- There's a lot of talk about enlightenment.
It's a concept that's very old in Buddhism,
but also in other spiritual traditions.
And it can mean so many different things,
but in my Zen tradition, it really refers to:
and to some of the surprising aspects of life
that we don't normally see.
Most specifically, the interconnectedness of everything,
the essential oneness of everything.
That yes, on one level, everything exists separately.
I exist separately from you,
and this chair exists separately from me.
And at the deepest level, none of it is separate.
All of it is completely interconnected and always changing.
That is awakening to the truth of life.
Now, enlightenment is often held out
as a thing that we can get.
And in fact, you can read accounts of people sitting
in long periods of meditation, sometimes on retreats,
where they essentially have these amazing experiences.
Sometimes they feel like out-of-body experiences,
and they can write elaborate descriptions
of what these are like.
And sometimes people feel like,
"Well, if I just have those experiences,
then I'm enlightened.
And if I had those experiences once, I want them back,
so I want to try to get them back again."
What we teach in Zen is that that's actually dangerous,
that nobody lives in a kind of unusual
altered state all the time.
Most of us never do.
And if we have unusual experiences, it's very brief,
an experience of, for example, complete interconnectedness
and oneness cannot last.
In fact, one Zen teacher did a set of interviews
with people who had had enlightenment experiences,
and he put them into a book, and the title of the book was,
And what he meant by that was that no matter what kind
of unusual experience we might have of waking up,
of enlightenment, we always go back to needing to do
the laundry and needing to brush our teeth
and needing to go to work, but that is just how life is.
So, although most of us, myself included,
wish that there were a way to get enlightened
and stay that way, to get to a place
where it's always blissful and we never suffer,
I have never met a human being on this Earth
who gets to that place.
And Zen teaching is that that's not possible.
That in fact, we move in and out of states of being
more awakened or less awakened,
that no matter how evolved you are
as a spiritual practitioner, you're gonna have times
when you're just all upset about stupid stuff,
when you're just deluded, as we say.
And then, you move back into periods
where you see life more clearly.
That's important for me because if you meet people
who hold themselves out as an ultimately enlightened person,
be very suspicious of that.
Be very suspicious of anybody who claims
to be a perfectly evolved, enlightened human being.
Shunryu Suzuki, a very important Zen teacher
in the United States in the 20th century,
was famous for saying that,
And what he meant by that was that no person
is finally, fully and forever enlightened.
There is only this moment's activity.
So, if I do something that is kind, that pays attention
to my interconnectedness with everyone
and everything, that is enlightened activity.
If I do something that's selfish, if I do something
that destroys the planet, that is unenlightened activity.
And so, the idea of pursuing enlightenment
really is not pursuing a self-improvement project.
It's pursuing a way to be as compassionate as I can
in each moment, to pursue enlightened activity
in as many moments as I can string together in my life.
That's the goal.