Your Life Story—And Beyond

I heard a woman talking about building her whole life as an homage to her deceased husband. She bought a house in the town where, before he died unexpectedly, he was planning for them to move. She has regularly spent time there with her children throughout their lives, “to build memories,” she said.

She spoke about these things always with grief, never with happiness.

This is a person who created a framework out of a past experience. She used it to shape her entire life and the lives of other people as well.

I would say that she is captivated by her life story. But that is not unusual. Many people are.

Of course, not all stories are mournful. There are a lot of them that are happy and uplifting. When people tell stories about their lives, the stories can have any kind of energy.

The point is not which kind of energy resonates in a life story. The point is that people often mistake their life story for their identity.

In the article, “Enlightenment: Why Bother?” on this website, I wrote about “the essential issue of enlightenment: a realignment of identity. Instead of being aligned to the story of your life, you align with eternal being.”

Your life story is not who you are. In essence, who you are is pure timeless consciousness.

The enlightened experience is consciousness established in timelessness. When you experience this, you won’t have the urge to repeat and re-live the story of some past event that made you feel vividly alive in either a positive or negative way.

It’s timelessness that spoils the life story party. Stories are about the past. Because the past is an aspect of time, it can’t mix with timelessness.

And there is something more beyond that.

The enlightened experience is that your life is not yours.

When your life is not yours, there is just life.

And then your life story also is not yours. It is just a story.

A stone falls into a pond. On the water’s surface, ripples spread out in circles, echoing, echoing, echoing, repeating, repeating, repeating.

The ripples tell the same story over and over.

Be the falling stone, not the ripples. Be the cause, not the effect. Dive to the depths. Leave your story behind you.

When you are captivated by memories, you forget the rememberer.

—JC

Are You Ready For Enlightenment?

If you were getting dressed to go to a party, you might spend a lot of time imagining and predicting how you want to look, what the surroundings will be like, what you will do there, who you will see and who will see you, how they will react to the way you are dressed, and exactly how you want things to go.

But what if you showed up and found out that the party had nothing to do with what you imagined, or with what your predictions were, or with the way you had prepared yourself for it?

Enlightenment is like that party. Some people know that they want to go to that party. They have ideas about what it’s going to be like. They are making a lot of preparations to get ready to attend it.

One way of getting ready is to work on yourself. You find ways to become a better person who is more deserving of an invitation to this party. Perhaps using resources from the self-help industry, you think yourself into a new perspective, or you re-order your priorities, or you process your old patterns and hang-ups.

You might even control your behavior to emulate that of a saintly person. You tell yourself to have fewer attachments, or to be free from negative feelings, and so on.

This could make you into a better person, and I sincerely congratulate you for that. And all it means is that you have become a better person. It’s not enlightenment.

Enlightenment doesn’t mean that you better yourself to the point of being enlightened. It isn’t the final improvement on the list of improvements. Enlightenment is a change of identity that comes through yielding to eternal being.

As long as you engage with your unenlightened self, your attention is on your problems. To be enlightened, you need to go where enlightenment is and dwell there.

Answers From Silence says, “Everyone has an Enlightened Self. It is the part of you that already is enlightened, already knows peace, and already has attained the goal of your evolution.”

Engage with your Enlightened Self. Then your state of consciousness rises to approach its level. Finally, you inhabit that level, and the difference between you and your Enlightened Self evaporates.

How to do this?

One way is to practice silent meditation. Then you are simply communing with your Enlightened Self.

Another way is to have an active dialogue with your Enlightened Self. You can find answers about your daily life, the meaning of life, and everything in between. Meanwhile, your attention is turned in the direction of enlightened consciousness the whole time. There is a “how to” section in Answers From Silence about this.

Eventually, you don’t have to go anywhere to get to the party. You are the party. And you bring it with you wherever you set your foot down.

—JC

The Meaning of Being

When a certain celebrity came to my hometown a couple of decades ago, I had an exciting opportunity to be with him as he spoke to a group of people. But as soon as I took the last available seat in the room, I was urgently called away by someone. Her reason for interfering turned out to be something that I considered unimportant. Meanwhile, upon returning, I had lost my seat to someone else and was turned away.

I resented this combination of events. It burned me every time I that I thought about it for years afterwards.

My perception was that three things were bundled together: the presence of the celebrity, my desire to be in that room, and my meddling friend’s agenda. How they totaled up was that a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had been taken away from me.

I had added these events together and arrived at the conclusion that something unfortunate had occurred.

But what had really happened? Nothing. At least, not to me.

In the fullness of being, and when being is the self, nothing ever adds to or takes away from the self. And nothing ever happens that is a comment on the self, or that puts a dent in the self, or that labels the self. In fact, there is a sense that nothing ever happens, because the fullness of being brings timelessness along with it.

So, simply, three separate things coincided. I was there. The celebrity was there. My friend was there. In the playground of time, in the timelessness of our being, we brushed up against each other.

As Answers From Silence says, “Meaning results from one thing connecting with another thing. In timelessness, there is no duality, no ‘one thing’ to connect with ‘another thing’. Therefore, in timelessness there is no meaning, and there is no need for meaning.”

When a friend dropped her forkful of egg salad in a restaurant, she felt stupid and said to me, “You can dress me up but you can’t take me anywhere.” My only reaction was to start cleaning up. I reassured her, “It doesn’t mean anything.”

Two plus two doesn’t equal four. It equals two plus two.

