| Buddhist Monk 2005-12-10, 12:41 pm |
| Enlightenment - Quotations by Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz
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Enlightenment is the complete awareness of life without mental
modifications.
Enlightenment is not a state of mind. All states of mind are contained
within it.
Enlightenment is not inter-dimensional travel. Enlightenment is the
experience of pure light.
Enlightenment is really worth seeking. It is the only thing that gives
you permanent happiness. When you experience the ecstasy of
enlightenment, everything is alright.
You can experience ecstasy in any dimension and at any time.
Enlightenment is not related to where your physical or astral body may
be, or to any experiences that you may be having with them.
Enlightenment is beyond dimensionality
Beyond this world and beyond all other worlds there is an all-perfect
light. It is pure intelligence, ecstasy, peace and happiness. It is
the light that shines beyond darkness, time, space and dimensionality.
Enlightenment, meditation is really a shift in perception. It's not a
thing that you go and do or become, since you're already that.
Enlightenment occurs when your mind merges with nirvana, with what
Tibetans call the Dharma-Kaya, the clear light of reality, which is the
highest plane of transcendental wisdom and perfect understanding.
When you are enlightened and have united your mind with the deepest and
most ancient part of the mind of the universe, you are not affected by
suffering the way other people are.
While I may not be able to describe to you exactly what enlightenment
is like, I can tell you that it is wonderful beyond understanding. The
experience of enlightenment frees your mind from painful and limited
states of awareness.
Spiritual knowledge is the experience of enlightenment, and requires an
understanding of the inner-most workings of the enlightenment cycle.
Enlightenment means having no human mind, no limitations. Your
awareness is eternity, timeless, infinite, beyond boundaries, and yet
it exists within all things.
All beings exist ultimately in a condition of inner enlightenment.
Enlightenment is in all things.
Enlightenment is a perfect state of mind. It is the direct "seeing" of
reality. The world most people see, which they call life, is really
just a dream.
If one becomes enlightened, as I did in past incarnations, we leave the
structural universes behind. We don't even have past incarnations
because the form that had those incarnations has dissolved into the
clear light of reality.
Normally the experience of enlightenment occurs in stages. A person
will usually have many small enlightenments before full enlightenment
dawns.
It is vain to think that we choose, that our own energy, our own
intellect will create the possibility of us experiencing a higher order
of existence. Liberation is to know you are that.
People who ponder too much about the subject of enlightenment don't
progress very fast. It is interesting to know it's there, but you
can't know what it's like until you get there.
A person who is enlightened does not have to reincarnate, or they may.
If they chose not to, they can go beyond the wheel, and slide into
nirvana.
There's not really a whole lot you could say about liberation. The
closest experience you can have of it is to come meditate with someone
who is liberated.
Enlightenment is a lot like dying. You might wonder why there aren't
more enlightened people. It is because they are afraid to die.
Enlightened teachers and people who help them, have a lot of trouble.
People try to interfere with the work and spread awful rumors about
you.
Most enlightened people can do miracles. Some have powers, some don't.
Some people who have developed powers aren't enlightened.
What is enlightenment, anyway? I don't know if I can really put it
into words, perhaps you can. I can't.
To be enlightened means that you really don't change, and yet you're
nothing but change.
Enlightenment is getting off the wheel. Enlightenment is to become
pure awareness.
There is no final stage in nirvana. Nirvana is beyond definition. It
is not quantifiable.
It is the way it is. But it is not the way it appears to be.
Enlightenment.
You have to become that infinite formless creation, which is life, to
know it. It cannot be known in an intellectual sense. That is
enlightenment.
It is not special to be enlightened, just different. An enlightened
person is someone who has dedicated not just this lifetime but
thousands of lifetimes to becoming awareness.
What the enlightened person sees no one could ever tell or describe.
Wonder beyond belief. We live in a universe filled with wonder. It is
wonder just to live.
People think that if you are enlightened you are not in touch with the
pulse of the physical. Au contraire! The higher you go, the deeper
you become, and the more conscious you are of the physical and the
sensorial.
How could being the entire cosmos and all of its wonder and all of its
stages and cycles, and yet being that which is beyond them all, the
invisible, be extinction? Extinction? The extinction of what, of
whom? How can that which has never been be extinguished?
We have to leave everything we have been, a perceiver, I as an
individual. That is enlightenment.
