Zen Master Rama on Enligtenment:
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"Enlightenment is the complete awareness of life without mental modifications.
Enlightenment is not a state of mind. All states of mind are contained within it.
Enlightenment is not inter-dimensional travel. Enlightenment is the experience of pure light.
Enlightenment is really worth seeking. It is the only thing that gives you permanent happiness. When you experience the ecstasy of enlightenment, everything is alright.
You can experience ecstasy in any dimension and at any time. Enlightenment is not related to where your physical or astral body may be, or to any experiences that you may be having with them. Enlightenment is beyond dimensionality
Beyond this world and beyond all other worlds there is an all-perfect light. It is pure intelligence, ecstasy, peace and happiness. It is the light that shines beyond darkness, time, space and dimensionality.
Enlightenment, meditation is really a shift in perception. It's not a thing that you go and do or become, since you're already that.
Enlightenment occurs when your mind merges with nirvana, with what Tibetans call the Dharma-Kaya, the clear light of reality, which is the highest plane of transcendental wisdom and perfect understanding.
When you are enlightened and have united your mind with the deepest and most ancient part of the mind of the universe, you are not affected by suffering the way other people are.
While I may not be able to describe to you exactly what enlightenment is like, I can tell you that it is wonderful beyond understanding. The experience of enlightenment frees your mind from painful and limited states of awareness.
Spiritual knowledge is the experience of enlightenment, and requires an understanding of the inner-most workings of the enlightenment cycle.
Enlightenment means having no human mind, no limitations. Your awareness is eternity, timeless, infinite, beyond boundaries, and yet it exists within all things.
All beings exist ultimately in a condition of inner enlightenment. Enlightenment is in all things.
Enlightenment is a perfect state of mind. It is the direct "seeing" of reality. The world most people see, which they call life, is really just a dream.
If one becomes enlightened, as I did in past incarnations, we leave the structural universes behind. We don't even have past incarnations because the form that had those incarnations has dissolved into the clear light of reality.
Normally the experience of enlightenment occurs in stages. A person will usually have many small enlightenments before full enlightenment dawns.
It is vain to think that we choose, that our own energy, our own intellect will create the possibility of us experiencing a higher order of existence. Liberation is to know you are that.
People who ponder too much about the subject of enlightenment don't progress very fast. It is interesting to know it's there, but you can't know what it's like until you get there.
A person who is enlightened does not have to reincarnate, or they may. If they chose not to, they can go beyond the wheel, and slide into nirvana.
There's not really a whole lot you could say about liberation. The closest experience you can have of it is to come meditate with someone who is liberated.
Enlightenment is a lot like dying. You might wonder why there aren't more enlightened people. It is because they are afraid to die.
Enlightened teachers and people who help them, have a lot of trouble. People try to interfere with the work and spread awful rumors about you.
Most enlightened people can do miracles. Some have powers, some don't. Some people who have developed powers aren't enlightened.
What is enlightenment, anyway? I don't know if I can really put it into words, perhaps you can. I can't.
To be enlightened means that you really don't change, and yet you're nothing but change.
Enlightenment is getting off the wheel. Enlightenment is to become pure awareness.
There is no final stage in nirvana. Nirvana is beyond definition. It is not quantifiable.
It is the way it is. But it is not the way it appears to be. Enlightenment.
You have to become that infinite formless creation, which is life, to know it. It cannot be known in an intellectual sense. That is enlightenment.
It is not special to be enlightened, just different. An enlightened person is someone who has dedicated not just this lifetime but thousands of lifetimes to becoming awareness.
What the enlightened person sees no one could ever tell or describe. Wonder beyond belief. We live in a universe filled with wonder. It is wonder just to live.
People think that if you are enlightened you are not in touch with the pulse of the physical. Au contraire! The higher you go, the deeper you become, and the more conscious you are of the physical and the sensorial.
How could being the entire cosmos and all of its wonder and all of its stages and cycles, and yet being that which is beyond them all, the invisible, be extinction? Extinction? The extinction of what, of whom? How can that which has never been be extinguished?
We have to leave everything we have been, a perceiver, I as an individual. That is enlightenment.
