One may ask: Is it possible for anyone to achieve enlightenment? Are there any practical methods for attaining this state of mind?
First of all, it’s not an achievement. It’s a visitation into you by that ineffable sacredness/eternal energy. If anyone offers you a method to “attain this state of mind,” run away from them. All of these supposedly exotic methods, techniques, and systems just make the mind more robotic, more lemming-like, more mechanical, and more second-hand. Rather, intelligently investigate without methodology. Without methods, simply be aware of thoughts/thinking, and perceptions, without the conditionings of separation and fragmentation that were poured into you. Allow silence of mind to come about naturally (without trying to make it happen). Be aware that — psychologically — the observer is not separate from the observed.
Hover in Blossoming … Photo by Thomas Peace c.2024
My Blog primarily consists of close-up nature photos (that I've taken locally) combined with original holistic-truth oriented prose and/or poetry involving mindfulness/awareness. I love nature and I love understanding the whole (not merely the parts and the details). I'm a retired teacher of the multiply handicapped.
I have a number of interesting hobbies, such as fossil collecting, sport-kite flying, 3D and 2D close-up photography, holography, and pets. Most of all, I am into holistic self-awareness, spontaneous insight, unconventional observation/direct perception, mindfulness, meditation, world peace, non-fragmentation, population control, vegetarianism, and green energy.
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Yes, Sara, most people see it as a goal to achieve. That stems from desiring and egotistical behavior (which nullifies it). I love spring! Leaves and blossoms popping up like fireworks… now that’s awesome! 😊
I found the first frog’s eggs! Wood frogs – here we still have snow but little crocus are popping up and now I am waiting for Phoebe…. Don’t you think that goal orientation is part of the American Way? WE have to change EVERYTHING… and spiritual experiences need conquering too!!!! It’s so ridiculous it’s funny!…. In Maine spring is just too short!
I do want to change the way we treat this planet for all good it has done – conservation counts – and i think it counts regardless of outcome – it matters how we feel about this miraculous earth and it brings us joy – so – I am not immune! not hardly!!!!….BUT I also don’t think these efforts will matter – I do it because it feels like a betrayal to the earth if I don’t try…
Yes, exactly, Sara. 😉 I do what i can to, because not to would be a betrayal to the earth and its creatures. And, like you, i feel that what i do probably won’t matter much. I don’t want to change everything because i realize that i can’t. But like T.S. Eliot wrote in his poetry: There is only the trying, the rest is not our business.
YES – this is what keeps me going – NOT to do anything is a betrayal of the earth – in the end it’s all that matters – as you say we are powerless to change outcomes but giving up our voices – NO!!!! Not ever. Thank you for yours.
Thank you, Linda, but it’s actually a Hover Fly not a Bee… not that it matters much. Rainy here too which is no fun for my arthritis! Well, the robins are sure happy and lots of birds are eagerly building nests in the area (which is a great sign of spring)! 😊 I hope you are enjoying retirement!
I see, but I saw “hover” and took that word literally as in the bee was hovering before it nestled into the blossom. The weather is perfect if you’re a duck or a robin trying to glean worms from the ground. No, I imagine your arthritis is not fun Tom. My mom had osteoarthritis and would have pain before during and after soggy weather like this and I suspect it might be that way for you as well. We had a Spring-y feel earlier this week and I’ve seen a lot of Robins looking for prime nest locations. I am hoping Mama Cardinal nests in my barberry bush again this year. I saw my first goslings at Council Point Park on Monday – that is earlier than usual. I can’t believe it’s been two weeks of retirement so far – the weather has not been wonderful part of the time, but it is great to go on a walk and know I can add another lap without looking at my watch or having to scramble to be ready to start work – bliss!
I’m so glad that you are enjoying your retirement! 😉 I have osteoarthrtis and rheumatoid arthritis. I excercise and watch what i eat, so that helps a whole lot. Arthritis is sure influenced by the weather a lot though.
I sure hope that that bird flu does not affect many of the outdoor birds. I sure hope that it does not mutate much (and begin to affect humans even more).
“Almost” for sure, wishforwater, because being is a lot like — and largely equivalent to –becoming. 😉 What is it that is being for many? Is it a smug sense of achievement?… or a projection of oneself as existing in what is considered the now?… or a self obtrusion of some kind of special silence that one has? Most of us are frightened of psychologically existing as nothing.
What a beautiful photograph of blossom and Hover Fly. The lighter Spring evenings here in the UK are a joy even though it hardly stops raining currently. Still, small mercies – as you say the flowers are growing and bring colour and there’s music from the birds.
