What the Heck is Enlightenment Anyways?

We may think that enlightenment is something to be attained or achieved, somewhere we arrive. Perhaps it’s a state, an experience, or a goal, and the mind likes this notion for it helps the mind “wrap itself around” this idea of enlightenment. But enlightenment is none of that. It goes beyond all of that. What enlightenment actually is has nothing to do with your ideas about it. NOTHING.

When you see through the appearance of everything in all its different forms, you see the singular essence that everything actually is which is really… nothing. EVERYTHING is This One Being… whatever “This” is. What words can we use for This? Presence? God? Spirit? Tao? Whatever… it’s nameless. No name works. No name could ever adequately come close to describing This.

The word “ice cream” does a better job of pointing to what ice cream is than the word “God” does towards pointing towards God. Ice cream at least has properties, characteristics, and qualities we can describe and understand. The essence of God unmanifest is formless, propertyless, boundless, limitless, and nameless. It just is, and not much more can be said about it.

When you see that everything is This Essence and there is nothing else other than This One Presence, then whatever the heck a supposed “enlightenment” is must by default also be This. So is unenlightenment. Heaven is This. Hell is This. Duality is This. Non-duality is This. Everything is This.

Our concepts and understandings of things, such as enlightenment, are set aside, allowing the purity of what enlightenment actually attempts to point to rise up to the forefront.

Despite appearances in the world of the relative, the concepts of enlightenment/unenlightenment are just yet another illusory duality created in the mind, two concepts that both ultimately are the same one Essence, despite the very different way they may manifest in physical form. It is only in this world of make-believe that we see differences amongst the One.

The further we fall into the silence of the unmanifest, the more clearly we tend to recognize that everything is This, whatever the heck this mysterious nameless This is. Progressively we drop all our notions of something as opposed to something else as if THIS were enlightenment and NOT that, despite the world’s manifestation of enlightened people and unenlightened people.

There is only this one non-thing Here. There is nothing else. What room does that leave for enlightenment?

What the heck is enlightenment? Just another concept flowering within this oneness/nothingness/everythingness… another concept to ultimately be dropped from the realm of “things I take seriously” and added to “just a convenient way of talking about things” the same way we drop the idea of sunrise as “the sun literally rising in the sky” and see it as “the earth turning around its axis, giving the appearance of the sun rising in the sky from the limited perspective of a person standing on the earth.”

When everything is discovered to be the One, who needs enlightenment anymore? Even enlightenment can be let go of.

hahaha……