You’ll get a wide variety of answers if you ask people what it means to be enlightened in the world today.
“If you are trying to attain enlightenment, you are creating and being driven by karma, and you are wasting your time on your black cushion.”
The myth of Enlightenment
According to Zen master Robert Waldinger, permanent enlightenment very rarely — if ever ever — exists. In fact, we should be highly suspicious of those who claim to be fully enlightened beings.
I think we’ve all met people who tell you the most wild but alluring ideas, quite often we find people with this full enlightenment are in fact just a bit lost themselves.
Although some people claim to have acquired total enlightenment after experiencing some fantastic spiritual event, Waldinger believes this perspective of “acquisition” can be dangerous.
Instead of viewing enlightenment as something you acquire, he believes it should be something you practice in each moment, like an activity or a habit.