Enlightenment is the culmination of self-knowledge, pure unadulterated
knowledge. Not knowledge you can get from reading a book, it comes
from perfecting your awareness, your mind.
There is a still point in eternity. There is a still point where all
things intersect. There is a still point beyond life, time, and death.
Your experience of the still point is enlightenment.
It is called enlightenment, nirvana, God, truth, call it what you will.
There is no activity other than the eternal activities of the
universe, perfect being, the awareness of all suchness, knowledge.
Light by its very nature is endless. Therefore you can never say
you've had the ultimate experience in light - it goes on forever.
Once you have mastered the ten thousand states of mind, it's
paranirvana, the absorption into the stillness forever.
Enlightenment doesn't occur by accident. It is a deliberate decision
that someone makes again and again. It is something you grow into and
develop in.
Nirvana is a step beyond. You dissolve into the universe. The
universe dissolves into you until there is no longer a difference.
There is no sense of individual self as perceiver.
There is no movement in Nirvana. There is no sameness. And one does
not consider it to be timeless because one is not one. It is you, my
friend, who go away.
We've decided what we are. That's the dream. When the dream fades,
it's not that we don't exist. How could we not exist since we never
existed?
We erase ourselves; we go away. But we don't really go away, and we
don't really erase ourselves, since we were never there to begin with.
We weren't there to begin with in that what we are, or conceive of
ourselves as, is a perception.
Enlightenment does not put an end to awareness. It puts an end to
limited awareness. It doesn't necessarily put an end to incarnation.
It puts an end to reincarnation.
Enlightenment doesn't simply mean being in heavenly states of mind. It
doesn't mean being a saint.
Enlightenment doesn't mean you know anything. It doesn't mean you
don't know anything. It means that you've returned to the source,
consciously.
Enlightenment means that you've become a sophisticated perceiver,
without letting anyone know that you're sophisticated.
Enlightenment simply means that you've run out of questions, and that
the answers don't matter anymore.
Enlightenment means that you're in love with all of life, with not only
immortality but mortality.
Enlightenment means that you're living fully, and it means that you die
fully. And then you go beyond life and death completely, everything,
nothing, all, and beyond all.
It is possible to move to an enlightened state of mind from a lower
bardo or level of awareness. It can happen, but it is extremely
unlikely.
The idea that reincarnation means all beings eventually reach
enlightenment is not true. Life does not have a fixed purpose. It
just is.
Nirvana is very funny. It's not sincere particularly. It's rather
frivolous, actually.
Awareness is wakefulness. Wakefulness is consciousness. Consciousness
is limitless awareness.
Enlightenment has nothing to do with physical knowledge. It is the
experience of existence. Existence is infinite. There are countless
universes and creations taking place simultaneously.
Perpetual wakefulness doesn't mean you have all physical knowledge,
that you can speak all languages, that you can fix cars...that is a
storybook, Hollywood version of the enlightenment experience.
If you are liberated then you can be in the crowd and there is no
crowd. You can be surrounded by the world and their is no world. You
have shattered the prism of illusion.
We have ideas of God and nirvana or truth or enlightenment. These
ideas will go away in nirvana because the suffusion is so complete and
intense that nothing can be remembered.
>From the point of view of enlightenment, none of this has ever even
been. All time and space, all the conditions that are apparent in the
absence of enlightenment are unreal.
I have not in this lifetime yet met one person who earnestly seeks
enlightenment in the West. Not one person.
A better name for nirvana might be endless love. Love not even in the
sense that we see it if we're watching the romantic movie, but love in
a sense of no absence.
The day-to-day life we lead has nothing to do with enlightenment. It
is just around the corner, and we don't see it.
Enlightenment is the ability to freely transact within the ten thousand
states of mind without a continuous self or awareness
The universe is endless. Enlightenment is endless. You have only
touched the outer periphery of the endless still center of perfect
being.
There is no way to explain enlightenment. It is just a word to
indicate something beyond, something very, very far beyond the normal
human condition.
After enlightenment your body changes tremendously; its very molecular
structure changes just because the kundalini is always streaming
through you.
If one is enlightened, one does not perceive life with North, South,
East and West. There is no California, there is no New York. In a
higher bonding state of attention, everything is fluid light.
Enlightenment just means that you don't have a structural self. It
means you've flipped through the gradated realities. Nothing binds,
nothing clings to you. You're unaffected by everything.
