I Have Achieved Enlightenment........

[peter]

And it's no big deal.

By that I don't mean to disparage it - it's simply not the great illuminating flash of revelation that it's commonly assumed to be. More of a quiet realisation that one has found oneself in the place one was 'searching for' without having realized that one had arrived (if you like).

Let's put it like this. We have all, each and every one of us, achieved the highest state that matter can aspire to - that of self awareness. This applies to the lowliest grub that crawls its way through the dirt who, on a scale where brute matter equals zero and Stephen Hawking equals infinity (yes, I know, but run with it...) is up there rubbing shoulders with us at the top end alongside the great man himself. We made it. We got to experience being - and to know that we are experiencing it!

Consider a pan of boiling water. We are like the individual bubbles that rise to the surface, self-contained for the briefest moment in our individuality, our I'ness an emergent property of the complex arrangement of the ninety plus letters of the elemental alphabet from which we are built. One day we reach the surface of the pot and our I'ness is no more; in fact Siddhartha had nailed it a long time ago when he said that it never really was at all.....it was pretty illusory at best. And at the surface of the pot when we reach the point where our illusory I'ness is finally stripped away.........well, that's another story.

(Disclaimer; No I don't think I'm the new Buddha nor one of the ones who decided to stay in Samsara to pass on the message; there is a hefty dose of toung in cheek in the above - but if one can't laugh in the face of ultimate understanding then what's it for anyway? Send cheques and postal-orders to Peter, c/o Box {Out of His}, Kevin's Watch, Cyberspace - Somewhere In.)

[Avatar]

Just remember...it's not a once off thing. It's an on-going process through which you have to live every day.

But yes...Maya...the world as illusion.

--A

[Skyweir]