Recognizing Your Enlightenment
Awakening is when we recognize our enlightenment. When we don’t recognize our enlightenment we continue to feel to some extent like we’re not quite what we want to be or where we want to be. Some degree of such feelings is typically so familiar that we treat it as just the way things are.
But it is possible to be here, just as we are right now, and be perfectly at ease with whatever it is that is happening, agenda-less, effortlessly present, open and available, without resistance and without needing.
This ultimate state of enlightenment/nondual awareness/buddha nature/christ consciousness is easy to miss because the mind has no clue what it is. It can feel like not-knowing or no-mind, yet there is no sense of needing to know anything.
It is prior to interpretation, prior to naming, and prior to comparison, so even to call it enlightenment, or some other name, makes no sense because it doesn’t match up with any name, idea, or image. It cannot be reduced to any thing. “It” is not a thing.
And yet we can recognize this space as our natural home, the place to which we always reliably return when all our beliefs about what we are and what is happening drop away.
On first encountering this openness, many of us fail to just stop and relax, and instead immediately try to figure out what’s happening or try to identify some particular feeling or thought that we can focus upon and orient ourselves by.
When we recognize enlightenment, it gives us permission to rest without orientation, without knowing what this is or what we are. We allow ourselves to fall into the gaps between our thoughts, and just rest here without knowing where here is.
This is lovely. It feels spacious.