“Enlightenment is an accident, but spiritual practice makes one accident prone.” It’s difficult to come up with a more accurate broad description of the spiritual path than this. Enlightenment is when we simply relax into our fundamental natural setting, and in the process let go of those habitual tensions that cause us so much suffering. It doesn’t require going anywhere else, nor does it require being a different person first in order to have access to some experience. We are already attempting to be so many different people. We are already going everywhere else, flailing against life and missing the here and now, and that is the primary barrier to recognizing the vast Presence, Silence, and Love that is our essence.
One doesn’t have to do anything to wake up. One doesn’t necessarily need a practice. At any amount, you could just drop all the BS. At any moment, you could permanently meander into an experience of joy and total freedom. The fact that most of us are going to have to apply some serious focus and dedication to the undertaking doesn’t take away from the fact that we could drop our masks at any time. Of course we generally need to practice something that brings us back to Now because with and without knowing it, we’ve already accumulated quite a few “practices” that tend to obscure the clear light of the Self. We need one habit that moves our attention back towards the Self in order to remove all the other habits that keep our attention locked into all of those cul de sacs of suffering.
Something that is also true is that waking up happens on its own. Another person, no matter how Enlightened, can never wake you up. Of course, we can have wonderful experiences in the Presence of realized beings, and we can also entirely sleepwalk by the Enlightened, or even feel like they are the furthest thing from whatever our conception happens to be, or all of the above at different times. When we do feel an expansion in the Presence of an Awakened person, it’s more truly framed as an act of giving ourselves permission to relax and fall into ourselves because the one in front of us is doing exactly that, and like a tuning fork, we feel that. The same is the case with a good spiritual practice, for it serves as a kind of resonance facilitator, guiding us into the most fundamental and expansive octave of our nervous system, allowing us to hear the numinous music that has been playing the whole time. Bathing in Presence, the subjective restrictions upon life relax, and we acquiesce to the flowing dance of Nature.
Enlightenment is living without the masks and conditioned tension that we learned over a life time. * The Self is already Awake. We don’t have to turn on any light inside ourselves, because it is already very much turned on. To experience That, we need only turn away from our little distractions long enough to take notice of it.
* If we don’t have an inkling of that conditioning or of the experience of life that exists without it, this sort of language can sound like gobbledy-gook or the height (or low?) of bumperstickerese. But so it goes with many things in life, like orgasm or the taste of chocolate until we’ve had some experience.