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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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The spirit in which the person said this to me was that some things in Answers From Silence didn’t jibe with her own positions on various issues. She viewed the information in the book in the context of forming opinions and defending them.

It’s true that Answers From Silence addresses some controversial subjects, including abortion, extraterrestrials, sexuality, and God. Just click on the “Topic Listings” tab at the top of this screen to see the whole list.

But the things that I wrote in it were not arrived at by following a line of reasoning, by winnowing facts, or by building cases. I was not trying to represent the opposing side of an intellectual debate or to convince you to change your views to fit mine.

I didn’t write Answers From Silence for you to agree with it.

I wrote Answers From Silence in case the information could be of help to you. There might be a zinger in there that is just the thing you need to hear at a particular moment. Something that could clear your path or resolve your confusion. Something that will fit into the existing stream of your thoughts and divert them to a more fulfilling direction.

And I wrote it so that you would have a model of the interaction between a person and his Enlightened Self. The message of this model is that it can be done, and that you could benefit from cultivating the same sort of interaction. That’s why there are how-to instructions in the book.

Once you get going with that, I expect that you will find, as I said elsewhere on this website, that the answers you get from your Enlightened Self will be the best answers possible, tuned in to your greatest evolutionary need at the time of your asking, and phrased in the language that communicates the most clearly and directly to you about your question.

Then we won’t need to agree about anything.

—J.C.

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I used to have exactly the same issue, and I addressed it in that chapter about career. Therefore, I assumed that she needed a different angle on the subject.

I tried reminding her that everything in our life is our path of enlightenment, and that ultimately “success” isn’t the point; instead, it’s growth of awareness.

After our conversation, I felt like my message was received as some kind of positive-thinking rhetoric. Assuaging words about growth of awareness didn’t reach my friend’s sore spot. They just seemed like a bandage. And, like a bandage, a cover-up.

Enlightenment isn’t a bandage, and neither should information about enlightenment be used to evade genuine feelings of unhappiness. If you are really unhappy, then denying that reality by pretending otherwise would not be the “enlightened” thing to do.

What I hadn’t done in the conversation was to identify the dynamic of the question. A question needs to be answered at its own level of intention. If the questioner has one intention, it won’t help to answer with another intention.

When my friend said, “I am unhappy about my lack of success,” I took her meaning as, “Please give me the understanding to be free of my unhappiness.”

But she could have meant, “Please give me information on how to be successful.”

Or, “Sometimes I get discouraged. Can you reassure me that I’m doing the right thing?”

Or, “I need to talk about this. Please just be here and listen to me.”

Or, “I know the enlightened answer to my question, but I am resisting enlightenment by holding onto my question.”

Our conversation also hinted at another question that people seem to have about enlightenment: will it improve chances for worldly success?

Various things will happen after you are enlightened. Things always happen. But none of them will add to you or take away from you, because enlightenment is constant fullness that is independent of circumstances.

Also: can you be enlightened and still want worldly success in the way that people usually want it and for the reasons that people usually want it?

If wanting something comes from the sense of lacking something, then the answer is no. Because of the fullness that is enlightenment, the enlightened person doesn’t do things because of an inner lack. If the enlightened person wants anything, it is probably enlightenment for everyone else.

Just as enlightenment doesn’t substitute for worldly success, so does not worldly success substitute for enlightenment. If you want to talk about enlightenment, let’s talk about that. If you want to talk about success, let’s talk about that.

Or let’s not, if you are ready to look out the window, beyond the roomful of concerns you have busied yourself with all this time, and see the amazing panorama that you never suspected was there all along. I would really like to watch that happen.

—J.C.

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Apart from making God look not so nice, this makes the search for meaningful explanations look not so nice either.

It also amounts to an extreme application of a widely accepted principle: do good things and good things will be done to you, do bad things and bad things will be done to you.

This karmic explanation creates a sticky problem. Sometimes bad things are done to those who do good things, and vice versa.

This requires that the explanation be elaborated upon, applying the principle over an elongated time duration: you can reap the consequences today of actions that you performed in the distant past. Maybe even a past life. The reaping is just delayed. It’s all cause and effect.

The way to be done with karma is to know yourself as fully being self-sufficient. The enlightened experience is of fullness, of inner fullness and outer fullness, and of fullness matching fullness. Nothing needs anything other than itself to be known or to be defined. Or explained.

The by-product of that is to know all moments as fully being self-sufficient. One thing at a time, and each thing unto itself.

Then it isn’t about cause and effect. There is just being. And tragedy or its opposite are just happenings.

As it says in Answers From Silence, “The wise have no ‘why’s.”

This doesn’t mean that you don’t grieve, or that you do nothing to respond to events.

One must always do what needs to be done. If there is a tsunami-sized mess to clean up, then clean it up. There are no questions to ask about that.

But when you ask, “Why did this happen?”, you are often really asking, “Why did this happen to me?”

When you ask this, you are confusing one thing with another. This happening is not about you. Only you are about you. This happening is about this happening.

It can be said that the Japanese didn’t cause a tsunami to wash onto their shores. Impersonal tectonic forces, driven inevitably by the laws of physics, did that.

As it says in Answers From Silence, “Don’t take anything personally. Except what you do to yourself.”

—JC