The journey to Enlightenment

Then one fish said, “I think my great grandfather had seen the ocean!” A second fish said, “Yes, yes. I have heard about this.” A third fish spoke up, “Yes, certainly, his great-grandfather had seen the ocean.” So the fish built a huge temple and made a statue of the great-grandfather of the first fish. They said, “He had seen the ocean. He had been connected with the ocean.”

Enlightenment cannot be talked about or understood at second-hand. It is the very core of our being; it implies the experience of going into the core of our self and living our life from there. We all come into this world gifted with innocence, but gradually, as we became more intelligent, we lost our innocence.
The reversal of this journey is enlightenment; it is the act of recovering our innocence despite the intelligence we have developed.

Enlightenment is that state of maturity, in which our self is unshakable by any circumstance. It is when we do not identify our self with limited boundaries; we feel that ‘all that exists in this universe belongs to me’.
It is easy to define what not enlightenment is. It appears when we limit our self by saying, ‘I belong to this particular place’. Many people around the world are stuck in that mental age group. We attribute glory to our ethnic group, religion or culture just because we belong to it, not because we see it for what it is. If one could take credit for all that exists throughout the ages and feels that ‘all this belongs to me’, then that is a sign of maturity. We should be able to say, ‘All this is my wealth, because I belong to the Divine’. The Divine has manifested itself in the form of various kinds of knowledge, depending upon the circumstances of space and time.

The whole evolution of man is from being somebody to being nobody - and so, from being nobody to being everybody. As young children, we have that sense of belongingness with other beings. But as we grow up, we lose that innocence and become more cunning.
Enlightenment is that rare combination of innocence and intelligence, a state that is reached after ignorance and cunning have been renounced. We must have the words to express our inner being; and at the same time, we must know the value of remaining silent. In such a state, the mind is fully in the present moment. Whatever is necessary is revealed to us in a natural way. We simply have to sit and the song flows through us.