.

And good luck on your Enlightenment, you remind me of well… me a few years ago, when I was into the whole “I should start a religion” phase of my life.

And so as not to be rude, here’s my Question for ya:
*
So now that you’re on a path of Enlightenment, What are you going to do with the rest of your existence here on this plane (no, not the Dope, the bigger plane than that)?*

38

If you care enough to ask if you’re enlightened then you prolly aren’t.

There’s a story about a man who went to see a zen monk who had become enlightened.

The man wondered what mysterious things the monk would tell him about enlightenment.

All the monk said was “before I became enlightened I had hemorrhoids, after I became enlightened I still have hemorrhoids.”

39

You are 22 years old. If–or rather when, human existence being what it is–you find yourself in a situation where you’re being crushed to death by a collapsed building, or just dying of cancer, or whatever suffering fate or random chance has in store for you, I suspect you will find the body can be pretty insistent concerning its attachments.

I don’t know what the Buddha’s deal was–I don’t know a lot about his life, but I would guess he did at least witness a lot of suffering–but I suspect in the case of many privileged Westerners who adopt these ideas, it’s all too easy to calmly say that everyone just needs to stop choosing life (sort of the anti-Renton, there) and calmly accept their fate, because I suspect that many of the people giving such advice really haven’t experienced true suffering; not of the “trapped and slowly dying in a collapsed building” sort. If you’re tormenting yourself over not being able to afford that new plasma TV, or not being able to get the phone number of that hot chick in Accounts Payable, certainly a little perspective and maybe “letting go of your attachments” is probably good advice. However, I find it hard to imagine giving such advice to people in Darfur, or Myanmar, or Sichuan; or even many people in the United States and other First World countries.

40

Well, practically speaking, I have plans of going to law school. I am currently on the waiting list for University of Arizona. We will wait and see how that goes. And in response to the inevitable comment, something about an enlightened lawyer being a hilarious oxymoron, I say this:

I once had aspirations of earning a PhD in Psychology. However, I don’t see how an objective stance on the mind can ever lead to an adequate understanding of human nature. I believe a moment of clarity can deliver more wisdom than a lifetime of scrutinizing scientific study. I, instead, will be going into law, where scrutinizing study actually does achieve something… the “best” subjective version of truth. It doesn’t pretend to be perfect. It is a system that acknowledges its flaws, but does the best it can. And hopefully, we all can do the same in our own lives.

And don’t be so surprised when a potentially enlightened lawyer becomes president in the coming months…
But insofar as the rest of my life is concerned, I plan on broadening my understanding of my own consciousness, and my own self. I think, in doing this, I will broaden my understanding of the nature of life in general, and the universe. I think that all of life’s answers can be found in the individual, particularly mindless consciousness. As I have read in what has become a favorite book series of mine, “The all is in the small.”

I also plan on expanding my practical knowledge on the matter, reading the works of great poets, writers, philosophers, orators, and, in the process, seek out like-minded people to have these sorts of discussions with, of whom we can mutually benefit and progress in towards further wisdom.