COLUMN: 'No more than an insignificant speck in the vastness of space...'

I had a conversation last week with a friend who said that his impression of enlightenment, from what he had read, was that enlightened people walked about in a permanent state of euphoria and bliss.

It was a bubble I took care not to burst but rather to deflate slowly.

It’s very easy to speak about enlightenment, living in bliss and being serene when you don’t have to worry about bills.

Enlightenment isn’t a single blinding light of epiphany though.

It’s a constant state of seeing the truth, of understanding the nature of life as fully as a person can and often learning to laugh at oneself.

It’s a daily training routine, not a single occurrence and it takes training to get it right more often than we get it wrong.

Firstly, enlightenment takes curiosity and curiosity takes courage, the courage to think for one’s self, outside everything you know, outside everything you have ever been told and every tradition and dogma that our various cultures have handed down to us.

Enlightenment takes an ability to learn to see the world differently, to ask questions of what you see and to test the truth of everything.

It begins by learning what truths have been discovered and rediscovered over millennia but at the end it takes the ability to see the truths for yourself. It’s all well and good to follow a philosophy but it’s far more important to make one for yourself.

This is also why all the great sages and gurus spoke in riddles, not to seem inscrutable or superior but rather that they wanted each person to find their own truth in the answers given.

No two people will apply those teachings in the same way because everyone’s life and perspectives are different.

It takes humility, both to know that life happens despite our plans and to know that we aren’t in control.

It takes humility to look inside, to look at our lives and see where change needs to happen. It takes critical thinking and the desire to learn more about who we can be.

Why do we live in clean homes? It’s because where we live is important to us and to be comfortable we know it needs dusting, cleaning and hoovering regularly.

We are no different inside when we give regular attention to who we are. We see how to give a spring clean to our souls, because that’s ultimately where we live.

Enlightenment lets us see life more simply, without preconceived ideas or prejudices and this allows us to see what’s really happening, where to direct our energy and where to save it, letting us lighten our load by removing inner conflicts and by extension outer ones.

Thinking that enlightened people walk around in constant bliss is a misinterpretation. They see the truth of life and so a lot of things amuse them.

We don’t need to follow fashion, have a huge mortgage or be on a property ladder. We need love, we need shelter, we need connection and we need food and water.

Everything else is nice but ultimately irrelevant. Imagine how easy life would be if you only concerned yourself with being a better person to yourself and then to others!

Enlightenment also tells us the truth. In life I have two thoughts.

The first is if I can’t change the outcome of a situation there’s no point in worrying about it and the second is if I can change the outcome I don’t need to worry, and so life becomes lighter.

All life begins, lives and ends. Imagine the breadth of the vast spray of celestial bodies. See the inconsequential blue green one on the edge of that small galaxy over there?

That’s earth. Home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every plant, animal and every human being who ever was has lived out their lives. A cacophony of emotion, of thought and of spiritual questing.

A voracious hunger for truth.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there.

We are no more than an insignificant speck in the vastness of space, but still no more than a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam and gone as quickly.

Seeing this as the truth and understanding the immensity of the importance of living in a way that sets our souls free to realise our truest potential...that’s enlightenment!

That’s the purpose of enlightenment and of learning Acceptance. Acceptance is the living, vibrant energy of enlightenment that lets us all see the truth, firstly in ourselves, then in others and in our own culture and then in the wider world.

To be enlightened we have to cultivate our minds, our emotions and our spirits to develop our own personal morality and standards, evolving our thinking and perspectives beyond anything anyone has ever taught us or what has been handed down through generations.

Traditions are all very well but the people who thought them up are long since returned to the dust and it’s on us to start a new tradition for ourselves.

Acceptance is the art form that challenges us to do just that, day by day, evolving us into the kind of single human family to which we’d be proud to bring friends home.