What Does it Mean to be Enlightened?

[psychoslice]

Enlightenment is to separate the laundry, only to realize laundry.

Can you put that into your own words, I mean what that means to you personally.

 

[Willamena]

Can you put that into your own words, I mean what that means to you personally.

It's the realization that 'enlightenment' is no more complicated than (the experiences of) everyday being, sans encumbrances like the expectation that it be something it's not.

(Edit added.)

 

[Thief]

Enlightenment is to separate the laundry, only to realize laundry.

enlightenment means realizing no one cares the color of your shorts....
so no need to separate laundry

 

[psychoslice]

It's the realization that 'enlightenment' is no more complicated than (the experiences of) everyday being, sans encumbrances like the expectation that it be something it's not.

(Edit added.)

Yes I like that, its just natural to us, just as natural as the blood running through our body, its we who make it complicated, and therefore spend years trying to find that which is beyond the mind body organism, when all the time we are there, we cannot be anywhere else.

 

[Aquitaine]

Completely Agree. I've come across more than a few of those people myself over the years. (They are even more numerous, in my opinion, than those secretly aloof folks who try to impress upon you that they are too modest, too down to earth, and too commonsensical, etc. to even for a brief moment think themselves wiser than the rest of us, let alone enlightened.) But I think thoughts and feelings both of superiority and inferiority come natural to us humans. It seems to me that our brains just work that way, that there is no escaping from thoughts and feeling that one is either superior or inferior to other persons and things so long as one has a functioning brain.

So I do not think it is just those poor, most likely self-deluded folks who go about town telling others, "I am enlightened, and you should be properly impressed by that", who are afflicted with thoughts and feelings of superiority and inferiority. I think it's all of us, every human, who is that way. The only difference is a slight one: Some of us think we're superior because we believe we're enlightened, while the rest of us think we're superior for various and sundry other reasons.

Am I am getting at anything true, Aquitaine? What's your view of all that?

I suppose there is a lot of truth in that: just look at how people treat those who have differing political or religious views. It takes a lot for someone to - genuinely - accept a differing opinion as equal.

 

[nash8]

On the way up the mountain of enlightenment trees are trees and flowers are flowers, on the top of the mountain of enlightenment you see see clearly the beauty of the sun, on the way down the mountain of enlightenment trees are trees and flowers are flowers.

We are all enlightened, it's a scientific fact. The philosophical/religious term for enlightenment, generally speaking, is just the realization that we have been "enlightened" the whole time.