This post with probably soon turn into a video. But to really honest with you I am a bit afraid of the back lash.  Which is kind of funny if you consider the content. This is an idea I have been stewing over for a few years and I am only recently getting there courage to say it.

For a long time I thought being a Buddhist made me a special snowflake. I thought if I went to seminars and meditated tens hours a day then some how I was closer to seeing the truth! I believed those actions make me more enlightened and compassionate than everyone around me.  I believed if i listened to my guru and learned his secret hand shakes and looked at his collection of special rocks that I would somehow be something important.
I wanted to the be the most Buddhist of all!

And you know what….I was just a jerk. Not a mean person just…someone who took some very good ideas and warped them a bit. I was a bad Buddhist because I was clinging to the idea of transcendence. I WANTED, coveted the attention and the idea that I was special. I wanted to GET/BECOME/BE enlightened. And it suddenly hit me: that idea made no sense at all. And so I left organized practice for a long time though I kept sitting in meditation daily.

Eough years have passed and i think i am ready to finally weigh on this.

Enlightenment is not some cosmic cookie you get at the end for being good. It is not some body transcendence bliss. It is not some state in which you suddenly become a different person who doesn’t gripe in traffic.

I thought enlightenment was going to fix me. Fix all the messed up stuff in my head. I tough being enlightened meant nothing awful would happen me agai

You want to know what I found after years of searching and trying everything to become some enlightened being. I always was one. We all are. PERIOD. In the kindness I showed to my friends, in the moments where my mind was quiet, and it in the times I wasn’t so anxious I could go talk to a stranger.

I can no longer sit quietly and listen to doctrines of karma and reincarnation imply the existence of some sort of cosmic moral judge who doles out presents before rewarding us with nirvana or rebirth as a cockroach. I simply cannot.

And finally the most resounding truth that sticks with me is this : The search for enlightenment is nonsense. What is sought after is what you ARE.

The second I began to ponder my own self, what things I need or want I realize I have slipped out of that moment. But i have not failed to reach enlightenment. I AM enlightenment. So are you. We always have been.