Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Advantages of Enlightenment

I was thinking about what would be useful to say regarding enlightenment. First of all, being enlightened is the opposite of being paranoid. Because being paranoid is having unrealistic fears. If you are enlightened you have trained yourself to be aware of your most primal instincts and intuitions and so they then become your friends and not your enemies. By training yourself to recognize which things are useful to contemplate and which are not in any given moment you are not plagued by unuseful fears all the time like many people are. Enlightenment brings a sense of order to the whole universe and so peace is possible. On becoming or entering into enlightenment as a path one first begins by separating what is useful from what is not useful.

For example, since everything is impermanent except Being and compassion, then compassion while being is the only useful thing to do because all else is meaningless. So, Compassion towards oneself and all other beings becomes the Only useful thing to do. If one does something else one will eventually experience the pain of loss which may hasten that one's death or insanity. So, the value of enlightenment is to realize that everything is impermanent and to realize that absolutely everything will eventually change or pass away but Being and Kindness, and that kindness is enhanced by compassion towards all beings including oneself. So then, logically the only worthwhile endeavor is to be compassionate to all life including oneself because it is the only lasting thing while in a state of Being.

However, once having achieved not only this understanding intellectually but also through direct experience over and over again, one can then assist through example, all other beings to their own (when they choose it) enlightenment through one's example. In this way both peace, enlightenment and happiness spreads throughout the universe, one being at a time.

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