https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-reach-p ... ightenment
How can I reach personal spiritual enlightenment?
A person cannot reach enlightenment. Enlightenment is when the ever-present, eternal Consciousness, which is everything there is, recognizes that it had mistaken itself to be a person. This is waking up to one’s true nature, waking up within a dream.
After recognizing this, person-hood is seen merely as an empty shell, a temporary role that is played out in Consciousness, one’s true being.
It is, however, understandable to think that it is person that strives for and finally reaches enlightenment. After all, this is what we hear and read about – some individual, a person, strives for truth and then becomes an enlightened human. Yet, what we really experience is a “dream” of a single Consciousness, and “we” are countless individualized viewpoints that make up this dream. When a certain viewpoint has been “exhausted” or it has played out all of the worldly experience it had to, in that particular viewpoint Consciousness recognizes itself as Consciousness again. And longing for enlightenment is how the approaching awakening is manifested within this dream. Thus, this longing or striving is not the actual cause for awakening. It is rather a symptom.
Nevertheless, do what must be done, maintain and grow the intensity of striving for enlightenment, listen to fellow awakened beings and most importantly – be humble and lose the sense of self-importance.
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First of all don’t try to reach a state. Don’t let your mind assume at any point that it has found it and now only needs to abide in it. Therefore, go on the path of negation. Find what is NOT yourself, rather than looking for yourself. This way you will avoid countless traps.
The fundamentals of what The Buddha taught are all you need really. Of course you can benefit from other teachings too, but don’t get scattered: the mind ALWAYS has a new question, a new query, and the search goes on forever in that way. Don’t get too caught up and what he said she said, stick to the fundamentals of the teaching of not self.
All is impermanent. Realize this deeply, then you will not invest in this world. If indeed it is happiness you seek, it DOES NOT come from this world. What does come from this world is pleasure, which turns to pain; then you pursue pleasure again and make such a mess on the way out of your confusion and ignorance regarding the nature of things, you end up with more pain.
As you ponder impermanence, and if you have lived a little, you will see nothing in this world is satisfactory because of its fleeting nature. Nor can you really cling to anything, because it’s always moving. Therefore the attempt to hold on to something (maintain) brings suffering: it is not doable. Therefore, you let things flow. This is where peace and beauty begin, at the end of attachment.
Look at what you take to be your self. Find out if the components that make ‘you’ up really do add up to a self: Thoughts are fleeting, emotions come and go, perceptions change, the body is rotting to death, and even consciousness is changing. Nothing stands still. What configuration of these do you freeze of constant movement and say ‘Now! THAT is ME!’ ? And so, all of these components are not self, not what you are, not yours.
This is a process of disidentification.
When you are practicing correctly, the payoff is felt. After all, enlightenment is about ending suffering.
It’s good to have a true teacher or someone you can contact when confusion sets in. There can be some serious traps/distractions on the way. Feel free to contact me if your guidance tells you to.
Lastly, there are a number of good teachings out there (and many incomplete ones). Some say the same thing in different ways, hence try to see beyond the words to what is actually be pointed at. Remember, the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon!
Best wishes!
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First you have to know what it is.
An enlightened person has easy access to profound peace-of-mind, conventionally called happiness, the common human goal.
The Buddha Gautama gave us the psychology of happiness when he said,
“Nirvana is the extinction of dukkha.”
Which translates as,
“Happiness results when we abstain from conscious mental activity while staying alert and passively aware.”
If you wish to pursue happiness directly, independently of any external goals try meditation.
There are many ways for beginners to start meditation. The various systems are around to accommodate absolute beginners as well as those well along the path. Beginners must learn to be comfortable with introspection. Once you have done the basics [counted breaths, used a mantra or yantra, concentrated on a body part or tried a few koans etc] and so learned to turn your attention inwards and maintain a normal level of awareness while doing so, you can begin.
In meditation, we observe the workings of our mind in as detached a manner as we can muster, waiting patiently for thoughts to fade away of their own accord, neither encouraging them nor suppressing them while remaining alert and passively aware.
Don’t entertain ideas of a method or a goal.
There really isn’t anything to do.
Meditation is rest from mental work while remaining passively aware and alert.
If you want to see my attempt at explaining why meditation works, look up
“21st Century Zen” at Introduction.
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In the enlightenment,
1. The mind is not disturbed.
Un-enlightened mind typically shakes itself, again and again, creating turbulence (vexations).
2. The mind is not caught by illusions.
Un-enlightened mind typically takes relative views as something absolute.
3. The mind is not losing the whole.
Un-enlightened mind typically amplifies some details (e.g. turning natural emotion into an excessive desire), and loses the harmony of the whole.
— Therefore, to be awakened, we practice the three highest trainings:
training in calmness, so that we do not shake up our mind;
training in wisdom, so that delusions do not hinder our seeing;
training in discipline, so that we do not lose the whole, being distracted by details.
