So, attaining Enlightenment just doesn’t make any sense in the traditional way it’s taught to us. I’m talking about the idea of becoming enlightened, attaining some amazing state of bliss that’s above and beyond everybody else, stepping out of the wheel of life so you’re not incarnated anymore. All that.
“Becoming” something doesn’t make any sense when you stand back and look at it. Think about the vast history of Humanity. We have been living here on the planet for 80,000 years, just exactly the way we are: Humans being. Even longer than that if you consider our pre-ancestors, or Neanderthals. The earliest known examples of Neanderthal-like fossils are around 430,000 years old. Neanderthals were practically humans. Very, very close to us. So close to us they’re saying that we’re all inbred with Neanderthals. They are literally us.
60,000 years, 80,000 years, is our basic timeline for humanity. During that time, at least, there were human beings out there, living everywhere on the planet. Their internal experience was the same as ours. What about them?
We have set the year zero at the time Christ was said to be born. Two thousand years ago. A mere thousand years before that is the beginning of the enlightenment traditions. The Vedas appeared and all of a sudden we have people attaining Enlightenment. That doesn’t make sense. What about everybody else?
I mean, just picture people living everywhere. There are people up in Siberia, there are people down all over Africa that have been there forever. There are people all up in Europe, there’s people in Hawaii, there’s people in Australia, there’s people everywhere. And this little tiny group of people three thousand years ago comes up with this teaching about attaining Enlightenment?
So what does that mean? They’re the only ones attaining this Enlightenment and everybody else is just sitting around and waiting for 1969 when books about Enlightenment start getting published everywhere?
It just doesn’t make sense that Enlightenment itself is something that you step forward into. Even the enlightened Masters themselves, if you read them, say no, we’re looking for a natural state. So, it behooves us to get over that idea right away.
We’re not looking for something that we become. We’re not looking for something that makes us better than what we are right now. We’re simply looking to uncover the false face that is false anyways. It doesn’t exist.
This changes perception. Now we see: okay, so humanity is this vast group of people having experiences everywhere around the planet. For the most of deep-time history we have been awake or we wouldn’t have made it. We couldn’t have been ‘human beings’ at all if we didn’t know who we were, if we were living in a state of existential confusion that whole time.
It wouldn’t have worked.
With that in mind, think about the qualities we ascribe to Enlightenment: relaxed into your being, awake, not confused by your perceptions. In enightenment you know who you are. You are not swayed by emotions, which are triggered by false thoughts. You’re actually living in a very stable state. You’re living in a state where you’re able to exist without causing confusion and destruction around you.
This is not something we step forward into and become. This is our natural face.
Now we can rewrite history. Eight hundred years before Christ was Buddha. He was already in a society with a false face. He was interpreting his experience through that society. They were in a society that lived with a false face. They had that had become unreal and were suffering the misery of that. They started discovering ways to come through that veil.
This understanding opens it up the whole Humanity, in a world where there are people everywhere who live naturally in this state and have ways to tell us about it. It just makes more sense that we are looking for something that the natural human being already experiences.
We’re not looking to step forward into some sort of attainment. I think that, however much you can drop this idea of attaining, you’re going to be so much closer to opening up the flower that is the real you. So this attainment thing just doesn’t make sense.