“Do you want to know what enlightenment is?” the teacher asked. Instantly the room became pin-drop still as curiosity flamed up a few degrees. A few students nodded, while others found themselves too immersed in suspense to move or even change their expressions.

“It is very simple,” he said. “It is being in light. In-lightened. The more light you have coming through you, the more in-light or in-lightened you are.”

Inside, I felt a little “Aha” trigger go off.

It was one of those statements that when you heard it, it instantly made sense. It made so much sense that it made me feel like I already knew it. So I, along with other students sitting there that night, nodded my head. Nodded our heads as though we were somehow seconding the motion, or giving our teacher a ‘thumbs-up’ that he had gotten it right, as though we were doing some kind of peer review on his teachings, as though we had already known this before he said it.

But once you hear it, it kind of makes sense. Doesn’t it?

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It is not so easy being a self-reliant and independent person. Try, work, struggle and try again. On and on, an endless cycle. Some people claim that work is fulfillment, and it is true that it can be just that. Whether that is something good for you, however, depends on your goals and perspective, depends on what you are looking to fill yourself with.

Another way of looking at this might be people some would label as irrational. They say their heads are filled with voices. But have you ever wondered where the voice you call your own comes from? How do you know whether the voice or voices you hear are yours?

When spiritual teachers talk about ‘emptying the mind,’ this can be a somewhat misleading expression. It suggests that there are no thoughts, nothing present. Emptying the mind is like taking a glass full of milk that has been left out on the table too long. The milk gets sour. So, we empty the glass and wash it out; this is emptying the mind of (s)our clutter. But it doesn’t stop there. We reach for a bottle of fresh milk, open the cap and let its’ cool liquid spill down our throat. This is the in-rush or through-put of living in the moment, allowing clear, clean thoughts to flow in and through us. We don’t think about drinking the milk; we just drink – and in the moment-by-moment drinking of it, we experience it – with little to no thought.

One way to get potable water is to desalinate it, while another way is to drink it straight from a fresh mountain spring. One way takes a great deal of effort to get from point A to point B; the other way is effortless – we simply drink it straight from the source.

We can’t drink an entire mountain stream. We sip some, some spills down our chin, and the rest flows downstream. Simply drink. Let thoughts flow in and out

It is not so easy being a self-reliant and independent person. So, stop thinking so much. Stop trying so hard. Open your mind and drink straight from the source.

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