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For today’s episode, I’m sharing a talk and meditation I led in our community a couple weeks ago, “Is enlightenment possible?” If you look back a few years on this podcast, you’ll find a meditation I led on this subject, which received a lot of positive feedback, including from other meditation teachers who now share it with their students.

My own ideas of enlightenment have evolved since then as I’ve had the chance to speak with some of the world’s foremost teachers and scholars of Buddhism like Dr. Jan Willis, Dr. Robert Thurman, Thupten Jinpa, Tenzin Palmo, and many others. So I wanted to share this new reflection and meditation with you.

Is the state of enlightenment even possible? One where you forever let go of delusions like craving, anger and selfishness to embrace total satisfaction, generosity, and joy. And is enlightenment something far off or is it something we can begin to explore right now, even something that’s already within us, just waiting to be recognized?

I also explore in more depth the question that’s bothered me for decades: whether enlightenment is a fixed endpoint or the beginning of some new altruistic adventure. And we consider a question that I’ve asked and heard many others ask too: would enlightenment actually be any fun?

What is enlightenment from a Buddhist perspective?

Scott Snibbe: Today I’m going to talk about enlightenment. Something I don’t have firsthand knowledge of, but it’s nice to talk about, I think some of the people in the Buddhist traditions I’ve been a part of kind of treat it like all or nothing. Like you’re sort of completely clueless and full of delusions for a long time, then all of a sudden, you’re completely happy, completely free, completely beneficial. And moments before that, you are a wreck.

What I’ve learned from my teachers over time is that it’s much more of a gradual process. That we do evolve, we do gradually evolve towards, you know this word, “enlightenment.” It’s just a word. It’s just a sound. We’ve been studying emptiness, dependent origination for a really long time, which I hope wasn’t too annoying to some people. I know a lot of people want really practical material, but emptiness is actually supposed to be the most practical topic. They were the most powerful antidote.

Gradually, day by day, you diminish your delusions and increase your good qualities as you practice a path like this. That’s the common sense, view of enlightenment, the progressively diminishing the disturbing mental states and increasing the constructive ones. In Buddhism, enlightenment is a state where our minds rise beyond fear, anger, and selfishness to an enduring state of joy, altruism, and peace.

In Buddhism, enlightenment is a state where our minds rise beyond fear, anger, and selfishness to an enduring state of joy, altruism, and peace.

You may have heard the word Nirvana, which is sometimes synonymous with enlightenment. It’s funny, I quite like the band Nirvana, their music is mostly about one topic in Buddhism, which is suffering. I make these playlists sometimes where each song corresponds to one of the topics of the sequence (that’s known as the lamrim in Tibetan Buddhism) and the Nirvana songs are usually the ones dealing with suffering.

It’s funny, I was in Nepal recently and the Nirvana t-shirts are very popular. I think that people don’t know that it’s a band, I think they just want to put the word nirvana on their t-shirt. My daughter has said kids at her school wear them. They must have licensed it to big places like American Apparel because they’re available everywhere. I’m sure there’s a lot of pirate ones too. It’s very funny that this band was called Nirvana. Kurt Cobain killed himself, talking about misery. I had to explain that to my daughter too the other day, she’s 14, and I tried to explain why Kurt Cobain commits suicide.

But what I’ve learned is that Nirvana isn’t a place. At least, that’s how my teachers explain it. It’s not a place you go like heaven. In the Buddhist view, Nirvana is a state of mind. We can evolve our minds so that we experience less and less disturbing emotions. And cultivate more and more of our best qualities: kindness, generosity, compassion, love, patience, and joy. Even saying the words helps to cultivate them. Just saying them actually evolves your mind a little bit towards them.

In the Buddhist view, Nirvana is a state of mind.

Actually, my daughter and I had a great conversation yesterday about the Whorfian hypothesis. I don’t know if you ever heard this, but it’s this idea that I learned it first from the book 1984 by George Orwell. In that book, this totalitarian state is trying to remove words from the dictionary for concepts they don’t want people to think about, like rebellion or freedom, things like that.

