Progress

I suspect I know what enlightenment is. It consists in living in the present, aware that the past has not reality and the future never arrives. To do this, we are supposed to surrender all ideas about what we think, believe, know, understand, judge, consider, and so on.

There are many excellent reasons for surrendering what we think we know or believe. Not only do our thoughts about a thing tie us down to a past, or make us worry about the future, but also the reality of life is so huge that what we think, believe, agree, dispute etc, cannot accurately reflect what is really happening,  or explain what anything really means.

From where we are standing, we have opinions, certainly, and these are worth having, because they galvanise our activity and give us something to talk about. However, perhaps it is freeing for us to accept that there will never come a time when we see the bigger picture as it is. Therefore, we would be better to drop all the baggage we carry around, which seems to dictate to us, even before we breathe our first breath of the morning, how we should view every situation….

As soon as we drop our baggage, a whole fresh world is revealed, which allows us to release ourselves too, and laugh, instead of crying. If we can release our opinions about everything else, we can release ourselves too, and suddenly, it doesn’t matter what we did last night, last week or even five minutes ago. Tomorrow is unreal, and therefore not something that I need to concern myself with for even five minutes.

Now, my whole focus shifts to what I choose, right at this minute. I choose…to go out for a walk, to go swimming, to laugh, to smile at my mistakes. I choose to see things differently.