Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.
Interpretation
Enlightenment is achieved through the release of desires and goals rather than through striving for them.
This quote suggests that true enlightenment is not about attaining a specific achievement or state but rather about relinquishing the constant pursuit of goals and desires that bind us. It conveys the idea that inner peace and understanding come from letting go of our incessant want for more, thus allowing us to be present in the moment and fully experience life without the distractions of personal ambitions.
In practice
During a meditation workshop, the instructor quoted Joko Beck to emphasize the importance of letting go of expectations.
What does open us is sharing our vulnerabilities. Sometimes we see a couple who has done this difficult work over a lifetime. In the process, they have grown old together. We can sense the enormous comfort, the shared quality of ease between these people. It is beautiful, and very rare. Without this quality of openness and vulnerability, partners don't really know each other; they are one image living with another image.
We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are; not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life.
There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts. We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here.
How do we know if our practice is a real practice? Only by one thing: more and more, we just see the wonder. What is the wonder? I don't know. We can't know such things through thinking. But we always know it when it's there.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.
Who can hope to be safe? who sufficiently cautious?_x000D_ _x000D_ Guard himself as he may, every moment's an ambush.
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
If you could really see that tree over there," Merlin said, "you would be so astounded that you'd fall over." "Really? But why?" asked Arthur. "It's just a tree." "No," Merlin said, "It's just a tree in your mind. To another mind it is an expression of infinite spirit and beauty. In God's mind it is a dear child, sweeter than anything you can imagine.
That the Jews are connected with God in a special way and that God does not allow that bond to fail is entirely obvious. We wait for the instant in which Israel will say yes to Christ, but we know that it has a special mission in history now ... which is significant for the world.
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