What’s more Tom, I don’t seem to disagree with anything you say in this post 😊 🌺
Thanks much, Margaret! 😉 It’s been raining a lot here in Illinois too. But a lot of leaves are popping out (and sweet flowers too)! Spring is a great time of year, when a lot of nature pops back from the winter lull. Glad that you see value in what i’ve been writing!
Thanks about the photograph, Sylvia! Means a lot coming from an excellent camera-bug like you! 😉 Yes, unfabricated silence is the truest and best kind; the other manmade stuff is artificial and calculated to “get something from.” Be indifferent about psychological silence but perceive its order and clarity. Then it will occur naturally without effort. Habitual thinking and desiring consists of effort.
Perhaps somewhat, Dr. Bodo. However, focusing on the experiential aspect of things — even without much needless thinking seemingly going on — might still leave one limited and restricted. Experience is often recognizing things (i.e., re-cognizing things based on past memory and past accumulation); and the experiencer is not separate from the experience. Experiencing is often very necessary and even beautiful (at times); however endlessly psychologically depending on experiences may be rather limited and childish. Can intelligence sometimes go beyond experience and not always cling to the apron-strings of it? I say, “Yes.” However, there has to be a balance. ”Avoiding experience habitually” can turn out to be neurotic and childish. We often take direct experience to be different than thought/thinking… while, for most of us, thoughts — and the recognitions stemming from thoughts — are there as things are experienced. We often perceive through the screen of thinking (while thinking that we are not thinking).
Yes. I think there’s a misconception that it’s a place you can stay forever. I’d say it’s like anything else, a cycle, a constant ebb and flow. (Not that I claim to have ever experienced it. haha)
Well, A.L., like i mentioned, i say that it is more like a visitation. While it visits, one feels a trillion times more alive than what people associate with being alive. When it comes it alters/influences the mind in a very positive way (i.e.,helping it to be even more orderly). Additionally, it can visit more than one time (not that quantity is extraordinarily important). Yes, a lot of people associate it with some kind of high order mental state that a person has achieved (and retains indefinitely). However, it’s nothing that a person has achieved and holds.
We are all enlightened, always were, in every lifetime, and maybe it is just that our conditioned selves who don’t want to accept it or maybe even know it.
It was the year 1990. I was in university at the time at an advanced level of learning Classical Greek, but I was doing self-study on the origin of the human ego, reading related material, and I had an undergrad degree in English and History, but Greek was the only class I was taking. I had kept my social life to a bare minimum since I’d returned to the university to pursue knowledge a year and half before. I had an 3 to 11 job as a valet so that I could sleep late, since at the same time I was delving deeply into my inner life, and I was having lucid dreams nightly and out of body experiences regularly, and I was using those to try and see how deeply we go inside. I was intently study the book Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines.
I did an all out spiritual practice for about three months, mostly working on quieting the mind and focusing on nothingness, but I did regular meditation and asanas. I had no guide or teacher, and nor was I part of any group. At about the three month point, I knew something was going to happen, and so I left Houston to go to Enchanted Rock, a state park in Texas I had had an incredible O.B.E. at earlier. On the way I decided to smoke the joint I had taken. I only smoked one a week, for my Friday afternoon meditation, and I was very strict about that. At that moment traveling down the highway, it just seemed like I should smoke it then, and I did.
My thoughts became very deep, and I saw my thoughts branch, and I was thinking about two things at the same time. Unfortunately I don’t remember those thoughts. Suddenly my thoughts collapsed, and there was complete silence in my mind, not quiet, not any kind of silence I had ever known. The was pure silence, and there were not only no thoughts, but no me thinking them. I had entered some pure state of consciousness, and, looking out at the world, still driving down the highway at 55 miles per hour, the world did not appear real. It was paper thin.
Then I exhaled and did not inhale again. I don’t know how long this lasted, just about 30 seconds I think, and then my heart beat erratically and then stopped completely. Yet I was still alive and still driving. I began to sing a part of a song that I had made a mantra of, “There Is Love” by Noel Paul Stookey. The part I used was, “Whenever two or more of you are gathered in his name there is love.” As I sang it, on the word love, the sound turned into some otherworldly almost metallic sound, but it was coming from my mouth, and then suddenly I felt a fire kindle at the base of my spine, and then I felt a rise from there shooting up my spine, but I just suddenly shook myself for reasons I still don’t understand, because there was no me there doing it, and the force stopped ascending, and my heart began again and breathing, and my thoughts came back, but in a mind of quiet.
