Is a parrot really enlightened? As entertaining as it may be, a parrot reciting Buddha is still just a parrot and I would much rather know what IT thought. I can read Buddha anyway
being Enlightened -- the freedom of being Awakened from the clutches of the Grand Trickster
Not all parrots know what their saying, they just like the sounds they're taught. Even if a
parrot did know what it was saying, is it really enlightened enough to teach me anything - especially in my own language?
And as entertaining as it may be, a parrot reciting Buddha is still just a parrot and I would much
rather know what IT thought. I can read Buddha anyway.
Do you think you are Enlightened?
But, just because we think we know what Buddha had to say on a subject, doesn't mean we are enlightened.
Why is it that people use the words of others who have been dead for a very long time
as the source of their inspiration
for "living in the now"
The thing is .. Buddha never wrote English, Jesus Christ never wrote English, Mohammed never wrote English, Lao-Tzu never wrote English .. and neither did so many others that I hear being quoted ad nauseas in the intellectual debates on Spirituality.
What we read and study in the English language are what people have translated in their own way .. in words that have meaning to them.
but, do these words have meaning for us? The original texts were written in the language of a time for people of a time. In many cases, they were written in phonemes, not graphemes.
Phonemes and Mantra's
A phoneme is something that puts the mind in accord with the body. A phoneme is a sound, not a written word.
The mindless repetition of Mantra's is not going to get you enlightened.
The thing about repeating Mantra's over and over again, is that they have meaning to the body .. what the phonemes and phonetics mean to the mind is of little consequence. Every organ, every group of organs and every bodily function resonates to a specific sound frequency.
However, unless your mother used these exact same phonemes when she was pregnant with you and, unless these same phonemes are recorded in your ancestral history as part of your DNA, they are meaningless.
The Disembodied Head
Why do you need some long dead authority in order to justify the flow of your life breath ... your very existence?
To be enlightened is to have your load lightened. It is a source of amusement to me to attend a Conference where great minds argue the meaning of various texts through mouths that speak from the burden of disembodied heads they carry under their armpits ... tombs of foreign and ancient words.
Underneath the arm pit is a primary acupuncture point which controls the lungs in the act of breathing. This point also controls the muscles of the diaphragm ... and, your heart.
Being Enlightened is about freedom
Freedom, in the words of a popular song, is "nothing left to lose". How can one be enlightened if the authority for their enlightenment is the burden of holding on with ones very breath to one's ability to parrot.
When I studied Transpersonal Psychology, my lecturers wanted to know whether I could speak in my own words .. what the original writings meant to me now .. how the concepts could be translated into words that had life.
Enlightened is awakened
The Conditioned mind is not Enlightened. Being Awake is about Freedom, the Freedom to BE Free.
It is the "Grand Trickster" that thinks it can think it is enlightened.
We cannot be Free from Suffering or ignorance or the flesh or thought or self or anything else until we root out the Cause of this Suffering.
That Cause, that foundation, is none other than the Grand Trickster ... the conditioned mind. When we let him go we will be Free, for it is he who
keeps us in chains and bondage to him. One more thing: once we are Free, Really Free, we will not want to "come back" to the Slavery of the Grand Trickster.
It takes Grand Trickster at least half a second to process information and come up with an answer - from the past. There is nothing Real other than the "Here and NOW" !
The great forgetting is that the "mind stuff" that does the thinking is made up of the cells of the body that have been conditioned by the suffering.
Thus, the "Grand Trickster" parrot is no more than someone who lives at a great distance from themselves ..