Gratitude

The biggest gratitude is just in being alive and experiencing life. Nothing else actually needs to be added to this. The simple fact of existence and being conscious is enough to be grateful Nothing else is needed. This is the holy realization.

Excerpt ~ Sam Sara

What an enlightened individual basically realises is that there is something fundamentally delusional about the way that most human beings think, and, by extension, experience themselves. This delusion is not intrinsic to our nature, but almost invariably seems to occur when human beings come together to form a community or society. This delusion, therefore, is basically ubiquitous among our species.

Before explaining the nature of this delusion, in order to give some foundation, I first want to describe as best as possible what reality looks like from the 'enlightened' point of view, which is how it is from the natural awareness of the human being, prior to the distortions created by thought. From the enlightened point of view, it is vividly apparent that existence is all one process. Now, the modern analytic philosopher would say that this is a meaningless statement, because we can only speak meaningfully about interactions between objects, not about what is common to all objects, but this is kind of the point.

What the enlightened individual realises is that there are no separate objects or entities, so we cannot actually speak meaningfully about the true state of affairs of the cosmos. What we call the universe is actually a single, integrated field of behaviour that cannot be fundamentally divided. What the individual previously believed to be a universe of discreet entities or separate events that, as it were, shove each other about, is seen to be one unified 'happening', which manifests itself as unique, but interdependent aspects. In other words, there is absolutely no real division between you and the tree outside your window. Both are merely different aspects of one seamless process, without other. When this is seen clearly, very basic and seemingly undeniable human axioms such as causality, determinism, and even individual free will, completely collapse.

The whole premise of causality is that this universe is divided up into discreet entities or events that act upon each other in a similar way that billiard balls do (the Newtonion model of the cosmos). If, however, we see that all phenomena are in fact different aspects of the same, unified process, then we also see that the universe is really just one big event, without prior cause, or ultimate effect. What appear to be discreet entities are really like waves on the same ocean, where each wave is an expression of the whole ocean. Similarly, the illusion of individual free will is founded upon the assumption that we are all independent islands of behaviour. Not so. In reality, every single one of us are unique aspects of one universal will, and our relationship to each other is rather like branches on the same tree. This is not, however, to say that we are all the puppets of an underlying will, as fatalists assume. This is still perceiving in terms of an illusory division between me 'in here' and the universe 'out there'. There is absolutely no real division anywhere. It's all one process.

What makes spiritual enlightenment (we could really use a new term; I nominate 'truth realisation') the ultimate and final insight is the realisation that, because everything is one, existence is, and always was, a done deal. It's all already complete, and there never was anything fundamentally to know, pursue, control, or hold on to, because these assumptions rest upon the delusion that there exists a knower or an agent separate from that which they are attempting to know or manipulate. All of existence, however, is really just the dynamic energy patterns of a single underlying principle, the purpose of which is simply to experience itself. The whole universe is really something like the symphony of one composer, or the dream of a single dreamer, that is fulfilled simply by the very fact of its own existence.

So, the delusion that human beings fall into is that, when we form communities, we confuse the world of language and symbols, which we use to communicate, with the universe as it is experienced directly, prior to thought. In our complete identification with language, which is really a way of dividing experience into cognizable chunks for purposes of control, we lose sight of the fact that experience isn't actually divided up in this way at all. Thus, what is actually a single field of behaviour, that all goes together, appears to us as a constant battle between fundamentally conflicting parts. For the most part, all that human beings are really doing in life is struggling to uphold the delusion of separateness at all costs, because the essence of power, of any kind, is the belief that what you're doing is something fundamentally distinct from what I'm doing. If we were to come clean on the fact that we are all actually just different aspects of one process, all our power structures would fall apart, because we could not legitimately praise or blame anybody for living the 'right' way, or the 'wrong' way. In short, civilisation as we know it would collapse. This is why the insight we call enlightenment has always historically been esoteric, and many have been chastised or even killed for trying to spread it. Nothing could be more undermining to authority than the realisation that we are all one process. It's the dirty, great elephant in the room of humanity.

If we see things in the correct way, however, we see that the idea of having power over the environment, or other people, is not only delusional, but completely absurd. What the fact that we are all one process really means is that your own deepest, unconditioned will is absolutely one and the same as the will of all other living things, because it all fits together, like pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. If one individual tries to resist the dynamic of the whole, or beat the the rest of life into submission to his own personal ideas as to how things should be, he is not only in conflict with the world, but also with himself, which, of course, are really the same thing. Just like if one member of an orchestra tries to play louder than all the other members, through fear of not being heard, he ruins the whole orchestra, if one aspect of the universal whole tries to bend the whole to its own will, this only really serves to destroy everything. Yet, many human beings alive today are intent on doing precisely this, and it is for this reason that the species, and the planet as a whole, increasingly finds itself in such trouble.

In short, the enlightened individual is really only someone who has come clean about the truth which basically all of us spend our lives unwittingly trying to avoid. He doesn't learn some new, obscure truth, only 'unsees' everything that was already untrue. In other words, there is the falling away of what was always false, not the acquisition of something new. The truth is that this whole universe is one will, and so therefore all our individual attempts to control it, pin it, resist, or hold onto it, are not only futile, but magnificently absurd, like a dog chasing its own tail. We are a planet full to the brim of lunatics desperately trying to stick pins into their own ends, because we cannot stand the fact that we are all one process. Why can't we stand it? Because it means that we can't hold on to each other, or the world, because there is no 'I' that is fundamentally separate from that which I am attempting to hold on to. It is somewhat ironic, then, that in the end, it will be our attempts to control or save the world that will be what destroys it.