The  Whorfian hypothesis is that if you don’t have a word for a concept, you can’t feel the concept. You can’t use the concept in your mind, which I think has some truth to it. But then the opposite’s true. If you reinforce these words, if you say words of things that you want to attain, where you want your mind to go a little bit, your mind goes in that direction. It’s really obvious when you meet people who have these qualities who are more advanced spiritually, I like to say spiritually, which refers to the invisible aspects of the world like love, compassion, and what happens when you die.

Ram Dass

I just saw this short film about Ram Dass, who’s a very popular spiritual leader in the 60s and 70s, on Netflix, a short film called Going Home. We almost didn’t watch it because my wife always checks the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, she was like, Oh, only 68%. I said, No, I think this movie’s going to be really good. We watched it and it was so beautiful.

It’s about the very end of his life. He had a stroke some time ago, and he can barely move, a guy has to carry him from one place to another and goes in a wheelchair. But every word that came out of his mouth was so beautiful, insightful, loving, and wise. You see it on his face, just a beautiful smile. What I thought seeing him is, Wow, there’s someone who has it, not necessarily enlightenment, but who is more evolved. He’s further along than I am or than many of us are. You may have been lucky enough to meet somebody like that, and it’s neat to see them on tv. This video, it’s only 30 minutes, if you want to watch it.

Something I heard early on when I was studying Buddhism is that Buddhism doesn’t promise that you’ll be free of problems, even once you attain enlightenment. Just that your problems won’t bother you anymore and that you’ll see problems as the naturally occurring impermanence and suffering that’s the nature of reality itself, and your mind can supposedly remain at peace even with the most difficult external problems.

Ram Dass said this about his stroke, that his outer life collapsed, but he said his inner life bloomed. It just grew so much from having a stroke. Because he was so much more inside himself all the time and he liked who he was inside. He said he wouldn’t wish the stroke on anybody, but he would wish them the insight and the inner growth that it provided him.

As I’ve studied Tibetan Buddhism, I’ve also gotten to know practitioners from other traditions. I’ve learned that even to Buddhists the word enlightenment has many different meanings. You may have heard some of the profound questions about enlightenment, like whether enlightenment’s something that’s already within us.

Robert Thurman’s thoughts on enlightenment

You hear that a lot, that everyone’s already enlightened. Really? They’re not acting that way, you know? Or is it there just waiting to be awakened? Or is it something you gradually attain in measured steps? This question particularly interests me and Robert Thurman said something interesting. He said, Once you become enlightened, it’s as if you become enlightened retroactively in all of your past. Which is hard to understand.

I think it says something about time, that we’ve misunderstood about time. But I’ve learned that many Buddhist questions of this nature have different answers, not only between the different traditions, like between Theravada and Zen Buddhism. They actually have very different answers to these questions. But even within finely differentiated divisions of Tibetan Buddhism. In Tibetan Buddhism, they have different views of enlightenment, even between the traditions.

Today what I wanted to offer was a meditation that explores this idea of enlightenment, and whether it’s possible, whether it’s seed is within us right now. Even whether it’s any fun. That’s something that I think I see in myself and also other people like, would it actually be fun, not to feel craving, not to feel frustration? I think for myself and a lot of people like, Oh gosh, that doesn’t seem that fun actually.

But we’ll explore that in the meditation and see for ourselves. I was really scared that enlightenment obliterated you, like you cease to exist, you just melt into this commonality. I was really scared by that and I didn’t find it very attractive. But I heard the Dalai Lama very early on when I was a Buddhist. I heard him say, Everyone attains enlightenment in their own unique way. That actually encouraged me a lot. You see that in the Dalai Lama. You see you can have a huge personality and no ego. You don’t lose your personality as your mind becomes more evolved.

You don’t lose your personality as your mind becomes more evolved.

