I wake up. I shower. I make my cup of hot water, laced with apple cider vinegar. I sit down to meditate.
Then I ask myself the question that leads me into a temporary state of enlightenment.
(I say temporary because I can’t hold onto it. It arises and then its gone. More on that phenomenon in another post. Haha, if you have found a way for enlightenment to abide permanently, let me know immediately :))
The question is this:
“In what ways might I fall in love with this exact moment.”
Suddenly my mind is being used to search for the good true and beautiful, instead of ways to protect to me from fear that it sees everywhere, as it has been trained to do over hundreds of thousands of years.
I smile to myself, and kick back. With my dog off happily chasing a scent run the mulberry bush, I can let the answers to the question flow toward me, like treasures rolling up onto the beach.
Before I share my answers with you, just takes 30 seconds right now:
Ask yourself the question that may lead you into a temporary state of enlightenment:
In what ways might you fall in love with this exact moment.
Smile to yourself, kick back, and let treasures roll unto your beach.
Try it now.
I hope you have sent your dog off happily chasing a scent around the Mulberry Bush. Let me know what you find.
In the exact moment as I write this, here are the treasures rolling unto my beach:
I revel in the sensuality of the moment.
That I have a body, in the midst of a cosmos.
I notice the drape of shirt across my chest.
I hear the rush of the incoming air through my nostril passages.
I feel the way my feet spread out on the floor.
And beyond this physicality, or mixed with it, there is a certain ethereal quality.
The way Spirit charges the air with Life Force (we call it “oxygen”).
Hundreds of millions of years of molten earth forming under my chair.
A vastness that streams out beyond me, into the incomprehensible.
As I continue to play with this question,
I make sure that I’m breathing deeply.
In fact, I slow my breath down so much, that I’m breathing in for about 6 seconds … and out for about six seconds.
Such a slow breath lends a richness and texture to my capacity to sense the magic present here.
There’s magic here!
The way the commonplace things of my everyday room lie about me in a perfect way.
The little plant stretching upward.
My sense of identity ebbing and flowing, in and out of the Void.
Haha, this is enlightenment, temporary as it is.
Well, I know there are many conflicting and overlapping definitions of enlightenment, but this consciousness I just entered by asking the question, and sincerely exploring it, with breath, is no other than what enlightened ones experience.
If you want to get a feeling for the multiple ways that enlightenment can be defined and accessed — its multiple dimensions, aspects and essences, read noted spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas’s recent ground-breaking book Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery.
But let’s get out of our heads!
And back to this profound, provocative and fulfilling question:
“In what ways might you fall in love
with this exact moment.”