enlightenment is simple

Enlightenment is simple

Being human is the tricky affair

When one is searching for enlightenment, when one is a seeker, it seems the most difficult thing to find, the most remote. The journey is so arduous. So we can often feel that enlightenment is somehow difficult. But look more closely at what is happening. All those struggles on the way to enlightenment have to do with getting rid of obstacles, of shedding things which are obstructing enlightenment.

Enlightenment itself is the simplest of matters. Someone is enlightened when they are living in their natural state, without distortion. So enlightenment is not difficult. It is our human side that is the source of all our difficulties. Being human, living in a human society, interacting with other human beings, all of this has come to involve a hugely complex pile of spaghetti in our psychology.  

It is human relationships that demand us to have a personality. If you lived alone, on a desert island, with no human contact at all, your personality would quickly drop away. There is no need for a story. A story is for other people. When we relate to each other, I give you my story and you give me yours. Really, we are not truly relating. Instead, two stories are relating to each other. That is what our personalities are: fabrications, fictions, stories. And that is why human relationships are so tricky. In principal they could be very simple things but that would require that we related directly to each other, and not through our personas, the masks we put on for each other.

The tragic thing is, these masks consume a huge energy in their maintenance and at the same time they cause us all the trouble that we feel. All the suffering in our life is because of them.

So don’t consider enlightenment to be the difficult thing. The difficult thing is living the way we do, as human beings, relating through our personalities, through our carefully constructed stories. Let go of those and you will come upon the simplicity of being.