For us to realize that Enlightenment itself is immediately prior to the temporal experience of all things that arise within our awareness is to awaken with all things. In other words, we can look at the spaciousness of the present moment that always exists, before mind gets into its processes of interpretation and evaluation, as the place of infinite availability and total potentiality that we keep discussing. Enlightenment is always here with us, even before any circumstances arise. This is what Shunryu Suzuki means when he says: “Even before we practice it, enlightenment is there.” In other words, Enlightenment is immediately prior to cognition, sensation, perception of any kind, birth, death, time itself. But, since enlightenment is never bound by time, it is also with us during and after every one of our experiences. All of our spiritual work, then, is to conflate, integrate, and then embody our contracted experience with this openness. To embody this work is to bring it fully home into this skin we inhabit.
Embodying Enlightenment, then, arises in this body of ours when we participate in the world by not trying to get anything from anything. This may sound difficult, but as long as whatever we do is coming from a place of “not trying to get anything from anything,” we are acting from the place of deep, unattached, surrendered stillness. The action that comes from this nonattachment is always and without fail a fully embodied response that is forever appropriate to whatever is arising in the present moment. In other words, it is here, from this unattached stillness, that we have a chance to act from the place that is prior to mind without being mindless; prior to the body without being absent from the body. Instead of being driven by the impulse that comes “after” pure Knowing, we are acting from the pure Knowing itself. This is the conscious coming together of the manifest world of form with the Unmanifest embodiment of Spirit, and it is here that the entire Universe evolves through our choices and actions as the physical form we inhabit.
On the other hand, as long as we are meditating in order to attain Awakening, we will be disappointed in our limited ability to walk the talk of an authentic sage. If there is a “you,” for instance, who is trying to address the perception of something lacking, we’ve got egoic craving. Meditation that is only fueled from this place of greed won’t hasten Awakening. In fact, it usually leads us on a major detour. But if you’re meditation is balanced, grounded, and sourced from an intention to be helpful to all beings, you neither reach nor avoid, and stillness will spontaneously uncover what’s always been prior to any perception of lack. Nothing, once again, is missing from this openness. From this openness it becomes readily apparent that there is no one doing the sitting, no one thinking the thoughts, no one feeling the feelings. All of this simply falls away, and what’s left is an embodied Big Self, ready to be put forever into the service of every one and every thing.
