THE SIMPLICITY OF ENLIGHTENMENT

     I have always been rather academic and intellectual, but I am becoming less so in a healthy kind of way as I age. As a young adult, I was all about the complicated and the convoluted. I was fascinated by the obscure. The tormented artist appealed to me, and the druggie hippie, the idea of vision quests and peyote buttons. The more dark and twisted a situation or person was, the more significance it had in my world. I was on a quest for understanding, for intellectual understanding and some kind of resulting enlightenment. I was constantly searching for deep thought, profound meaning, and the real truth. As a result, I often missed what was right in front of me.
     A few years ago, sitting at a traffic light, I had a moment that was terrible and wonderful all at once. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps everything I had ever thought about enlightenment was all wrong. Maybe it wasn't something I could achieve at all, or capture by hunting like big game. I had always thought I had to travel an arduous and punishing road to earn my understanding, but perhaps not. Perhaps it was available to me anytime and anywhere. Perhaps it was less achievement and more willingness. I had spent years tunneling down rabbit holes when the answer I sought, the very thing, was possibly simple beyond reason. Perhaps it was and ever is right here and right now where I am, simple and accessible.
     I choose that view today and it brings me peace and the frequent experience of joy. Today, I understand enlightenment as absolute presence and pure awareness, without intellectualism or analysis or thought. My mind is quiet and my spirit and senses awake. I am alive, and open to the experience. I am filled and complete and want for nothing. I am ok, you are ok, and the world is ok. When the commentator of my mind speaks up again, enlightenment is lost, but I have touched it and felt it and I know I can return.

I catch myself when I have lost the moment in noisy mind projections and come back to the present where all is well.