enlightenment

We have now received the mandalas of the Ultimate Tantra
That are so very difficult to gain in our aeon.
Your kindness is overwhelming, and impossible to repay.
Now until I gain enlightenment,
Lord, let not your compassion forsake me.
Upon your distracted and agitated disciples like me,
Lost in states of uneasiness and confusion,
We beg you always to look with compassion.

The best way to avoid eternity is to seek it.

One thinks of a Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, or Dickenson, not as engineers hard-pressed to reverse-engineer existence, but rather deeply contemplative and sensual individuals who wanted nothing more than to savor and celebrate the intricate flavors of, and their curiosity toward, existence.

The solution to your problem is to see who has it.

Don't waste time polishing the turd. It doesn't hold truth and it won't take a shine.

"But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind." - Bodhidharma

For me this book was a very practical explanation of one man's experience of Enlightened awareness in in the face of or in light of dogma-oriented wisdom.

How many students who make it into the liberal arts and into philosophy classes still only manage to comprehend the content of these courses dogmatically, as simplisms to "believe"? Instead of grasping principles and values and an aristic ethos of clarity, they still only hear what pleases and flatters them: they grasp in Socrates or Plato the "countercultural" overtones that enable them to shower abuse on the diseased culture of their parents or peers, but they don't grasp at all the overwhelming obligation for themselves not to lie in orthodoxy's bed of sloth. They substitute, as opinionizers and slaves will do, one orthodoxy for another, imagining that the processes of "enlightenment" will change only the matter they think about and not the form of their own activity in reasoning. 

But nowadays, I know, that I have limitations. And that I know, that what I say and think now, might not be a true or valid as it will be tomorrow. My arguments for myself are just part of a flawless perfect reasoning. Which I haven't achieved yet. It is only trying to get close, to find that perfect argumentation that will eventually lead me to be exactly right. And have no doubts whatsoever of what I speak. I my eyes, such an argumentation, is either yet unconceivable, or so pervasive, that it defies the laws of nature. There are limits to knowledge and wisdom.

     Enlightenment is selfless awareness.  The process of enlightenment is not about becoming who you really are but about unbecoming who you never were.  It cannot be desired or wished for because prior to its achievement failure is pre-ordained by the radical deconstruction of self required to slip from the grip of the intolerable lie of 'self'.  From the perspective of ego, enlightenment is the biggest nothing of all time, totally anti-climactic, like waking up from a spectacular dream.  But, further, this Truth is beyond any possible sensation or thought in the mind -- it is more than human.  The real price of enlightenment, of immortality, is the severance of your attachment to all that is mortal, a complete disidentification with all that changes and passes away -- this entire world, in a nutshell.  This is something you must see for yourself, a madness you will embark upon only when your current position becomes untenable -- when you have no choice.  When your need is authentic you will get out of your own way and the universe will respond.  Grace happens.  So there is no such thing as an enlightened person; it's an immutable contradiction for that 'person' has ceased to exist and yet you (?) continue.  Perfectly human.