Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [171]
In Buddhism it is accepted that there are many different degrees of enlightenment. Someone who has experienced the first level is traditionally known as a stream enterer. Stream enterers are those men and women who have directly experienced ultimate reality, however temporarily. Regarding the transcendent experience, my teachers always said, “One glimpse is not enough.” By this they mean that someone who had seen reality would not be satisfied until he or she had realized far more. These glimpses of enlightenment can be likened to the moment when the clouds that have been obscuring the sun part for the briefest of moments and the sun shines through. When the clouds return, we no longer see the sun, but now we know for ourselves that there is a sun. We understand why there is daylight.
Because seeing is knowing, enlightenment experiences can be very important while traveling the spiritual path. These experiences uproot doubt and skepticism. They convince us that reality is there behind the mist and clouds of illusion—even if it is temporarily obscured. We know what we are looking for. As the great mystic poet of India, Kabir, sang, “I glimpsed it for fifteen seconds and I became a servant for life.”
However, sometimes to our surprise we discover that we are almost as frightened by the idea of enlightenment as we are drawn to it. Sometimes we want enlightenment, but not until after we’ve achieved all our worldly ambitions. Sometimes we worry that enlightenment means we will no longer be able to have relationships with the people we love. Sometimes we fear that once enlightened we will become flat-liners, as if lobotomized, with no passion and verve. We might not like it. We might be disappointed.
We might fear that we will lose our reference points and not know who we are or why we are doing things. We experience tremendous fear of the unknown. We worry that by going beyond ourselves we will go over the edge and lose ourselves. This fear is a response we can anticipate as the ego begins to lose its grip, and we start moving away from our habitual ruts and patterns of thinking. A spiritual path does not mean walking over the edge. If anything it is propelling us back to the center, the Golden Mean—back to health, sanity, and authenticity. All we are doing is opening up to truth and reality—the bigger picture.
I think it helps if we look to the example of the Buddha and other enlightened masters. By these examples, we see that enlightened men and women who have walked among us continued to lead rich, sane, healthy lives filled with loving relationships and passionate ideals and original ideas.
Another issue that deeply concerns many people is that they will never be able to achieve enlightenment. They feel they can’t devote as many hours as they might like to meditation. They can’t follow all the traditional customs and rules. They may feel they are too busy and already have far too many demands on their time and energy. I think it’s really important for people who are walking the spiritual path to understand that the genius of Buddha Dharma is that it really can provide anybody with a suitably appropriate path to work through. Anybody can do it. Even if you can’t memorize or believe in anything.
One of my favorite stories is about the arhant Chunda. When it came to brainpower, Chunda wasn’t very swift. When Chunda’s elder brother became a monk, Chunda wanted to do exactly what his brother did. He went to Ananda, Buddha’s attendant, and Ananda said, “Sorry, you could never make it as a monk.” Ananda thought this young guy was just too stupid to become a monk because he couldn’t even remember the rules. So Chunda and his monk brother appealed to the Buddha, who was known to be kind and compassionate.
The Buddha scanned the past lives of this dull young boy Chunda. He saw that, like most people, Chunda had at least one seed or root of merit in his karmic accumulation that could help him get enlightened. It didn’t