Enlightenment is pure silence, the silence of no-mind.
Enlightenment is simply becoming aware of your transcendence of chemistry and physics, biology and physiology, knowing yourself to be the eternal, non-physical energy. It is pure light, and nobody can enforce it, it is absolutely in your hands to remain ignorant or to become enlightened.
Enlightenment is not a state of ecstasy, it is beyond ecstasy. Enlightenment has no excitement in it; ecstasy is a state of excitement. Ecstasy is a state of mind — a beautiful state of mind, but still a state of mind. Ecstasy is an experience. And enlightenment is not an experience, because there is nobody left to experience. Ecstasy is still within the ego, enlightenment is beyond the ego. It is not that you become enlightened: you are not, then enlightenment is. It is not that you are liberated, it is not that you remain in that liberation, liberated: it is a liberation from yourself.
When a man of enlightenment looks at a roseflower there is no division between the knower and the known; he becomes the very heart of the roseflower. When he looks at the sunrise he becomes the sunrise, when he looks at a white cloud, he becomes the white cloud. It is not by any effort. He has just become a mirror, so clean that everything that comes before it is reflected in it. He becomes it.
Enlightenment means exactly that: when meditation has become natural. You are meditative — not that you sit sometimes in meditation, not that you have a few hours of meditation every day — your whole time is meditative You move in meditation, you walk in meditation, you sit in meditation, you eat in meditation, you love in meditation, you do your businesses in meditation. Your whole life becomes surrounded by a new kind of energy. It is not NECESSARY, it is simply natural.
A man of enlightenment, feeling one with existence, needs no morality, needs no ethics, needs no teachings about what is right and what is wrong. He is so in tune with existence that everything that happens through him is bound to be just right. There is no possibility of anything going wrong. Meditation is an art of bringing you closer to the heartbeat of existence. The deeper you go within you … you will find the very heartbeat of existence. Then there is no morality for you; all that you do is beautiful.
Self-realization is a process of sudden enlightenment. If one can relax totally in the moment, if one can put the mind aside and just BE… silent, aware… one can become self-realized at the last moment of life too.
Self-realization is not difficult at all. It appears to be difficult because we never try to get in tune with our own being. We have forgotten the language, that’s all, but it can be remembered.
Truth is only the one that happens when the mind stops functioning; that is the truth of enlightenment. When you are in absolute silence, not a thought moves and the lake of your consciousness is absolutely rippleless, then you become a mirror and then the whole is reflected in you; that is the truth of enlightenment. That’s what happened to Buddha under the bodhi tree… that was what Jesus was calling ‘the kingdom of god’.
Nirvana means the ultimate enlightenment, the state when the ego disappears, when man is no more separate from existence — not even a thin curtain separates him, not even a transparent glass separates him — when all separation disappears. That meeting with the total, that merger with the whole, that melting into the absolute, is called nirvana.
Whenever there is enlightenment, god takes possession of the enlightened person, because the enlightened person is not a person at all; he is just emptiness. And only in that emptiness can god take possession. So whenever there is this emptiness, whenever the ego disappears, god immediately appears. These are two aspects of the same phenomenon: the ego disappearing and god appearing; the death of the ego is the birth of god.
The awakening is called enlightenment because it is an experience of being full of light, overflowing with light.
Enlightenment is not attained by striving for it — no. Striving itself is the greatest impediment. You don’t attain it by making effort; you attain it by relaxing all efforts. It happens. It is not an attainment really, it is not an achievement… and the achiever’s mind never reaches it. It is a relaxation: when you are not striving for anything, not thinking to achieve anything, not even thinking about enlightenment, then it happens. It takes you always unawares: when you are really looking for it hard, it goes on eluding you. That is not the way to get to it. It is very elusive, mercury-like.
Watch desire… just watching, observing, seeing the ways of the desire and the subtle, cunning strategies of it and how it always comes. It even starts thinking “How to drop desire?” — it starts desiring the state of no-desire too. See this whole game, and seeing it one day, suddenly one is sitting alone and there is no desire, no desire around — in that very moment suddenly one finds oneself at home. That’s what enlightenment is, and that’s what the experience of God is.
Enlightenment can happen through anything, but the most potential situation is love. Enlightenment is possible in any kind of situation, in any state of mind; sometimes it has happened in very absurd situations.
