Why would an enlightened person do anything at all?
by Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment
It is common for people to ask why an enlightened person would bother doing anything at all. Why would he or she even get out of bed in the morning and bother to brush the teeth, get dressed, eat, or go to work? What would be the impetus to do anything?
When we look at this question we find a nuance that has to be explained, beginning with a couple more questions: Who is it that does something? and Who is it who has reached enlightenment? These two questions, that are inherent in the original question, are at the core of the difficulty in understanding.
The “state” of enlightenment is not really a state or a nonstate. It is a realization of what has always been present — what is always present. Being enlightened is a matter of subtraction, not addition. It is a matter of removing all that is not permanent in order to find what remains. In Sanskrit, this is referred to as neti, neti (not this, not this).
Not this, not this
So you remove all that is impermanent. Is it the physical body? No, not this. Is it thoughts that come and go? No, it is not this. Is it consciousness in which everything seems to arise and fall? No, it is not this. Is it nature, plants, trees, herbs, and the elements? No, it is not this. By continuing with this process of neti, neti, you come to something remarkable that never changes and is permanent. When you fully realize that this is what you are then this is called being awake or enlightened. It’s not an intellectual knowing, but a realization.
Once the egoic mind and all of its attachments, knowledge, possessions, and identities are stripped away, then consciousness remains. And prior to consciousness is the stateless state called the Absolute. So there is no “attaining” or “reaching” enlightenment; there is simply the recognition of the Absolute that is beyond all thought, movement, restriction, boundaries, perception, and conception.
No one is enlightened
There is no “one,” no person, who is enlightened. The person is the ego, or the egoic mind, the sense of a self. Carl Jung called it the persona. And it has been referred to as the mask to the world. It is this self that is realized to be no more than a belief and it is formed out of an accretion of thoughts. It is also this egoic self that believes it is the doer. But in fact there is no “one” who does anything. All doing — all action — is performed only by the entire movement of consciousness, whether this is realized or not.
There is no difference between an enlightened state and the ignorant state except for a lack of realization. By analogy, we can say that two people can be floating in the ocean; one person knows he is in the ocean and the other person is unaware that he is in the ocean. But in either case, both are in the ocean.
There is no doer
Whether ignorant or aware of this fact, the only doer is consciousness. The egoic self believes it is the doer because it thinks it is a separate individual; this is what he/she surmises and is conditioned to believe. In other words, we are taught we are separate from the wholeness of life, so we perceive ourselves to be individuals who have control of our bodies, minds, brains, environment, and others.
When in the enlightened state, so to speak, nothing has changed with respect to living, action, movement, creation, destruction, and potentiality. The doer is consciousness, as an entire movement. Nothing occurs in isolation; everything that happens is due to what precedes it in a singular complex and dynamic system. If you go out and water your herbs, it is only because of everything that has already transpired and brought you to this point, back to the beginning of the very first movement.
When asking why an enlightened would person do anything, you have to realize that no person does anything ever anyway. The enlightened person realizes that the individual self is not the doer, but the ignorant person mistakenly believes he/she is an individual self, the doer.
