What is Enlightenment (yet again)

We know all sorts of strange things about Enlightenment (and God actually) like

Enlightenment does not "happen", it does "occur", it does not come or go, it is always there and so we have the Heart Sutra telling us there is no path and no attainment whatsoever.

SO says the unenlightened well if its here and there is nothing to do then I am enlightened. And if I am not then don't I need to achieve something, change or gain something?

Enlightenment is like trying to dock a space craft...

The target ship is already there, but unless we hold extremely steady we will miss it and crash. And borrowing from Judaism missing the mark is exactly sin.

Steading the mind we know from practices like meditation, yoga or even martial arts. But what exactly are we steading and why?

This is us.. exactly like a cat being distracted by string. The world is full of distractions like writing or reading blogs, really bad ones like NEWS, mobile phone notifications and even worse the mental notifications of thoughts that constantly bombard us with ideas and things of interest, and then there are calendars and schedules and people asking for us to do things and then ice creams and cars and music and love and things we want and basically we are surrounded by irresistible pieces of string... and then we try and dock our space craft! 

Not going to happen. The moment we are even close to target we get pulled away.

So this is what unenlightenment means we are distracted and do not understand where the target is and how to dock. As a result we are adrift in space with no safe place, and this is the world of struggle and suffering.

When we do dock and go oh that was easy in the end, I get it now, why didn't I do this a long time ago, then we look back through the forest of distracting strings and go oh wow why did I waste time on all of that! Easy to see now, but very hard while you are searching for the docking point. Enlightened people are not frivolous or distracted, they lose interest in the usual up and downs of life and the attraction to the bright lights fades. Everything is the same as before, but now they have docked there is nothing else to do.

This how enlightenment can already be there, its straight ahead and we just need to stay on course to get there. There is nothing to do there. But ironically the problem is that we are constantly thinking we need to do something and getting pulled away from the simple process of just docking.

When we meditate then initially we are taught not to get distracted and keep our mind on the breath or whatever object of meditation. Eventually distractions fall away and we get "locked on" and the mind stays with the object. This is such an important stage, but this is just the external distractions.

Iforgot to mention the key thing about distractions is that we "stick" to them. A piece of string passing a cat does not just passively attract the cat, it is like a force that pulls the cat away from what it is doing. This is called "attachment." We are actually stuck to the distractions, and unsticking gets very hard. Tanha is the word for this.

So even after being "locked on" to the object there are lots of subtle attachments like even "objects of consciousness" where we are attached even to the very formation of conscious things. But its the same process of gradually slowing down the vessel and making the docking ever more precise.

So where does the story end. Well the pop version is that contact is made and we stop and are enlightened. But the experience of the astronaut is not this because by the time they are near to docking even the docking does not distract them!