For a few hours I bounced back to the silence but did not enter, and for two weeks I walked around in a daze because I had seen the world for what it was, an illusion, and I had no reason to continue my studies or do anything. I was devastated, wished I had not seen what I had seen. One day I laid down on my bed, and the whole room erupted in vision, and a White woman dressed in male American Indian warrior buckskin, riding on a white horse that was dancing on a sea fully in storm, looked at me and smiled and said, “Nirvana expresses itself through the forms.” And then, for a second, I saw through the eyes of innumerable beings at the same time, as though I was looking out through their eyes, each and every one simultaneously. Coming back from that vision I had purpose again; I understood, and I was soon to leave the university and become a homeless pilgrim never to return to normal life again. I live in India and have for 20 years, a private person, not a guru. I engage the world only through my creative material, and, try as I might, I have not yet entered the silence as a permanent dwelling place, have only re-experienced it, not though, the suspended animation.
I might tell you that I’m at a level of world knowledge that I don’t want to be at, and I have been mind-fu*ked by powers far superior to me, beings and principalities, who have taken my little boy, the person I was giving my knowledge to, who was showing signs of miracle (read his poetry on his YouTube channel S. Nithish), and now of course I just want to get back into that silence of no-self, to stop the pain, to not see how royally screwed we all really are, but enlightenment is farther away now than it ever has been.
I thought I might leave a comment to tell you that I don’t think you have much of an idea of what enlightenment really is; it is another state of consciousness entirely, and it can come in any number of ways, but you are right, there are no steps you take to get there. It happens when conditions are right, but beware, because if it does happen, and you are unfortunate enough not to stay in that state, you are walking target for powers far more intelligent than we are who rule this Earth. The Divine powers only intervene from above, and only at certain nodes of some situation, and they are not in control here; the Hostile Powers are. More often that not, the divine gives the powers hostile to it the field, for reasons I just can’t get my head around, but you see the world and its history, don’t you? Maybe the divine does just enough to keep this world going towards its purpose not to fail, but I don’t know that now.
Donny, personally, i think that the things that you have written here are projections from a mind full of distorted self-projections. It is attributing these self-projections to other forces. My advice is to stay away from drugs, including joints. Grass is a false high, and it (just like alcohol) deteriorates the brain severely. Such a distorted brain can then fabricate outside hostile powers and all kinds of false phenomena.
Tom's Nature-up-close Photography and Mindfulness Blog 
Oh just perfect Tom – you nail it – it’s a Visitation – yes yes yes! and oh such beautiful blossoms….
Yes, Sara, most people see it as a goal to achieve. That stems from desiring and egotistical behavior (which nullifies it). I love spring! Leaves and blossoms popping up like fireworks… now that’s awesome! 😊
I found the first frog’s eggs! Wood frogs – here we still have snow but little crocus are popping up and now I am waiting for Phoebe…. Don’t you think that goal orientation is part of the American Way? WE have to change EVERYTHING… and spiritual experiences need conquering too!!!! It’s so ridiculous it’s funny!…. In Maine spring is just too short!
So cool about the frog eggs! Be careful. Wanting to change everything is goal orientation.
I do want to change the way we treat this planet for all good it has done – conservation counts – and i think it counts regardless of outcome – it matters how we feel about this miraculous earth and it brings us joy – so – I am not immune! not hardly!!!!….BUT I also don’t think these efforts will matter – I do it because it feels like a betrayal to the earth if I don’t try…
Yes, exactly, Sara. 😉 I do what i can to, because not to would be a betrayal to the earth and its creatures. And, like you, i feel that what i do probably won’t matter much. I don’t want to change everything because i realize that i can’t. But like T.S. Eliot wrote in his poetry: There is only the trying, the rest is not our business.
YES – this is what keeps me going – NOT to do anything is a betrayal of the earth – in the end it’s all that matters – as you say we are powerless to change outcomes but giving up our voices – NO!!!! Not ever. Thank you for yours.
Yes, if we all acted correctly and orderly, the earth would not be overpopulated and so polluted.
I’d say this is a massive understatement considering our present sickening global situation – yes?
I’ve never thought of it that way. Thank you.
Yes, that’s because of the rarity of it occurring on this planet (so far). 😉
Food for thought and more than one course 🙂
Great to read; i love it when something presented gets people pondering deeply! 😉
The bee in the blossoms is a refreshing end to a day of dreary rain and following your thoughts on enlightenment.
