Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.
Interpretation
Enlightenment is achieved through the release of desires and goals rather than through striving for them.
This quote suggests that true enlightenment is not about attaining a specific achievement or state but rather about relinquishing the constant pursuit of goals and desires that bind us. It conveys the idea that inner peace and understanding come from letting go of our incessant want for more, thus allowing us to be present in the moment and fully experience life without the distractions of personal ambitions.
In practice
During a meditation workshop, the instructor quoted Joko Beck to emphasize the importance of letting go of expectations.
What does open us is sharing our vulnerabilities. Sometimes we see a couple who has done this difficult work over a lifetime. In the process, they have grown old together. We can sense the enormous comfort, the shared quality of ease between these people. It is beautiful, and very rare. Without this quality of openness and vulnerability, partners don't really know each other; they are one image living with another image.
We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are; not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life.
There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts. We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here.
How do we know if our practice is a real practice? Only by one thing: more and more, we just see the wonder. What is the wonder? I don't know. We can't know such things through thinking. But we always know it when it's there.
The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend to all the happiness of man.
Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.
Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone.
Tend to choose what is popular over what is right when they are in conflict. They desire to fit in both at church and outside of church; they care more about what people think of their actions (like church attendance and giving) than what God thinks of their hearts and lives.
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ...If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
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