enlightenment is impossible, so don’t try the possible
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
If you have been reading my articles for a while you may note that I have written about observation and what it means to be awake to “what-is.” This is often called enlightenment, but the word itself has been so misunderstood and misused that it is nothing more than a distraction. It is an ideal and a goal to be reached. But how can one reach what one already is?? It has always been a challenge for anyone to speak of what it means to be awake, because the word is not the thing.
There is really no instruction that can open your mind to nothingness, which is also the capacity for everythingness. There is no way, no path, no how-to. And so with all the effort, thinking, planning, structuring, reasoning, and observing you come to the conclusion that it is impossible. And here is the gate to it all: the impossibility. The everythingness is the world of the possible and the nothingness is the realm of the impossible.
It is possible to use effort, think, observe, see, employ the intelligence, and discuss or envision a reality that is beyond the superficial physical existence and the conditioned mind that binds us. But all of that which is possible can never pierce what is impossible. All of our regular tools of mentation are required for so many things in life, from finding the source of a plumbing leak to engineering a bridge and to assessing who is right in a court of law, but these same tools cannot be used to know what we are in the truest sense.
When we believe we are not trying, using effort, to uncover the mystery of the “what is,” who is it that believes such a thing? Who is it who tries and expends energy? It is the sense of self, the “me,” which is the very thing that blocks us from seeing “what is.” We go in circles, which is exactly what I did for more than 60 years of trying to figure it all out. We go round and round trying to use our trusted mental faculties to know what can never be known in the same way we can know how to play the piano or figure out a complex mathematical equation. We come to a no-thing that even our smartest intellectuals cannot begin to uncover with their brilliance.
If you want to be awakened to how reality really, really is — what you really are — then you have to drop everything — thinking, practicing, meditating, rationalizing, studying, attending lectures and classes, and learning — even observing. Drop it all in favor of just letting go and free falling. When this happens the mind becomes empty of the known and ready to apperceive the unknown. The Taoists refer to this as the empty vessel, and only an empty vessel can be filled with everything.