—JC

Positive Thinking—And Beyond

I was listening to someone talking to a group about how to accomplish a particular project. I was waiting to hear what simple actions to take in order to accomplish it.

I was still waiting when the speaker said that positive thinking was crucial for the success of the project, and for everything in life.

This would apply if you are at the point where you need encouragement in order to begin taking action, or if you are feeling discouraged as the action is in progress.

And it would apply if you are in the habit of self-defeat. Positive thinking might be helpful for changing that habit.

Positive thinking is also an invocation to the positive forces in the universe, attracting support for the success of your activity.

I definitely affirm anything that works for you.

At the same time, it seems to me that there are a few more nuances to the topic.

For one thing, there is the common, everyday experience of doing something that you don’t feel like doing. Inwardly, you experience resistance, but you still decide to do what you know has to be done. And you do it.

This suggests that you can perform action regardless of your inner experience, positive or not.

As Answers From Silence says, “Feelings and actions are separate dimensions.”

For another thing, if you accidentally tip over a glass of water onto your dinner table, you probably won’t take any time out for positive thinking in order to convince yourself to do what needs to be done.

In fact, taking time out for positive thinking at that moment would be superfluous. And it would reduce your effectiveness by sidetracking your attention.

Instead, you will act instantly to contain the spill. And you won’t do any thinking at all.

This suggests that there is a part of you that is always ready for action.

So it seems to me that there can be something beyond both “positive” and “thinking”.

Item: beyond “thinking”.

You are not your thoughts. You were here before they were.

There is a more fundamental self that is you. It is characterized by silence.

Thoughts orbit around that fundamental self. But they are not the definition of you. Nor are they the identity of you.

Item: beyond “positive”.

That silence is positive, but not in the sense of “I get what I want” or “I am in a good mood”.

It is positive in the sense of wholeness.

Wholeness means that nothing is lacking.

When you move through life having embraced the inner sense of the wholeness of the silent self, where nothing is lacking, then you are beyond the qualities of positivity and negativity that categorize events in the outer world.

Your experience might be something more like having God carry you in His two hands through each day.

Bonus item: beyond “invocation”.

When wholeness is there all the time, then you never have to summon it.

—JC

The Enlightened Viewpoint

There is a section of Answers From Silence on the topic of intolerance. It says that all viewpoints are limited in some way.

Every day you hear about people who can’t understand or relate to others who have a conflicting viewpoint.

Perhaps as a result, most public discourse now consists of taking a position and defending it against another person’s position.

This is might work if only there weren’t an essential flaw in taking a position. Any position can be challenged and undermined by contradictory information.

The world constantly changes. New information is always arriving. Holding a position might require that you ignore new information.

Also, holding a “good” position in opposition to another person’s “bad” position only makes you into their reflection.

As Answers From Silence says, “The only ‘right’ thing is the whole thing.”

Perhaps people want to hold to a changeless viewpoint because at some level they sense that there does exist a realm of changelessness and they want to exist there.

In that case, what they really want is enlightenment.

Establish yourself in the realm of changelessness, and you will inherit a viewpoint that originates from an experience of timelessness and unboundedness.

Except that it isn’t exactly like a viewpoint. It is more like an actual view. Like one you might see from a mountaintop.

In this analogy, opposing viewpoints would be like an argument between two mountain climbers who are trying to predict what it will look like when they reach the top of the mountain.

Only arriving there answers the question.

And then silence reigns.

—JC

The Triumph of Enlightenment

A loyal reader sent in this question: “When injustice seems to triumph, how do you handle it as an enlightened person? So many crazy things go on in the world every day. Please comment.”

Before answering the “how do you handle it” part of your question, let’s look at the ”as an enlightened person” part.

What is it to be an enlightened person? It is to know the truth of who you are.

Who are you? At your inner core, as your Enlightened Self, you are simply being as pure consciousness.

A person has boundaries. Enlightenment is unboundedness. A miracle of our human existence is that as persons we have the capability of experiencing enlightenment.

And as an enlightened person, you are still human. You still have human reactions and emotions.

Things that happen can still provoke a reaction in you. Seeing injustice triumph can make you feel a negative emotion. Seeing justice triumph can make you feel a positive emotion.

But an enlightened person knows that she is not her emotions. She also knows that she is not the world of phenomena that triggers those emotions. She knows who she is.

Emotions change and phenomena change. They have no impact on her changeless Enlightened Self.

Which brings us to the “how do you handle it” part.

In the arena of activity, do what needs to be done. If you see injustice and can effectively do something to correct it, then do something.

But perhaps your question comes from a feeling that you can’t do anything about it. You want to change something unjust that happened and you can’t. You want to prevent all future injustices that might happen and you can’t.

What we all want, all the time, is for outer to match inner. With every action we take, we have an inner intention and we want it to have an outer reflection. We are always trying to make the world in our own image.

When outer doesn’t match inner, we experience distress, frustration, and anger. Like when something unjust in the outer world doesn’t match our inner sense of justice.

Perhaps your question means that you want to hear something that will make it match. “If I could only understand how injustice can triumph, I could reconcile all this.”

There are lots of explanations for the grand and sometimes hidden designs behind confusing events in the world. Answers From Silence is full of them.

For example: “Everyone is on their path of enlightenment, and everything that happens in a person’s life is their path of enlightenment.”

Understanding can help. But enlightenment is not a philosophy. It is the living knowledge of the truth of who you are.

And when that knowledge lives in you, nothing that happens in the world can compromise, endanger, damage, negate, extinguish, or triumph over your Enlightened Self.

—J.C.