There are many particular practices that we can use for the three highest trainings. For example,
in all the Buddhist schools the practice can be presented as the Noble Eightfold Path.
In Mahayana Buddhism, the path also can be described as the way of the Six paramitas.
In Zen Buddhism, we try to directly observe every moment, thusly absorbing the knowledge beyond words. And one day that knowledge becomes “a critical mass”, and our worldview shifts to a different foundation — of real phenomena rather than culturally conditioned knowledge.
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PS. So how should we practice?
There are many various methods for various personalities. In Zen, practice can be like that:
We do special sitting meditation sessions (usually in the morning or in the evening, or both, and meditate more on weekends and other special occasions, such as Uposatha days) — to deepen our experience of tranquility.
We practice during all daily activities, whenever possible, keeping calm observation.
When vexations come, they would usually distract us, carrying away from the awareness. Thus the intention to keep the practice at all times shifts our attention from vexations to the calm openness of the heart. That's how we apply discipline and train in calmness.
Not distracted by vexations, we see clearly, on the non-verbal level, what goes on in our life, this moment, in terms of causes and results. For example, if we experience that fire burns, we would quickly remove any part of our body away from fire, often even before we feel actual pain from getting burnt. That’s an example of non-verbal knowledge: we don’t need ideas about fire, reasoning and so on: we just see causes and results. Thus by non-verbal contemplation of everything in our life we develop wisdom of clear seeing, not trying to rely on empty abstractions.
Finally, we practice care about others — to the degree of our current abilities.
Thus we dissolve oppositions and egoistic habits. That prepares us for the life of bodhisattva — the life of the awakened heart.
After awakening, we keep practising, to manifest that awakened seeing in every part of our life.
PPS. Question:
How do you train in Zen in all activities? And how to you evolve in meditation practice?
For Zen meditation, two most well-known ways are used nowadays.
One is to concentrate on a koan (gong an) or a wato (hua tou). Like “What is my face before my parents met?”
Whatever you do, you try to keep that questioning. It helps to keep your mind focused, observing what goes on, before you started to comment it. Otherwise we start to comment: naming, describing, comparing. Or we start to think of something else. In both cases, we’re losing the totality of our awareness of here-now.
That takes our mind out of our control. When the suffering comes, we can do not much, because our mind is distracted. Try to practise, and you will discover that by yourself.
When you are half here and half there, you feel helpless, enslaved. But when you concentrate your mind into one, then you can do much more, and feel more stable, like master of yourself.
Thus, the point of huatou practice is to
(1) keep the stable awareness of here-now.
(2) Directly seeing the reality before words came.
(3) Training our mind to concentrate into unity. That moves all things back to their natural self-control, rather than being helplessly distracted and torn apart into dualities.
(4) Support our strong wish to know the truth. That huatou (or koan) questioning — investigation — keeps our practice more and more concentrated. As they say, “You feel a Great Doubt and put all your being into solving it”.
After you gather “a critical mass of the Great Doubt”, it explodes, and the clarity of awakening reveals.
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Another way to meditate in daily activities is to put all your attention on what you are doing.
For example, if you are an accountant, then it might be hard to keep concentration on huatou when you work, — so in such moments you just totally work.
Or if you are driving a car, or crossing a road, it’s dangerous to remain in huatou rather than watching what goes on.
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The second most popular Zen meditation method is Silent Illumination (mozhao) or its variation “just sitting” (shikantaza).
This method have the same effects as I mentioned before, except that it doesn’t concentrate on the questioning, and doesn’t generate large “feeling of doubt”.
Instead, it’s more directly focused on the totality of the perception of here-and-now.
(Though some investigative attitude as our motivation can be present there, too).
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I myself have developed and practiced a method in between of huatou and silent illumination. Probably it’s more like ancient Chan. It doesn’t require to concentrate “inside”, on the question. Rather, you open your attention like in mozhao, not dividing this moment to “inner” and “outer”. But at the same time you look at all the universe with that investigative attitude, demanding it to reveal the truth, wishing to see the reality, to solve the problem of your life. Instead of very great doubt, you gather kind of silent understanding, that heaps and one day turns your worldview upside down.
I call that method “The Path of Awareness” (zhidao).
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Maybe we can say that all those methods lead to some kind of Great Letting Go, where our mind remains clear and non-attached. See:
http://www.chancenter.org/chanctr/ddp/c ... -1982.html
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In reality, there is no such thing as enlightenment, but because human language is dualistic in nature, that word exists, and is used to describe the powerful transformation a human being is capable of going through.
Many sages would agree that, that transformation known as “enlightenment” is the end of the personal self, dropping the story of an “I” and realize, see and feel Oneness in multiplicity: the simple recognition of our True Nature.
At the beginning we are under the impression that there is a journey to enlightenment and that there is a seeker behind it, and that’s perfectly OK, so if this is where you are, then start by dropping your personal sense of self and take it from there.
Kind regards,
Thomas & Ruth
http://www.weareco.org
