I ran across the quote below, surfing some Buddhist site that I failed to record the URL. On the one hand, I like the quote. But on the other hand, there's a certain hypocritical self-referentiality – he's guilty of what he criticizes, since he draws attention to his own enlightenment, and his very effort to explain that enlightenment is not special grants it a certain privileged or special status. It's a difficult path to navigate.
Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special, it’s not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred. I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe. The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it. Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special.
Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence. Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened, the many concepts of enlightenment is a big joke. I use the word enlightenment all the time; not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in the idea of enlightenment.
Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretence. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.
Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being.
- Adyashanti (Zen teacher Steven Gray)
– notes for Korean –
승가(僧迦) = sangha (संघ, saṃgha) (buddhist intentional community)
업보(業報) = karma (retribution or effects from previous life)
