Christians and Enlightenment

“Even as a tree has a single trunk but many branches and leaves, so there is one true and perfect religion but it becomes many, as it passes through the human medium.” – Mahatma K. Gandhi

I was realizing the other day that this blog may seem as if it’s just for Buddhists. After all, “enlightenment” and “nirvana” are Buddhist constructs, right?

I think as you get to the trunk and start digging towards the roots, these distinctions blur. The holiest (as in whole) people in all religious paths I meet are so alike.

An evangelical Christian said yesterday: “I run into a lot of people that have a relationship with theology – not God.”

If you are Christian (and I must admit my own path is very inspired by Jesus, much more so than the Buddha) what does Enlightenment mean? It’s to know God, not about God and to live each moment whispering “Thy will be done” entirely without an ounce of doubt or resistance or remnants of self-interest. To be at complete rest in God.

I saw yesterday that my path has had three steps. I’m aiming to live #3 right now and that’s why I started this blog to explore my own ‘bleeding edge’ which I felt might benefit others as well.

1. There must be a better way!
2. Be still and know.
3. Thy will be done.

Unadorned

The word unadorned came to me as I thought of this blog’s design (just picked one of the free ones available with this free software) and that word seems to fit. All the way around really. Who would we be if we were unadorned? essence?

And I thought of this passage about the Beat poets of San Francisco.

“Three centuries later, Kerouac provided an American definition of the [haiku] form: “POP-American (non-Japanese) Haiku, short three-line poems, or ‘pomes’, rhyming or nonrhyming, delineating ‘little Samadhis’ if possible, usually of a Buddhist connotation, aiming toward enlightenment”…

“This actual moment! That bedraggled crow! This moonlit evening, that cold rain on your skull! There you stand, inhabiting your body with animal clarity, wide-open senses, and no preconception or abstract idea can touch the experience itself. Buddhists call this tattva, thusness. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams famously wrote, setting ten thousand poems free from abstraction. He could have been reading Basho: “To know the pine, go to the pine. To know the bamboo, go to the bamboo.”

…Haiku’s simplicity of spirit is what so quickly allies it to Zen Buddhism. I like to think the current popularity of Zen in America is due in part to a tenacious belief that we remain a no-nonsense people, a people who talk straight and try to keep life simple – this and a mounting restlessness with our overabundance of things… This Thoreau-like hunger for unadorned living, and the belief that the richest insights can only be acquired through close-to-the-bone experience, carries on in the spirit of modern poets. It is nowhere more evident than in the embrace of the haiku ethic.”

- from “Rucksack Poetry: How Haiku Found a Home in America”, Winter 2004, Tricycle, (in The Best Buddhist Writing 2005 anthology)

When two or more are gathered in my name

“I sell happiness. I sell enlightenment,” said Rajneesh, popularly known as the Cadillac guru or Osho, in an interview with Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes.

But how can you sell what one is and what is?

I’m not selling enlightenment. That’s free.

Eventually Dwelve will be a community space. Perhaps we can support each other in sustaining a livelihood so we can go about our real work. And engage in everyday work so that it brings us face to face with pure reality .

In highly motivated, spiritually-disciplined groups, approximately fifty to fifty-five percent of the people in the group reach the goal of Unconditional Love (e.g. twelve-step groups, spiritual/religious ashram devotees, monastic renunciates, members of spiritual communities, such as Zen monasteries, etc.) – Transcending the Levels of Consciousness: The Stairway to Enlightenment, by David Hawkins

Nirvana now

I was always looking for the right tool, the right platform, the right time to launch Dwelve.

Now, as always, is the right time.

No this isn’t the final site, final template, or even final URL. Sure. Sometime soon it’ll be Dwelve.com. Why wait for the perfect moment, whateverthatis.

What’s it about? People, places, pointers, reviews and interviews to everyday enlightment. Momentary mindfulness. Nirvana now.

“To know much and to taste nothing – of what use is that?” – Bonaventure