Enlightenment is the culmination of self-knowledge, pure unadulterated knowledge. Not knowledge you can get from reading a book, it comes from perfecting your awareness, your mind.
There is a still point in eternity. There is a still point where all things intersect. There is a still point beyond life, time, and death. Your experience of the still point is enlightenment.
It is called enlightenment, nirvana, God, truth, call it what you will. There is no activity other than the eternal activities of the universe, perfect being, the awareness of all suchness, knowledge.
Light by its very nature is endless. Therefore you can never say you've had the ultimate experience in light - it goes on forever.
Once you have mastered the ten thousand states of mind, it's paranirvana, the absorption into the stillness forever.
Enlightenment doesn't occur by accident. It is a deliberate decision that someone makes again and again. It is something you grow into and develop in.
Nirvana is a step beyond. You dissolve into the universe. The universe dissolves into you until there is no longer a difference. There is no sense of individual self as perceiver.
There is no movement in Nirvana. There is no sameness. And one does not consider it to be timeless because one is not one. It is you, my friend, who go away.
We've decided what we are. That's the dream. When the dream fades, it's not that we don't exist. How could we not exist since we never existed?
We erase ourselves; we go away. But we don't really go away, and we don't really erase ourselves, since we were never there to begin with. We weren't there to begin with in that what we are, or conceive of ourselves as, is a perception.
Enlightenment does not put an end to awareness. It puts an end to limited awareness. It doesn't necessarily put an end to incarnation. It puts an end to reincarnation.
Enlightenment doesn't simply mean being in heavenly states of mind. It doesn't mean being a saint.
Enlightenment doesn't mean you know anything. It doesn't mean you don't know anything. It means that you've returned to the source, consciously.
Enlightenment means that you've become a sophisticated perceiver, without letting anyone know that you're sophisticated.
Enlightenment simply means that you've run out of questions, and that the answers don't matter anymore.
Enlightenment means that you're in love with all of life, with not only immortality but mortality.
Enlightenment means that you're living fully, and it means that you die fully. And then you go beyond life and death completely, everything, nothing, all, and beyond all.
It is possible to move to an enlightened state of mind from a lower bardo or level of awareness. It can happen, but it is extremely unlikely.
The idea that reincarnation means all beings eventually reach enlightenment is not true. Life does not have a fixed purpose. It just is.
Nirvana is very funny. It's not sincere particularly. It's rather frivolous, actually.
Awareness is wakefulness. Wakefulness is consciousness. Consciousness is limitless awareness.
Enlightenment has nothing to do with physical knowledge. It is the experience of existence. Existence is infinite. There are countless universes and creations taking place simultaneously.
Perpetual wakefulness doesn't mean you have all physical knowledge, that you can speak all languages, that you can fix cars...that is a storybook, Hollywood version of the enlightenment experience.
If you are liberated then you can be in the crowd and there is no crowd. You can be surrounded by the world and their is no world. You have shattered the prism of illusion.
We have ideas of God and nirvana or truth or enlightenment. These ideas will go away in nirvana because the suffusion is so complete and intense that nothing can be remembered.
From the point of view of enlightenment, none of this has ever even been. All time and space, all the conditions that are apparent in the absence of enlightenment are unreal.
I have not in this lifetime yet met one person who earnestly seeks enlightenment in the West. Not one person.
A better name for nirvana might be endless love. Love not even in the sense that we see it if we're watching the romantic movie, but love in a sense of no absence.
The day-to-day life we lead has nothing to do with enlightenment. It is just around the corner, and we don't see it.
Enlightenment is the ability to freely transact within the ten thousand states of mind without a continuous self or awareness
The universe is endless. Enlightenment is endless. You have only touched the outer periphery of the endless still center of perfect being.
There is no way to explain enlightenment. It is just a word to indicate something beyond, something very, very far beyond the normal human condition.
After enlightenment your body changes tremendously; its very molecular structure changes just because the kundalini is always streaming through you.
If one is enlightened, one does not perceive life with North, South, East and West. There is no California, there is no New York. In a higher bonding state of attention, everything is fluid light.
Enlightenment just means that you don't have a structural self. It means you've flipped through the gradated realities. Nothing binds, nothing clings to you. You're unaffected by everything.