Thank you, Linda, but it’s actually a Hover Fly not a Bee… not that it matters much. Rainy here too which is no fun for my arthritis! Well, the robins are sure happy and lots of birds are eagerly building nests in the area (which is a great sign of spring)! 😊 I hope you are enjoying retirement!
I see, but I saw “hover” and took that word literally as in the bee was hovering before it nestled into the blossom. The weather is perfect if you’re a duck or a robin trying to glean worms from the ground. No, I imagine your arthritis is not fun Tom. My mom had osteoarthritis and would have pain before during and after soggy weather like this and I suspect it might be that way for you as well. We had a Spring-y feel earlier this week and I’ve seen a lot of Robins looking for prime nest locations. I am hoping Mama Cardinal nests in my barberry bush again this year. I saw my first goslings at Council Point Park on Monday – that is earlier than usual. I can’t believe it’s been two weeks of retirement so far – the weather has not been wonderful part of the time, but it is great to go on a walk and know I can add another lap without looking at my watch or having to scramble to be ready to start work – bliss!
I’m so glad that you are enjoying your retirement! 😉 I have osteoarthrtis and rheumatoid arthritis. I excercise and watch what i eat, so that helps a whole lot. Arthritis is sure influenced by the weather a lot though.
I sure hope that that bird flu does not affect many of the outdoor birds. I sure hope that it does not mutate much (and begin to affect humans even more).
It’s almost like – being. 😊
“Almost” for sure, wishforwater, because being is a lot like — and largely equivalent to –becoming. 😉 What is it that is being for many? Is it a smug sense of achievement?… or a projection of oneself as existing in what is considered the now?… or a self obtrusion of some kind of special silence that one has? Most of us are frightened of psychologically existing as nothing.
What a beautiful photograph of blossom and Hover Fly. The lighter Spring evenings here in the UK are a joy even though it hardly stops raining currently. Still, small mercies – as you say the flowers are growing and bring colour and there’s music from the birds.
What’s more Tom, I don’t seem to disagree with anything you say in this post 😊 🌺
Thanks much, Margaret! 😉 It’s been raining a lot here in Illinois too. But a lot of leaves are popping out (and sweet flowers too)! Spring is a great time of year, when a lot of nature pops back from the winter lull. Glad that you see value in what i’ve been writing!
Beautiful image Tom. I especially liked this: “Allow silence of mind to come about naturally (without trying to make it happen)”
Thanks about the photograph, Sylvia! Means a lot coming from an excellent camera-bug like you! 😉 Yes, unfabricated silence is the truest and best kind; the other manmade stuff is artificial and calculated to “get something from.” Be indifferent about psychological silence but perceive its order and clarity. Then it will occur naturally without effort. Habitual thinking and desiring consists of effort.
I am seeing a phenomenological approach. Am I right?
Perhaps somewhat, Dr. Bodo. However, focusing on the experiential aspect of things — even without much needless thinking seemingly going on — might still leave one limited and restricted. Experience is often recognizing things (i.e., re-cognizing things based on past memory and past accumulation); and the experiencer is not separate from the experience. Experiencing is often very necessary and even beautiful (at times); however endlessly psychologically depending on experiences may be rather limited and childish. Can intelligence sometimes go beyond experience and not always cling to the apron-strings of it? I say, “Yes.” However, there has to be a balance. ”Avoiding experience habitually” can turn out to be neurotic and childish. We often take direct experience to be different than thought/thinking… while, for most of us, thoughts — and the recognitions stemming from thoughts — are there as things are experienced. We often perceive through the screen of thinking (while thinking that we are not thinking).
Thank you for inquiring. 😊
Yes. I think there’s a misconception that it’s a place you can stay forever. I’d say it’s like anything else, a cycle, a constant ebb and flow. (Not that I claim to have ever experienced it. haha)
Well, A.L., like i mentioned, i say that it is more like a visitation. While it visits, one feels a trillion times more alive than what people associate with being alive. When it comes it alters/influences the mind in a very positive way (i.e.,helping it to be even more orderly). Additionally, it can visit more than one time (not that quantity is extraordinarily important). Yes, a lot of people associate it with some kind of high order mental state that a person has achieved (and retains indefinitely). However, it’s nothing that a person has achieved and holds.
We are all enlightened, always were, in every lifetime, and maybe it is just that our conditioned selves who don’t want to accept it or maybe even know it.
Good comment!
