Enlightenment and the Alchemy of Remembering
Friday, January 5th, 2007Misplace your keys? Forget the name of the person you just met? Can’t figure out how you got yourself into such a mess?
Being a human means being forgetful.
But we don’t just forget keys and names, we forget our true nature.
“We are the world,” as that old song goes, but we think we are itsy bitsy specks of flesh and to do lists. We’ve forgotten.
What have we forgotten?
Infinity.
Wisdom.
Spontaneity.
Compassion.
Continuity.
Balance.
Natural ease.
Forgetting is not just for old people and Type A compulsonauts.
We all forget, but to different degrees.
A person who feels very separate and who is all tied up in knots of fixations and habitual reactions has forgotten a lot.
A person through whom the primordial intelligence shines and dances with little impediment has remembered a lot.
Remembering what we are is enlightenment.
We usually don’t remember everything all at once. And most of us remember and forget, remember and forget, until remembering finally settles in to become our base state.
We remember what we are, and we discover we are sharing all of life, all together.
It’s that simple.
This simplicity is the key to understanding authentic Tantra and the other great nondual traditions.
Now, you might wonder why we use words such as “enlightenment” or “realization.”
It’s popular to bash these words. I’ve done it myself. But these words are not just philosophical concepts. They reflect the experience of practitioners.
At a certain stage, we become able to encounter the weave of Reality as primordial intelligence appearing as light. There are many, many facets and levels to this encounter. Our world becomes dazzling.
Our world also begins to become Real-ized. We sometimes speak, for instance of how well a painter realizes a particular subject. We might discover a painting that does a poor job of realizing anything at all. Or, we might discover a painting that, regardless of its genre, presents us with a seemingly infinite display.
As we practice, the infinity of the world and ourselves begins to reveal itself. This experience is quite concrete, and also multi-faceted. The world seems to be painted in richer colors. We are less distracted by our narrow fixations, and so we can engage with more of life’s expressions.
Forgetting and remembering are not mere mental processes, divorced from bodies. Forgetting and remembering are embodied processes of the manifest world. The pulse of forgetting and remembering is the life process of manifest beings.
When we remember more, our bodies, our movements, our emotions, and so on, present differently in the world. We have expanded capacities. We are less limited by forgetting.
For instance, Hanuman wondered how he would cross the ocean to rescue Sita, imprisoned by Ravena on the island of Lanka. He had to be reminded that he could fly. Until he remembered, he had no access to that capacity.
Many sincere practitioners experience the arising of expanded capacities such as control over bodily processes, lucid dreams, precognition, telepathy, and so on. While these are not the goal of practice, they do indicate that the alchemy of remembering is taking place.
Some few beings on earth seem to be direct emanations of remembering itself. They arrive and serve the great compassionate purpose of reminding all of us to remember.
What do these beings, such as Anandamayi Ma, Christ, and Buddha ask us to remember? Certainly not our attachment to siddhis, or powers. Through their existence and actions, they ask us to remember the great wisdom virtues and the role we have to play in manifesting these in human life.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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