Quote of the Imaginary Moment by Byron Katie
If you understand that the world isn’t separated into self and other, you’ll see very clearly that there is no such thing as enlightenment. There can’t be. After all, who is there to be enlightened? You would have to be someone before you could experience enlightenment. There would have to be an ego to get free. But egos don’t get free.
It’s only when you see the Buddha as a separate self that you can form the concept that he’s enlightened. All these spiritual concepts are just creations of mind. What do “I” know of this imagined form you call “me”? Many of the monks who were listening to the Buddha must have realized who he was: no one. But some of them may have wanted to treat him like a guru, to put him in a different category, to think that he was superior to them, a more evolved or exalted being. They may have looked at him with starry-eyed adoration…How could he play into their projections? He kept saying that he didn’t have anything they didn’t have…The story of having an enlightened master, as sweet as it may feel, is the story of separation.
People think that self-realization is something special. But we’re not at home until we’re at home in the ordinary. That’s where it feels comfortable. Someone will say, “How are you?” and I might say, “Fine.” It has joined; it has penetrated. So I’m unrecognizable. I’m standing with everyone else on the corner of the street, eating the hot dog, watching the band go by. I’m neither more nor less than you. If we’re even one breath more or one breath less than anyone else, we’re not at home.
There’s no answer for anything. We can’t explain anything essential in our lives. But why would you want to explain? Does that make you any happier?...There can’t be any teaching offered by the Buddha, because all teachings are dissolved, just like the construct that is happening in your mind right now as you read. It’s all imagined; there’s nothing to teach. Where does the wind go on a still day? And the breath you just took— doesn’t it exist now only as pure imagination? You noticed the breath flowing into your nostrils, and when you don’t have any thought of a past, this is the first breath that has ever been breathed, and now it’s gone. How can you know that it ever happened at all?
The truth is so simple. Every word said, every teaching given, no matter how valuable, leaves a construct where in reality none exists. It assumes someone listening, someone speaking, something to be known. In trying to tell the truth, it creates something extra. It adds something unnecessary to what is, and thus it becomes a lie.
Byron Katie, excerpt from her book, " Mind at Home with Itself"
via Miranda
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