Enlightenment is Not Believing a Thought You Think

Enlightenment is the direct experience of Reality itself, without going through the mind to overlay a perceptual filter through associating the experience with thought.

The mind is simply a tool. It’s a very powerful tool and a very useful tool. It plays a role in physical creation. Every car you’ve driven and every building you’ve ever walked into was first just a thought in someone’s head. Eventually the thought was identified as appropriate so it was made manifest through action.

However, a thought can never be the Truth itself.

You can think about drinking a glass of water all you want until you die, but the only thing that will do you any good is actually drinking the water.

You can hold the glass and drink the water without consciously thinking about it. The thoughts and the experience are two totally different things, completely different realities.

You can talk about a glass of water all you want, but the words are not the water. The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.

Thoughts are symbolic, conceptual ideas, pointers, but they are not the Truth itself. Thought can never be anything other than thought. Everything is exactly what it is.

Reality just is. You just are. You are. I am.

There is a BIG difference between thoughts and Reality. In fact, the two are mutually exclusive.

The thing is though that the mind has become almost like a cancer. It has taken over Reality and replaced it with its own symbolic reality that only exists within the mind itself. The mind is supporting itself with thoughts created by itself. People spend more time thinking about something than actually having the experiencing the experience itself.

This has happened to such an extent that the “I” that we are who uses the tool called the mind now goes to the tool to loop back and figure out what it is. “Who am I?”

The response is called a self-image, an image that represents who we *think* we are.

Now don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing bad or wrong about the mind. It’s a tool that helps us do certain things in the world. It’s a tool like a hammer or a chair, but it doesn’t actually define who we are. If we asked the chair who we are or what we should do in a particular situation, if the chair could speak, it would probably respond, “What are you asking me for? That’s not what I’m designed for.” As mentioned earlier, the cars and buildings you’ve experienced in your reality were all first thoughts before they came into physical manifestation.

We’ve all had the experience of the mind battling itself, trying to decide what to do and who I am.

“I’m a good person, bad person, shy person, confident person, happy person, sad person.” and on and on and on.

None of those ideas are based in Reality. They are just thoughts. Thoughts are just thoughts.

Sure we could realize for ourselves that the mind has no capacity to actually determine Truth in the first place, but let’s pretend that it could, just for the sake of argument. One can have the direct experience of ultimate Reality, or even experience something as simple as drinking a glass of water, but the mind can never truly BE the glass of water, nor can it be any other object or experience.

Nothing in the nature of thought is ultimately true. As soon as we take an object or experience and conceptualize it, store it in our memory, and attach descriptions and ideas to it, what we have captured is a sign post that points to something larger than itself.

As soon as you take an experience and say to yourself, “Now I know the Truth,” you’ve lost it. Really, you’ve just created a symbol that points to the Truth, but you aren’t looking at the Truth itself.

Enlightenment comes down to not believing a single thought the mind thinks, not because the thoughts are within the dualistic realm of true and false and identified to be false, but because Truth itself is beyond the realm of duality entirely. It simply can not be contained in word, thought, or languaged form. The mind simply can’t wrap itself around Truth.

In fact, Truth itself is infinite. How would a mind wrap itself around infinity? Can the mind we have comprehend the biggest number in the world? The fact that the universe expands infinitely far?

The thoughts may be in alignment with your experience, they may not. Either way, they are not the Truth itself, only a symbolic representation of it.

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