There have been so many searching for so many thousands of years for enlightenment. The search goes on and on. There is nothing more unrequited than the hunger for truth when you know it is within your grasp, but you simply cannot reach out and grab it.
So what do I mean when I say the entire brain is enlightened? What I mean is that if we were aware of everything our brain is experiencing, we would instantly experience enlightenment. But we have chosen to only be aware of certain selected things about the brain’s experience of Life. To be more specific, we have become enamored with one aspect of the brain’s experience to the exclusion of all others. We are so plugged into the voice in our heads that sounds like you talking to you that we have focus on it to the exclusion of everything else in our field of awareness.
It is very much like falling in love with a beautiful woman. She is gorgeous, lovely, cute – we are smitten. We get married and spend years with her. But we really never get to know her as a person because the only thing we ever focused on was her physical qualities.
Those of us who have experienced the abiding love that deepens with the years in a relationship, know what we would be missing if we only focused on one facet of our mate.
This is what we have done with our brains. Verbal thought is the function of a couple of areas isolated in the left hemisphere of the brain. But we identify that function as “me” and as long as we do, we never really become aware of the depth of our true experience of life. If we did, we would instantly experience what the sages call enlightenment.
The entire right hemisphere and the deep structures of the brain are nonverbal. What the heck are they up to? As long as we identify heavily with verbal thought, we will never experience the depth of the nonverbal. And yet a whole new world waits.
The nonverbal invites us to look further, to experience deeper. But we have to do something for ourselves to find that new world. We have to put down the boom box with the game-show--host that is narrating our lives. Then we can stop thinking life and start living enlightenment.