It was the year 1990. I was in university at the time at an advanced level of learning Classical Greek, but I was doing self-study on the origin of the human ego, reading related material, and I had an undergrad degree in English and History, but Greek was the only class I was taking. I had kept my social life to a bare minimum since I’d returned to the university to pursue knowledge a year and half before. I had an 3 to 11 job as a valet so that I could sleep late, since at the same time I was delving deeply into my inner life, and I was having lucid dreams nightly and out of body experiences regularly, and I was using those to try and see how deeply we go inside. I was intently study the book Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines.
I did an all out spiritual practice for about three months, mostly working on quieting the mind and focusing on nothingness, but I did regular meditation and asanas. I had no guide or teacher, and nor was I part of any group. At about the three month point, I knew something was going to happen, and so I left Houston to go to Enchanted Rock, a state park in Texas I had had an incredible O.B.E. at earlier. On the way I decided to smoke the joint I had taken. I only smoked one a week, for my Friday afternoon meditation, and I was very strict about that. At that moment traveling down the highway, it just seemed like I should smoke it then, and I did.
My thoughts became very deep, and I saw my thoughts branch, and I was thinking about two things at the same time. Unfortunately I don’t remember those thoughts. Suddenly my thoughts collapsed, and there was complete silence in my mind, not quiet, not any kind of silence I had ever known. The was pure silence, and there were not only no thoughts, but no me thinking them. I had entered some pure state of consciousness, and, looking out at the world, still driving down the highway at 55 miles per hour, the world did not appear real. It was paper thin.
Then I exhaled and did not inhale again. I don’t know how long this lasted, just about 30 seconds I think, and then my heart beat erratically and then stopped completely. Yet I was still alive and still driving. I began to sing a part of a song that I had made a mantra of, “There Is Love” by Noel Paul Stookey. The part I used was, “Whenever two or more of you are gathered in his name there is love.” As I sang it, on the word love, the sound turned into some otherworldly almost metallic sound, but it was coming from my mouth, and then suddenly I felt a fire kindle at the base of my spine, and then I felt a rise from there shooting up my spine, but I just suddenly shook myself for reasons I still don’t understand, because there was no me there doing it, and the force stopped ascending, and my heart began again and breathing, and my thoughts came back, but in a mind of quiet.
For a few hours I bounced back to the silence but did not enter, and for two weeks I walked around in a daze because I had seen the world for what it was, an illusion, and I had no reason to continue my studies or do anything. I was devastated, wished I had not seen what I had seen. One day I laid down on my bed, and the whole room erupted in vision, and a White woman dressed in male American Indian warrior buckskin, riding on a white horse that was dancing on a sea fully in storm, looked at me and smiled and said, “Nirvana expresses itself through the forms.” And then, for a second, I saw through the eyes of innumerable beings at the same time, as though I was looking out through their eyes, each and every one simultaneously. Coming back from that vision I had purpose again; I understood, and I was soon to leave the university and become a homeless pilgrim never to return to normal life again. I live in India and have for 20 years, a private person, not a guru. I engage the world only through my creative material, and, try as I might, I have not yet entered the silence as a permanent dwelling place, have only re-experienced it, not though, the suspended animation.
I might tell you that I’m at a level of world knowledge that I don’t want to be at, and I have been mind-fu*ked by powers far superior to me, beings and principalities, who have taken my little boy, the person I was giving my knowledge to, who was showing signs of miracle (read his poetry on his YouTube channel S. Nithish), and now of course I just want to get back into that silence of no-self, to stop the pain, to not see how royally screwed we all really are, but enlightenment is farther away now than it ever has been.
I thought I might leave a comment to tell you that I don’t think you have much of an idea of what enlightenment really is; it is another state of consciousness entirely, and it can come in any number of ways, but you are right, there are no steps you take to get there. It happens when conditions are right, but beware, because if it does happen, and you are unfortunate enough not to stay in that state, you are walking target for powers far more intelligent than we are who rule this Earth. The Divine powers only intervene from above, and only at certain nodes of some situation, and they are not in control here; the Hostile Powers are. More often that not, the divine gives the powers hostile to it the field, for reasons I just can’t get my head around, but you see the world and its history, don’t you? Maybe the divine does just enough to keep this world going towards its purpose not to fail, but I don’t know that now.
Donny, personally, i think that the things that you have written here are projections from a mind full of distorted self-projections. It is attributing these self-projections to other forces. My advice is to stay away from drugs, including joints. Grass is a false high, and it (just like alcohol) deteriorates the brain severely. Such a distorted brain can then fabricate outside hostile powers and all kinds of false phenomena.