When will I enlighten?

This is a similar question to "Where is the Mind?" or "Who enlightens?"

The normal view of life is that we have experiences in the present and we have memories of the past and we have thoughts and expectations about the future and time travels with us from the Past to the Future.

We therefore expect enlightenment to be waiting for us in the future.

We also have ideas about who we are, and where we are. We expect "me" to enlighten, somewhere like under a tree, and at some time in the future. Perhaps we go on pilgrimage to find a place where we can enlighten.

But lets look at someone else doing all this. Call them something random like Freda. So Freda exists in a stream of existence going from the Past to the Future. Things happen to Freda in this stream. She marks them down in a diary. She has blank pages yet unwritten that to her in this stream will be written some time in the future. And she can look back at all the written pages that somehow have mysteriously been created by a person that is gone, but she understands as the same "self" as is reading them now, but somehow in the Past. Now this is Freda's life we are talking about. To her it is all she has, this is what she is, and its like a necklace with beads being threaded onto it to make up the sequence of her life. This bead is when I was born, then some beads later I went to school etc and eventually there will be the bead of Death and the necklace will be complete. Hopefully one day too the enlightenment bead will be added and perhaps that will mean no death bead, people are never too sure about this bit.

But enlightenment does not float down these streams. It does not exist within the channels of our life. It is not a bead. Enlightenment is realising that there is more to life than just this stream. We don't get nihilistic and tell Freda that her life stream is not important cos its just one of millions. Instead we point out to Freda that she is greater than this life stream, she is for starters able to watch all the beading! She can just let the life stream carry on as it does, as rich and important as ever, but that she doesn't need to wait until the Death bead gets added to escape it.

The point of Enlightenment is non-attachment and emptiness. We get used to letting go of the life stream. We get used to just watching things being added to the necklace and we get used to this being the way. This is my life, its great, its amazing, its wonderful, its extraordinary and mysterious but it just is, it doesn't need me to be present for it to carry on. I am free to just let it happen. I'm not actually "in" this stream.

Now that ability to let the stream just be; that is the liberation. There is nothing down the track called enlightenment, and when we practice Buddhism or any religious practice we are not heading "towards" some end or goal or achievement! We are instead learning to accept God into our lives as some might say, or learning to accept things as they are.

That said there are stages to this and for some, and at some times, it would be good to fit our religious practice "into our" life stream and feeds a few beads onto the necklace, at least to start with, or when we are confused and need some direction.