Tag Archives: Enlightenment

Enlightened

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To say that you’re enlightened is to demonstrate that you’re not.  What’s interesting is that we’re all enlightened.  We just seem to have forgotten about it, or misplaced it, or started believing the things we told ourselves as kids.

In my last post I referred to my most enlightened experience and a commenter and friend had the logical question, “What was your most enlightened experience?”  It’s the type of conversation that flows much more gracefully in the spoken word because you can hear how it lands, if the person receiving the story is with you on the journey or if they’re missing the whole experience. That was the way it occurred when I brought it up.  I’ve really only shared the event with two people, my wife who listens to all of my brilliant soliloquies, and that colleague.

Here I’m going to attempt a much more daring feat.  I’m also going to be brief.  You can make up what you like about whether or not this was a moment of enlightenment, and surely you will.  It’s very possible you’ll discount it because that’s what we do and that’s why most of us don’t really notice that we’re already enlightened.  Whatever description I give it will be inadequate regardless. Being enlightened must be experienced. It must be experienced right now.  You also may want to use it to justify a religion or your religion, or invalidate a religion (or your religion).  Don’t.  Where I was doesn’t matter.  And yes, I regularly attend Roman Catholic church.

I stood in a pew, in a church, with an enclosed ceiling.  There weren’t a lot of stain glassed windows in this particular church and the ones that were there weren’t very large and they definitely weren’t near me.  In the time leading up to this “phenomenon” I’d just gotten very clear about who I am, about who I’d always been.  Love present and experienced.

I stood during a blessing being given to some people that had been married a long time, and my eyes were closed.  Light shone down on me, through me really.  I felt its warmth and the warmth that I felt was Love.  This light extended out through me as if it was coming down on me but as I was a part of it.  In my mind it appeared there was a large opening above me and off to the side of me allowing the full rays of the sun to shine down and wash over me.

Standing there basking in that warmth, not doing anything but also not not doing anything, I experienced what was.  I experienced myself as part of all of it, part of that light and warmth that extended out through my body into all things.  I was that light yet the light was me. I was whole and one.  I was you and you were me.  I was wood and stone.  All those things were love, lit up and warm.

I began thinking more than being, wanting understanding more than wanting experiencing and I opened my eyes to see if there was a window above me, or if there was light shining through a window off to the side.  There wasn’t and I was just back in the church, grateful to know that we’re all loved so deeply.

I’ve had other englightened experiences including my favorite and most absurd where I experienced the complete perfection of a pile of dirt with one of those wooden, stand-up road barriers standing on it in the middle of a road construction site.  God, it was so beautiful.  It all is, when there’s no concealment.  It took me a great number of years after that dirt pile to know a word that accurately portrayed the experience as experienced.  Aletheia. 

With Love and the Warmth of the Sun,

Ed

A Technology Conversation About Lifting The Veil and Revealing Aletheia

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Yesterday was a beautiful day and I had an enthusiastic conversation over lunch with a colleague who has read my blog.  We shared conversation about our “most enlightened” experiences and our interest and desire to have enlightened being occur “more often”.

Conversation is a fun, if not limiting, way to presence shared experience or the separate experience that comes from that shared place of who we all are.  We set off to lunch with an anticipated shared sense of commonality, an anticipation that we each mentally knew some of the same things and even that we had individually experienced some type of heightened state of being or being present.

Common language allows for a common way of describing the same things and knowing that another “gets” what you’re saying.  Often it’s the lack of shared language that freaks people out in conversations that are fear inducing such as the ones that  confront your ego.  In a powerful three part series of papers on rhetoric, Dave Logan from USC goes into great depth about these “terministic screens” and the way dual degree MD and MBA candidates were able to translate their medical practice into results in the financial world because of their ability to distinguish these two very distinct language vocabularies.  Having these dual terministic screens gave them the ability to powerfully distinguish things from each realm and tie the two together to make the other more useful.  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=915321

During lunch with this “dual track” colleague of mine, who is both a long time network engineer in the Cisco Systems sense of the term, and a student of transformation/enlightenment/Buddhism/etc., I was pleased to have him suggest a model of viewing our existence in the exact same way as I was recently thinking and viewing it – through my similar dual terministic screen of vocabulary and modeling.  It’s not that it really IS this way, but it’s a way of viewing it that allowed each of us to share the idea and the experience in a way that each of us understood.

Understanding networks and the way they work requires knowing the OSI model.  If you’ve ever studied networking or ever wanted to one of the first things you’ll need to learn is the OSI model – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model.  In simple terms, the model defines 7 layers of the network beginning at the lowest level with the “Physical” layer and moving up through the other six layers to the highest level which is the “Application” layer.  This model defines and allows various distinctions and interpretations to occur at the various layers – each within its own bounds but each complying to various rules that allow the other layers to interact in an expected way.  Certain flexibility but very specific rules.  Each with it’s own protocols and ways of interacting with the layer both directly above and directly below it.

His suggestion (had he thought of it this way before, or did my listening allow for and create it in the moment in conversation?) that there is an OSI model for our existence as human beings was fantastic.  We talked about our moments of enlightenment and how these occurred almost “below” the physical layer that we believe we interact with and we talked about how our allowing ourselves to come from and interact with more power from this Being layer allowed our applications or our Doing in the world to produce different results.  We also talked about people we’ve read or experienced and their unattachment to the various “higher” layers and that this unattachment allowed them to virtually shift the way “reality” occurred for those in their presence.

Mostly though I was just pleased that I was drawing out people around me that were willing to share their experience.  It is only through this conversation of network nodes that further realization of our human potential will occur.  Connected by dark matter, or being, or presence, or time and space, or whatever it is that we don’t yet know how to describe because we’re way up at the application layer, so far removed from the physical layer that we don’t speak in the same protocols, shouldn’t prohibit us from experimenting and reaching out to converse with each other openly and admitting that we may not really understand how it all works.  We know that there’s something there, connecting us all, maybe it’s Truth and Love or whatever words your terministic screens allow for, yet for now it’s mostly concealed behind the veil.  We get glimpses of it out of the corner of our eye or when we’re letting go of attachment to things. Join me in unconcealing, leave a comment, send me a note, have a conversation to explore – maybe you’ll expose the next human facebook riding at the application layer.  Maybe you’ll just experience Light and Beauty, Freedom, Truth and above all things Love.

With Nothing And Love,

Ed