If enlightenment is transcending a narrow, separate sense of self, what might a taste of that expansive self that’s less identified with our attachments and our dislikes feel like? Is enlightenment really an end point? Or is it the beginning of some new altruistic adventure?

That’s the thing that’s bothered me the most actually, because the ideal of enlightenment that I learned says that you become omniscient. You know everything at once, you’re inside everyone’s head at once, but it doesn’t bother you. You’re omnipresent, you’re everywhere at once. But the idea of an end seemed really odd to me. I don’t know if that seemed that attractive either actually.

But the biggest question I had was whether we still grow after we become enlightened. That seemed very strange to me, that you would stop growing and expanding as a being, and this question bothered me for many years. I was lucky enough to have dinner with Robert Thurman when we did an event together at Tibet House when my book came out. And I had a whole list of questions I’ve had for years that I asked him during that dinner. And I asked him this one, Is enlightenment really an end? Do you keep growing after your enlightenment or not?

He gave me an answer that really satisfied me. He said, “You don’t grow any longer as an individual once you become enlightened, but you still grow through others.” I found that really beautiful and really satisfying, that your growth is the growth of everybody you contact and you help your benefit.

“You don’t grow any longer as an individual once you become enlightened, but you still grow through others.”

Robert Thurman

Obviously, I’m not enlightened, but it’s okay to be curious about it together, and to want to learn more about it experientially in meditation, not just from reading or listening to lectures, and also to feel that you’re slightly closer to it. Maybe with this 15 minutes of conversation we’re slightly closer to whatever that ideal of enlightenment is, just by thinking about it and appreciating its benefits, if it exists.

Let’s do this meditation together.

Meditation on enlightenment

All right, so settle yourself into meditation posture, straighten your spine, cross-legged on the floor, sitting on a cushion, if that’s how you are. Or in a chair with your feet flat on the floor.

Rest your hands in your lap. Palms up. Thumbs touching. Venerable René says this opens the heart.

Relax your shoulders, your face, the rest of your body, which can also happen by scrunching up your shoulders and letting them go slightly. Tilt down your head, half close your eyes.

And the first part of a meditation, especially for anyone who’s brand new… every week, people join. This is the secret to having a beneficial meditation practice, is to at least add some motivation to it. If you’re already familiar with mindfulness meditation, mindfulness has no ethical component to it by itself.

Think about your motivation for meditating

Even if you’re just doing mindfulness meditation, the beginning, just think, May my meditation benefit others, and that turns it into something that brings out your good qualities. Our motivation today is to explore the idea of enlightenment with curiosity, openness, not merely as another interesting, cool experience, but as a possible doorway,

Opening up our being to become the greatest benefit to the people and the creatures in the world around us.

Think about your motivation too. Y’all made some effort to be here today. Why did you come? If you’re listening later, why did you make time to listen to this recording? What’s your motivation now?

We can appreciate that there are beings who are closer to enlightenment than we are, or might even be enlightened right now. People like the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh, maybe Pope Francis, or a compassionate nurse in a hospital somewhere right now who’s tenderly caring for someone who’s going to die today.

Do people like this show that it’s possible to strengthen and maybe even perfect our capacity for benefiting others for altruistic good? Some people really do deserve our respect, and what’s wonderful is that these people teach that what they possess is not in need, but it’s teachable, it’s learnable.

Stabilize the mind

For a moment, focus on your breath to stabilize the mind. As the breath comes in and out of your nostrils, as it causes your chest to rise and fall, put all your attention there to become fixed in the present, in your life, your awareness. And it’s okay. It’s normal if other thoughts and feelings appear, but just let them pass by without pulling them forward, without pushing them away.

Bringing your attention back to your breath just for one minute.

Now this mindfulness that we’ve cultivated on our breath is a path to enlightenment.

Great teachers instruct us that mindfulness, nonjudgmental awareness of thoughts and feelings and perceptions can be the gateway to openness. And when that openness is perfected, eventually it becomes enlightenment.

