Enlightenment Lite

Having started a blog, I’m seeing challenges with maintaining it. For one, I do most writing long-hand in coffee houses. I would find it grueling transcribing it to a computer. Also, any delays in uploading to the blog my writing, done long-hand or on computer, presents an issue. My mood shifts unpredictably and frequently, making what I had written feel, for me, outdated, moot. However, trusting that the saving grace is that I will eventually cycle back to sentiments expressed previously, I’ll at least transfer most computer-written pieces and excerpts from the most significant hand-written pieces.

As an example, here’s an excerpt of something I wrote this past Friday, addressed to members of my residential community:



Last night was incredible for me. And it wasn’t like I can point to any person, place, or thing that was any big deal or held key responsibility though I can probably point to frames involving each of you (like this Asian woman bending, raising and lowering Christina’s legs. Uh, Christina, where was that going anyway)? If anything I simply showed up. I’m not sure why or how so much last night and I don’t need to know the magic of why I felt so alive. ("Why" is my left brain trying to bottle the recipe.)

I even had a dream last night that Isaac arranged something for us in some kind of workshop, something with a stack of containers and as I looked at each one, I opened up in bliss incredibly.

Sometimes I know I am choosing death as when I walk and it’s slightly cold out and I hate it and don’t want to go on or do anything. Then sometimes, like this morning I’m choosing life as when I’m walking to the train this morning, tears in my eyes because I’m so full, and I’m wearing my teashirt and it’s cold and I just smile at the cold and say “I love you too.”



Adding this anecdote, I realize my blog has another subject thread: enlightenment. That seems so enormous to take on and I hear the shitty committee in my head chuckling at me as I dare pull such a term down from mount Olympus into my meager bloggie and that, at best I might use a term like nirvana, as in, “Ok, Jim, so you had an experience that felt a little something sorta kinda like nirvana. But lay low on that enlightenment thing. As soon as you think you can live there, the universe will most definitely prove to you otherwise. And with pathetically such little effort. Perhaps someone will give you a dirty look and you will predictably jump to judgment, mumbling ‘asswipe!’ or some other such unkindness under your breath.”

Yet enlightenment is the term that came to me on the train after that brisk morning walk Friday. Slowed down, I looked at the other passengers with a warm curiosity rather than numbness or inner drama projected. In a workshop some months ago, the facilitator explained that purpose is not what we do but who we are. Participants were asked to come up with four words that describing one’s purpose. One of mine was “transformation”. (Actually, someone else suggested it and, as I was having trouble coming up with the last word -- or had no need of one -- and that it reminded me of the magician’s quadrant in Jungian masculine psychology, I took it on.) Yet whenever I mentioned transformation as part of my purpose, I did so half-convinced. It wasn’t quite landing. Yet, as it had direction built into it, I thought it best not to discard it. So, while on the train, in this egoless, vulnerable, altered state, child-like really, I receive this term enlightenment and recognize an invitation to replace “transformation” with “enlightenment”. I breathe and, thinking about my rapid-cycling moods, decide it best to hold off adopting the term and, instead, set an intention to return to this place.