Waiting For Enlightenment

Waiting for anything is wasting the present, so is looking forward to, and to remember, to reminisce, and even worse - to regret, to ruminate and hold a grudge. Yet we all do it for some reason. Maybe to our brains the present is just not entirely interesting enough. Otherwise we would not have 500 24/7 TV channels in addition to our subscriptions to magazines, texting phones, newspapers, books on tape and the Internet - to name a few.

In other words, our brains are addicted to stimulation the way our stomachs are addicted to food. We are getting more and more sophisticated in all our food choices, as well as our food-for-thought choices, but we are overfed and overstimulated. Yet, somehow this is what makes life interesting and is a sign that we have moved from mere survival, to culture and art, and even the pursuit of enlightenment. If you want to read a sophisticated magazine on Enlightenment, check out "What is Enlightenment" a magazine that has been around for about ten years and has grown into a highly regarded, intelligent and informative publication. Not just Enlightenment, but related subjects like the Universe, Psychology, Art and Technology are discussed with some of the leaders in all of these fields. "What is Enlightenment" makes a genuine effort to connect the dots and to find the patterns, the truths, and the various ways to describe them.

While we're waiting for Enlightenment, we might as well think and write about it. Kind of like being pregnant and reading all the baby magazines.

Here For Waiting

I came across the statement “We are here for waiting” today, made by a four year-old little girl in the Seattle Children’s Hospital, as posted earlier here on this blog. She was waiting to get her health back, and for her Dad to return home from a long absence. Both events were going to be far off in the future. Sometimes, what we are waiting for never comes about, yet, if we learn the lesson that can be learned from waiting itself, if we can even learn to wait infinitely, we will discover what we were really looking for all along - the present.

A sunrise, or being stuck in traffic, become the same. We are finally here, and just being here is the magic trick of uniting with the whole Universe and Eternity. Here is Home.

Waiting

I was recently invited to read "Here You Are" at the Seattle Children's Hospital. A four-year-old little girl sat down with me on a red couch, excited about such a shiny, colorful book she knew I was going to give to her as a present. I started reading and when we read the "Why am I here" page she told me she was here for waiting. As we moved on to the Wondering pages, she said she was wondering whether her Dad would ever come home. That he keeps leaving and coming back, but that he hadn't come back in a long time. We just wondered together about it in silence for a while. I was wondering about the circumstances her family might be in. Was it a divorce, a soldier Dad away on duty, or something else? We were strangely OK without answers, both of us, while looking out of the window next to us, with the leaves on a tree blowing in the wind outside. After a nice moment of silence and waiting we read the rest of the book that she seemed very satisfied with. She proudly held her new shiny book with her right arm that barely fit around it, while holding on to her rolling lillie-pad IV stand with her left as she left the playroom.

It reminded me of Osho, an Indian Mystic, who once said:"For those who can wait infinitely, things happen instantaneously." One of my favorite statements about enlightenment.