In this state of openness, we’re not trying to get rid of disturbing thoughts and emotions, but simply let them pass without allowing them to take over the mind. Seeing that we’re not our thoughts.

They say that even highly realized beings, bodhisattvas, still have disturbing thoughts, arise feelings of anger or sadness or shame, but they no longer identify with these thoughts. They just see them passing by like clouds, like ripples on a lake. The thoughts pass through them. They feel them, but they’re not disturbed by them.

Try that right now.

Try whatever passes through your mind to not identify with it. Wanting something, it’s just a thought. Just notice it’s a thought, wanting something and let it pass by. It’s a thought, frustrated or enraged by something. Yes, I noticed that and let it pass by.

It’s a self-critical thought. Okay, that’s a self-critical thought. Just let it pass by.

You are not your thoughts.

Beneath thoughts, feelings that we can find a subtler way that we exist. Beneath our preferences, our personality, and this clarity, awareness of mind isn’t generic, it’s specific, it’s changing.

Exploring the mind

For a minute, let’s let our mind look at itself.

We will try to probe beneath thoughts and feelings to a subtler nature of the mind that they say is the seed of our enlightenment. There’s a potential already there that if we could only see it and identify more with this luminous awareness, we might ourselves become enlightened and realize our highest potential.

Probe the nature of consciousness, awareness, mind. What do you see when your mind looks at your mind?

Does your mind feel spacious or small?

Is your mind bright or dim, dark?

Does the mind reflect what appears to it like a mirror, or does it absorb what appears to it like a black velvet hole?

So with curiosity, look single pointedly at the nature of consciousness, awareness, mind.

Reflective, clear knowing.

Some people call this space God.

Some call it the Dharmakaya.

Some call it your buddhanature.

It’s a space that’s always been there inside yourself, waiting to be discovered.

Interdependence

Now, as you look at your mind, see that it isn’t something independent from other things.

As sights, sounds, thoughts, memories appear within the mind. They don’t appear without a cause.

Some come from phenomena outside the mind. The interaction of matter and beings outside you.

Others come from the mind itself triggered by memories, thoughts, feelings, habits, experience, and training.

You may be alone right now, but everything you think and feel is conditioned by everyone you’ve ever known. Everything you’ve ever learned.

See how your brain, your body in which these thoughts stir, how all of it comes from things outside you, your meals, the air you breathe, your parents evolution, stardust.

The history of the whole universe.

Your body is even right now in dynamic interdependence with all of reality.

When we look at all of conditioned reality with wisdom, we see that some things are true. That nothing lasts. Everything changes that problems inevitably occur.

That we aren’t in control of the world and the beings around us, but only control our mind how it reacts, and some small ways that we interact with the tiny parts of the universe right around us.

Accepting reality

One aspect of enlightenment is acceptance of reality as it is, rather than wanting it to be different, to bend it to our will for only good things to happen to us and no bad things to occur.

Of course it’s natural and reasonable to want these things and to wish them for everyone else, but the logic of reality shows us that impermanence, change, suffering, death, they’re all natural parts of reality.

Accepting these inevitable parts of reality is part of enlightenment too, and strangely can lead to happiness because the Buddhist view is that unhappiness comes simply from having a mind that’s misaligned with reality, with how things really are.

We can see that these things that are true for us are true for everyone else too. No one wants to suffer. Everyone wants to be happy, not just for people, but for cats and cows and even ants and amoebas. They are repelled from the unpleasant and they seek the pleasant and whatever way their senses tell them.

In this way, I and all beings are the same.

What does enlightenment feel like?

The greatest form of love is recognizing that others are like me and wishing for all of these beings to be happy and not to suffer, and even doing whatever I can to be a cause for their happiness and their freedom from suffering.

With some deep contemplation, you may come to the conclusion that the best way to genuinely help others would be to develop your best qualities of kindness to generosity, patience, and wisdom to their ultimate perfection.

To be enlightened would mean to expand our love to its greatest capacity without bias, without exhaustion, without fear.