Enlightenment is not a finite state. It's not something that you just do and it's done. It goes on forever.
Buddhists don't feel that enlightenment is particularly unusual. We feel that it's the natural state. Enlightenment simply means perceiving life directly as it is in all of its infinite, ever changing wonder, in all of its varied, myriad states of mind or as pari-nirvana, or whatever.
Be enlightened for you, just for you. No one else knows or cares. They crucified Christ, you know. They don't take real well, on this planet, to the people who see things differently.
The world of enlightenment doesn't know of its own existence. We're beyond both the knower and known. There's no conceptual identity whatsoever.
Nirvana's not like anything you've ever known or experienced because it can't be known or experienced.
Enlightenment is an ocean of awareness that slides through the human part of us and dissolves it, and leaves us forever in eternity.
We can't say what enlightenment is, we can't say what it isn't, because these are words and words have nothing to do with reality.
Words are a human way of trying to describe things. But they're much more of interference than they are a help in the world of enlightenment.
When I talk about the realm of spirit, happiness, nirvana, enlightenment, I'm not talking about something ideal or imaginary. There are realms of light that exist, that have always existed and will always exist. They're much more solid than the transient perceived reality that you're currently experiencing
You see, that's the fun of Buddhism. We do have a wild card in the deck that can't be explained, that changes value continuously, and that's enlightenment.
Only a pure heart, a completely pure heart can house eternity.
The enlightenment experience is not what you think. How could it be anything that you can configure, anything you can imagine, any way that you think it should be?
It's a very complicated matter to become enlightened. If it happens to a person without a teacher in this lifetime, you can bet their boots, they've had about a thousand teachers in their last thousand lives because it’s a very complicated thing to do.
The dreams of eternity are the states of mind. When we wake up from the dreams there's only enlightenment. There could never be anything else.
Since infinity is by its very nature infinite, then enlightenment by its very nature is infinite, and thus can be experienced in infinite ways, by itself or without itself
Enlightenment means the total dissolution of the self in the white light of eternity. It doesn't simply mean that you can sit and go into samadhi.
Enlightenment is x-rated, honey; if you haven't checked it out. It's hot, it's vivacious. You're going to take your mind and merge it with the entire cosmos.
The effort to lift one's self into perfect enlightenment is a profound thing. It has nothing to do with individual will. It's a refraction of the cosmos. The cosmos delights in itself.
Once we've achieved perfect meditation, we're terribly trapped because that's an illusion...any enlightenment that seems ultimate is an illusion.
We ourselves are transmuting the reality of our perceptual field, and there are endless, beautiful and perfect universes, or you can go beyond universes to pari-nirvana, to the dissolution, where there's no beginning.
The world of enlightenment, and that which creates enlightenment, is much different than what most people would think. Most people have Hallmark Card descriptions of what creates enlightenment. And if their descriptions were correct, then everyone who is in religious practice would be enlightened.
Becoming enlightened doesn't mean everything works your way.
The wonder of immaculate, perfect, pure mind is that when it is in its perfect, extant state without confusion, it can be anything it wants to be.
If you become the quiescent state, which is what enlightenment means, it means that you're never the same. You move and shift as the quiescent state, in a body or out of it.
Yes I say that I am enlightened. What does that mean? It means I live in a condition of light...There really is no primary self anymore.
When someone says to me "I want to be enlightened." I immediately take a vacation because I know that the person isn't serious. I’ve never met anyone who's serious about enlightenment
The waking dreams of life as most people know them are spiritual experiences, but there is another order of spiritual experience and that's to be in the garden of the heart, in the perfect stillness, where the white light of eternity meets the white light of eternity.
Enlightenment doesn't mean you stop being a student. Being a student is a state of mind. Enlightenment simply means that you are everything and everywhere. It doesn't preclude being a student.
Enlightenment, meditation is really a shift in perception. It's not a thing that you go and do or become, since you're already that.
Nirvana is limitless awareness, without a field, without a knower.
When the spirit is understood, then life becomes not at all common, but a constant magical circus in which you see yourself reflected in all forms and all formlessness."
- Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz
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