Sunday is Message Day on the blog. Monday through Friday we look at contemporary events and day-to-day occurrences at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality…but on Sunday, we reserve this space for a specific teaching derived from the material in Conversations with God
Through the years I have given hundreds of talks and written scores of articles revolving around this material. Every seven days we will present in this space a transcript or reprint of one of those presentations. We invite you to Copy and Save each one of them, creating a personal a collection of contemporary and uplifting spiritual thought which you may reference at any time. We hope you will find this a constant source of insight and inspiration.
This week’s offering: The third in a series of Sunday pieces taken from the transcript of a talk on the nature of Enlightenment and how to achieve it, before a live audience in Ashland, Oregon in July, 2004.
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God says, “No one calls to me who is not answered.”
And each of us will be answered by that which we call divine, in the way which most effectively responds to the vibration that we hold and create from the center of our being. To put this another way, God, or divinity, or Enlightenment, if you please, appears in the lives of every person in a form that is most appropriate to their background, their culture, the level of their understanding, the level of their desire, and their willingness.
This very conversation, and the transcript of it that many will be reading, falls into that category. For some, it will be perfect, the perfect tool of communication. For others it will not, and they will not even have read this far and will not know what is being said here.
So there are many means of communication, and there are many disciplines: physical disciplines, mental disciplines, spiritual disciplines, and some disciplines that involve all three — the body, the mind and the spirit.
We spoke of The Buddha earlier. It is good to tell the whole story.
His name was Siddhartha Gautama. He lived in riches and luxuries as a young man, because his father and his family were the rulers of a large area of countryside and had much wealth.
They tried to protect Siddhartha from any knowledge of the outside world for many years. And they kept him on the grounds of the family compound, but one day Siddhartha ventured outside the walls to learn of life as it existed on the street.
He learned of poverty and of illness and of disease and of cruelty and of anger and of all the so-called negative experiences that no one ever allowed him to experience when he was inside the gates of his family’s vast estate. And he gave up all of his riches and all of his luxuries, his whole family, left his wife and children and everyone at home and disappeared, essentially, and embarked on his search for Enlightenment.
“What can I do?” he asked himself, “What can I do?” And he then underwent a series of very rigorous physical and mental disciplines, from fasting to day-long meditations to physical trainings, of every imaginable sort. And this went on for quite awhile, not a week or two, but for a long time. Something like six years.
He sought out other Masters and asked them how they had achieved or moved toward the experience of Enlightenment, and he did as they told him, because he wanted to honor the Masters that he met along his path. But nothing brought him the experience of Enlightenment. It only brought him an emaciated body, and a life that was made difficult with physical and mental discipline and training.
One day Siddhartha Gautama said, “I’ve tried everything. I’ve done all the physical disciplines, all the trainings, all the exercise, all the starvation, all the diets, all the fasting, and all the meditation. Now I’m just going to sit here beneath this tree and I’m not getting up until I’m Enlightened.”
And there he sat, doing nothing. No exercises, no meditations, no fasting, no nothing, just sitting there doing absolutely nothing. Now that is hard for many of us to do, because we think there is something we are suppose to be doing in order to be Enlightened.
Suddenly Siddhartha said with a start: “I’m Enlightened.” And people came to him and cried out, “What did you do? What did you do? Teach us, Master! You have become the Buddha, the Enlightened One. What is the secret? What did you do?”
And the Buddha said something quite extraordinary: “There is nothing that you have to be, do, or have.”
Imagine. After all that time. After the life he had lived and all that he did and saw. After all the luxury and then all the self-denial, after wearing a silk shirt and then a hair-shirt, after thoroughly satisfying his body and then starving his body, and no spiritual or physical discipline and then tons of discipline…after all that time, he realized it was not about doing or having anything and it was not about not doing or having anything. It was about the middle way. It was about just living life, non-attached to anything in particular. Not attached to your luxuries and joys, and not attached to your poverty and tragedies. It was not about any of that. It can be if you want it to be. It can be if that is what suits you. It can be if that is your path, but it is not necessary to be, do, or have anything in particular.
The Buddha said, in effect, “I’m Enlightened because I have realized that Enlightenment is knowing that there is nothing you have to do to be Enlightened.”
Isn’t that interesting? Think of all the effort that people are putting in, with years-long programs and trainings, only to find out that Enlightenment requires nothing at all!
Next Week: Part IV of this series.