Now, is this idea frightening to you? Does it seem like any fun? Do we want to be free of our suffering? Would life be meaningful if we didn’t get angry, if we didn’t feel compulsive, addictive desire, if we lived our lives to benefit others just as much as ourselves?

Without shrinking away from the idea, explore this question openly, without being biased toward acceptance or rejection. Let’s try to imagine what our day would look like if we were enlightened.

What would a slice of cake taste like when you’re enlightened?

What would making love feel like if you were enlightened?

The Mahayana Buddhist view is that each of these activities, all our activities, can become the cause.

The activities of an enlightened being, if we approach them with mindful open presence, if we give the people around us our unbiased, kindness, and love and affection.

If we’re enjoying something wonderful, we imagine universalizing it that everyone deserves such pleasures and we imagine sharing it with everyone.

And as bad things happen, imagine that you take away the similar suffering of others, so that your misfortune can become a cause for compassion and a further step toward enlightenment. May nobody suffer the way I’m suffering right now. May nobody be sick. May nobody have financial problems. May no one have arguments. May no one lose their temper.

But in such a state, do we lose ourselves? Are we obliterated if we no longer have anger, craving, jealousy, pride?

Imagine yourself for a minute in a perfected state of altruistic love, and compassion and kindness, and see what you find.

Is what you see scary? Is it liberating?

The Dalai Lama once said that everyone becomes enlightened in their own way, and we can see from his example and other highly realized beings that they each have plenty of personality. They have close friends, arguments, they share jokes. They genuinely enjoy life and feel sorrow.

The Dalai Lama once said that everyone becomes enlightened in their own way, and we can see from his example and other highly realized beings that they each have plenty of personality.

So with that example, imagine yourself in this more highly evolved form. It’s still with the personality of your particular life without changing your job or your family, your friends. Imagine just embodying by everyday example. Love, compassion, the deepest understanding of reality without changing anything outwardly at all.

Like a quiet secret you keep that manifests as joy and presence and generosity and attention for the people around you.

The state is highly engaged. It’s not hidden Inside. Enlightenment, it’s said, is being a benefit, not just blist out. It’s not a cool experience to seek out, but inner development that manifests in outer good.

Imagine enlightenment as being engaged and connected with others, not some ethereal, detached, blissed-out state.

Imagine enlightenment as being engaged and connected with others, not some ethereal, detached, blissed-out state.

Is enlightenment an end? Is it a finish line? Do you become like a God when you become enlightened? In some Buddhist teachings, they say that enlightenment is omniscient. Being aware of everything, but it’s not omnipotence having power over everything.

But we don’t know whether that’s true.

Perhaps that’s a kind of myth that suited certain minds at a certain time, or perhaps not.

In Japanese Buddhism, in Zen Buddhism, the view of enlightenment, they call Satori. It says that enlightenment is a beginning. It’s the point where you become rooted in present awareness and love and compassion in your deepest nature and capacity for open, present love.

It’s a state where you begin to see reality, and it’s a state where you keep growing. Perhaps forever. Rest in imagining this state, this idea of enlightenment as just the beginning of an altruistic adventure that we each take in our own unique way without fear, open, loving, curious, and joyfully present.

Closing the journey

Then as we ease out of this journey of the imagination into enlightenment. We can dedicate the fruits of this meditative adventure to curiously exploring this idea if it feels right to you, being open to the idea of enlightenment, of moving toward it, discovering it inside yourself, and measuring progress.

Not by the minutes you can focus or the power of your visualization, but by your capacity to pay attention to the people around you. To see impermanence and change and interdependence as the natural way of being.

To rest in the present and be content with the uncertainty and even chaos of reality, and to be okay with that.

And you can come out of the meditation.

Scott Snibbe: Thanks for joining me for our 200th episode, Is enlightenment possible? For our next episode, I speak with one of our most beloved guests, Dr. David Kittay, on the juicy topic of AI and enlightenment, something I think you’re going to really enjoy.

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