Enlightenment

I wrote about discovering the word ‘endarkenment’ a few weeks ago and how if meaning is relational, rather than something you find in the achievement of goals, then enlightenment must be relational too. So it’s not to be found on a mountaintop or on the other side of a great trial, as we’ve been told. You can find it in daily life if you are attuned to it. This idea has stayed with me and is beginning to feel like a favourite pair of running shoes. It makes enlightenment feel more achievable. More real and making myself aware of this truth is allowing me to notice it in my life.

For example, on Monday I was driving home from taking my daughter (who doesn’t live with me) for dinner as I do every week. We had talked about nothing in particular over a pizza but, as always when I spend time with her, I found myself noticing how her face is changing, how it bursts into expression when she thinks or talks about something that makes her laugh. I’m always catching up with what’s going on in her mind. But I saw in the moment how much I love just being in her company and picking her brain about the things that she’s encountering in life that are helping form her perception of the world. In the car home I was listening to the best songs from the new Taylor Swift album after she had matter of factly directed me to them. The sun was setting. The motorway was empty. I was tearing along at speed but the world around me felt slow. I drove passed the turning I used to take to see my grandmother who died a couple of years ago and thought of her garden in the Spring. The last birds I had seen in that place now flew around in my mind. The car felt so easy and smooth. I saw a buzzard overhead then and craned my neck to look at it. I thought of my wife and two youngest children I was excited to see at home. And my eldest son who is at University and who we would see that weekend.

And then it happened. I got a feeling I have only ever had a couple of times before when meditating. A kind of tingle of awareness that while my place in the world would always be unfathomable, that was ok. And more knowable because of it somehow. Unconsciously I took a very short, gasping breath, my body becoming aware of the moment, as I made sense of something in my bones that I will never be able to put into words. A feeling of profound ease. A pin prick of light that revealed the existence of something far larger than I could ever see, but that nevertheless proved that something making the light was there. Wherever there was. And I could access it. But then being aware of it somehow contrived to make it turn into a physical sensation as I tried to find words to describe it and then it was gone. I was back on the road. The sun was still setting. Everything was the same and yet not the same. As was I.

And then the usual fears and worries came in. About work, money, the health of people I love, ambitions I have not yet fulfilled. They washed over me but I could see that for them to wash over me they had come from somewhere else. They were not in me. But the pin prick of light was still there in the background of my perceptions. It was always there. The light behind it I could only see a fraction of would always be there. If I wanted to peer through it again.

It’s such a peaceful thing knowing that light of enlightenment is there. It shores me up somehow. Makes real the nagging feeling that nothing is as it seems. That something real is being ignored. And that the pinprick you sometimes stare through into the light when love fills your heart is the answer to whatever that is.

I have tried to look for it since but of course it’s not to be found in looking. It’s to be found in feeling. In meaning. In experiencing the relations between things.

Thanks for reading.

Dan