Enlightenment

Enlightenment we can thus see is an absolute state of mind in which no ‘discrimination’ takes place and it requires a great mental effort to realize this state of viewing all things ‘in one thought.’

In fact, our logical as well as practical consciousness is too given up to analysis and ideation; that is to say, we cut up given realties into elements in order to understand them; but when they are put together to make the original whole, its elements stand out too conspicuously defined, and we do not view the whole ‘in one thought.’

And as it is only when ‘one thought’ is reached that we have enlightenment, an effort is to be made to go beyond our relative empirical consciousness, which attaches itself to the multitudinosity and not to the unity of things.

D.T. Suzuki, the 20th century’s most well-known authority on Zen, wrote those thoughts in his essay Enlightenment and Ignorance. Our practical consciousness takes us on a journey that has many stops. These stops are filled with thoughts. We don’t always know what we think since there is a confused state of awareness between the stops.

We call these stops experiences in our reality, and we use them to touch the enlightenment within them. Enlightenment is the vacillating, indescribable fence that contains all the stops and experiences within the action of consciousness. Enlightenment is not a thing or a place. Enlightenment can’t be taught or lost. It can’t be bartered or sold. But it can be the action we sense as our practical consciousness adjusts to the speed of no-thought.

How we reach and sense, this action of consciousness is our choice. We don’t need to meditate or run off to a monastery and fast for life. But what we must do is accept our self as a whole part of the whole of consciousness where enlightenment freely roams.