27 Apr '05 20:52>
Originally posted by eagles54It depends crucially on how "enlightenment" is understood.
Then there is a causal relationship between meditation practice and enlightenment that just wasn't apparent in the story before.
Thank you.
If it's seen as a "process" that occurs in progressive stages, then yes, there is a causal relationship between practice and enlightenment.
But if enlightenment is seen as not a process, but rather a direct recognition of what is already the case, then from the ultimate perspective there is no causal relationship between enlightenment and effort of any sort.
In my own experience, both of these carry truth. The first is the truth of relative reality -- space, time, bodies, cause and effect. The second is the truth of "absolute" reality, which is not defined by space, time, bodies, or cause and effect, but rather exists prior to the movement of thought. Both space and time are concepts, the experience of which is influenced by our conceptual filters. When not caught up in confused thinking -- that is, when not identified with thought -- our experience of space and time changes. We begin to directly experience "no separation" (no space) and the "eternal now" (no time).
Another analogy -- clearly there is a direct relationship between the world and our mind (in terms of our subjective experience). When we go to sleep each night, what happens to the world (for us)? Effectively, it disappears. We have no experience of it. When we wake up in the morning, lo and behold, there is the world again.
The "shifting" from sleep to waking is akin to the shifting from delusion to enlightenment. Meditation in this analogy can be likened to a gradual movement from deep sleep (including bad dreams) to light sleep and good dreams, to hovering on the edge of awakening, and then finally to simply waking up.
The actual waking up is something like a quantum shift, radical and sudden. Much like how we wake up in the morning and realize that the entire night we just went through was nothing but a series of dreams.
But was our awakening actually caused by anything? We can ascribe a number of natural biological processes to the actual movement from sleep to waking up in the morning, but from another perspective it just happened naturally when we were ready and the time was right. When our body had slept enough, you might say...