For all but the most dedicated practitioners, the search for enlightenment is often a search for happiness. An end to unhappiness, depression, and all the other maladies that affect us. And perhaps most of all, a quest somehow to survive, to cheat death, to be reborn or move to the next level. Many of us believe we will be somehow endowed with extraordinary powers to rise above the countless challenges of life. And that is what so many religions, philosophies, and programs offer you, ultimate salvation, however expressed or envisioned.
If that is what you seek, find a guru or mystic or religion or program or other sage who claims insights, understandings or perhaps direct links to God greater than your own and offers you whatever makes you feel better. Meditate, contemplate, chant, bow, spin, sing, dance, read, pray, deprive, indulge, whatever. It won't matter. It usually changes nothing.
That is not what we are doing here. That is not what a serious practitioner seeking insight or enlightened awareness is all about. instead, we ask simply what is this and what are we really. No goals, no preconceived notions, no desired ends looking for a justification.
The real question, the real quest, is how do those things you seek and everything else for that matter arise, how do you know them and everything else you will ever experience, how are you even aware of your misery or unhappiness or anything at all. What is the nature of your awareness, the process of your awareness....how does everything that is, including you, even arise? Focus if you want only on what has arisen and an entire universe of detail. There is enough there for countless lifetimes.
Or, as one insightful practitioner put it, " I awakened to know instantly, beyond doubt and beyond description, that the universe and all it's infinite complexity was a stage, a glorious play, and my awareness, the awareness of all beings, was at once the director, the audience and the very stage itself and that outside that theatre, far more awaited."
When you experience that level of insight and awareness, the pain, the suffering, the misery cannot touch you.