Enlightenment is not a finite state. It's not something that you just
do and it's done. It goes on forever.
Buddhists don't feel that enlightenment is particularly unusual. We
feel that it's the natural state. Enlightenment simply means perceiving
life directly as it is in all of its infinite, ever changing wonder, in
all of its varied, myriad states of mind or as pari-nirvana, or
whatever.
Be enlightened for you, just for you. No one else knows or cares.
They crucified Christ, you know. They don't take real well, on this
planet, to the people who see things differently.
The world of enlightenment doesn't know of its own existence. We're
beyond both the knower and known. There's no conceptual identity
whatsoever.
Nirvana's not like anything you've ever known or experienced because it
can't be known or experienced.
Enlightenment is an ocean of awareness that slides through the human
part of us and dissolves it, and leaves us forever in eternity.
We can't say what enlightenment is, we can't say what it isn't, because
these are words and words have nothing to do with reality.
Words are a human way of trying to describe things. But they're much
more of interference than they are a help in the world of
enlightenment.
When I talk about the realm of spirit, happiness, nirvana,
enlightenment, I'm not talking about something ideal or imaginary.
There are realms of light that exist, that have always existed and will
always exist. They're much more solid than the transient perceived
reality that you're currently experiencing.
You see, that's the fun of Buddhism. We do have a wild card in the
deck that can't be explained, that changes value continuously, and
that's enlightenment.
Only a pure heart, a completely pure heart can house eternity.
The enlightenment experience is not what you think. How could it be
anything that you can configure, anything you can imagine, any way that
you think it should be?
It's a very complicated matter to become enlightened. If it happens to
a person without a teacher in this lifetime, you can bet their boots,
they've had about a thousand teachers in their last thousand lives
because it's a very complicated thing to do.
The dreams of eternity are the states of mind. When we wake up from
the dreams there's only enlightenment. There could never be anything
else.
Since infinity is by its very nature infinite, then enlightenment by
its very nature is infinite, and thus can be experienced in infinite
ways, by itself or without itself
Enlightenment means the total dissolution of the self in the white
light of eternity. It doesn't simply mean that you can sit and go into
samadhi.
Enlightenment is x-rated, honey; if you haven't checked it out. It's
hot, it's vivacious. You're going to take your mind and merge it with
the entire cosmos.
The effort to lift one's self into perfect enlightenment is a profound
thing. It has nothing to do with individual will. It's a refraction of
the cosmos. The cosmos delights in itself.
Once we've achieved perfect meditation, we're terribly trapped because
that's an illusion...any enlightenment that seems ultimate is an
illusion.
We ourselves are transmuting the reality of our perceptual field, and
there are endless, beautiful and perfect universes, or you can go
beyond universes to pari-nirvana, to the dissolution, where there's no
beginning.
The world of enlightenment, and that which creates enlightenment, is
much different than what most people would think. Most people have
Hallmark Card descriptions of what creates enlightenment. And if their
descriptions were correct, then everyone who is in religious practice
would be enlightened.
Becoming enlightened doesn't mean everything works your way.
The wonder of immaculate, perfect, pure mind is that when it is in its
perfect, extant state without confusion, it can be anything it wants to
be.
If you become the quiescent state, which is what enlightenment means,
it means that you're never the same. You move and shift as the
quiescent state, in a body or out of it.
Yes I say that I am enlightened. What does that mean? It means I live
in a condition of light...There really is no primary self anymore.
When someone says to me "I want to be enlightened." I immediately take
a vacation because I know that the person isn't serious. I've never
met anyone who's serious about enlightenment
The waking dreams of life as most people know them are spiritual
experiences, but there is another order of spiritual experience and
that's to be in the garden of the heart, in the perfect stillness,
where the white light of eternity meets the white light of eternity.
Enlightenment doesn't mean you stop being a student. Being a student
is a state of mind. Enlightenment simply means that you are everything
and everywhere. It doesn't preclude being a student.
Enlightenment, meditation is really a shift in perception. It's not a
thing that you go and do or become, since you're already that.
Nirvana is limitless awareness, without a field, without a knower.
When the spirit is understood, then life becomes not at all common, but
a constant magical circus in which you see yourself reflected in all
forms and all formlessness.
- Zen Master Rama
www.ramaquotes.com
Thank you in advance for your religious tolerance.
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