I take that to mean that before enlightenment, we mistake the labels for the things themselves. When we awaken, we see that everything is the same thing but in order to communicate with others and investigate exactly what we are, we still need our labelling system

Those of us with the biggest egos are in need of the greatest support, in order to fulfil that ego.

What do you think enlightenment is?

All these things, without being named, and saying 'that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot.' When you don't name things anymore, you start seeing them. Because say when a person says 'I see a leaf,' immediately, one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing outlined in black and filled in with flat green. No leaf looks like that. No leaves--leaves are not green. That's why Lao-Tzu said 'the five colors make a man blind, the five tones make a man deaf,' because if you can only see five colors, you're blind, and if you can only hear five tones in music, you're deaf. You see, if you force sound into five tones, you force color into five colors, you're blind and deaf. The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound. And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and the world of sound that you really begin to hear it and see it.

Lecture On Zen
by Alan Watts
http://deoxy.org/w_lectur.htm

What distinguishes an enlightened person from a non-enlightened person?

I am he as you are he as you are me as we are all together.

Is it an end in and of itself, or a process/journey?

What is the purpose of enlightenment.. ?

You may include your opinion of the process in getting there, which is always interesting, but my main focus is:
What do you think enlightenment is?
What distinguishes an enlightened person from a non-enlightened person?
Is it an end in and of itself, or a process/journey?
What is the purpose of enlightenment..

Suddenly, everything falls into place in a way that reveals something that was always there right in front of you all along - but you were not ready yet to see. Typically, at least in my view, it's a moment where one has a unifying vision that ties everything together in a complete picture.

I am not saying stop all labelling....I am just trying to point out often same words can mean different things to different people and one must be careful not to make any assumptions one is understand in the way one thinks. I guess an enlightened person would remember this. :)

Late one night the female Zen adept Chiyono was carrying water in an old wooden bucket when she happened to glance across the surface of the water and saw the reflection of the moon. As she walked the bucket began to come apart and the bottom of the pail broke through, with the water suddenly disappearing into the soil beneath her feet and the moon's reflection disappearing along with it. In that instant the young woman realized that the moon she had been looking at was just a reflection of the real thing...just as her whole life had been. She turned to look at the moon in all it's silent glory, her mind was ripe, and that was it...Enlightenment.

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

- Albert Einstein

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

-William Blake
Auguries of Innocence

In Buddhism, they speak of the three dignities of man. Walking, standing, sitting, and lying. And they say when you sit, just sit. When you walk, just walk. But whatever you do, don't wobble. In fact, of course, you can wobble, if you really wobble well.

- Alan Watts
on Zen Buddhism

http://www.dharmaweb.org/index.php/Alan_Watts_on_Zen_Buddhism

When the old master *Hiakajo was asked "What is Zen?" he said "When hungry, eat, when tired, sleep," and they said, "Well isn't that what everybody does? Aren't you just like ordinary people?" "Oh no," he said, "they don't do anything of the kind. When they're hungry, they don't just eat, they think of all sorts of things. When they're tired, they don't just sleep, but dream all sorts of dreams." I know the Yun-Mens won't like that, but there comes a time when you just dream yourself out, and no more dreams. You sleep deeply and breathe from your heels. Now, therefore, Za-zen, or sitting Zen, is a very, very good thing in the Western world. We have been running around far too much. It's all right; we've been active, and our action has achieved a lot of good things. But as Aristotle pointed out long ago--and this is one of the good things about Aristotle. He said "the goal of action is contemplation." In other words, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, but what's it all about? Especially when people are busy because they think they're GOING somewhere, that they're going to get something and attain something. There's quite a good deal of point to action if you know you're not going anywhere. If you act like you dance, or like you sing or play music, then you're really not going anywhere, you're just doing pure action, but if you act with a thought in mind that as a result of action you are eventually going to arrive at someplace where everything will be alright. Then you are on a squirrel cage, hopelessly condemned to what the Buddhists call _samsara_, the round, or rat-race of birth and death, because you think you're going to go somewhere. You're already there. And it is only a person who has discovered that he is already there who is capable of action, because he doesn't act frantically with the thought that he's going to get somewhere. He acts like he can go into walking meditation at that point, you see, where we walk not because we are in a great, great hurry to get to a destination, but because the walking itself is great. The walking itself is the meditation. And when you watch Zen monks walk, it's very fascinating. They have a different kind of walk from everybody else in Japan. Most Japanese shuffle along, or if they wear Western clothes, they race and hurry like we do. Zen monks have a peculiar swing when they walk, and you have the feeling they walk rather the same way as a cat. There's something about it that isn't hesitant; they're going along all right, they're not sort of vagueing around, but they're walking just to walk. And that's walking meditation. But the point is that one cannot act creatively, except on the basiss of stillness. Of having a mind that is capable from time to time of stopping thinking. And so this practice of sitting may seem very difficult at first, because if you sit in the Buddhist way, it makes your legs ache. Most Westerners start to fidget; they find it very boring to sit for a long time, but the reason they find it boring is that they're still thinking. If you weren't thinking, you wouldn't notice the passage of time, and as a matter of fact, far from being boring, the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named, and saying "that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot." When you don't name things anymore, you start seeing them.

- Ibid

Sadly, when I come back in this world it seems I cannot remember. It sooooo annoys me....

- annasthasia

If you hold on to it, say "now I've got it," it's gone out of the window, because the minute you grab the living thing, it's like catching a handful of water, the harder you clutch, the faster it squirts through your fingers. There's nothing to get hold of, because you don't NEED to get hold of anything. You had it from the beginning

The _bodhisattva_, you see, who doesn't go off into a nirvana and stay there forever and ever, but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it, too, he doesn't come back because he feels he has some solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious cant. He comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same. He sees all other beings as buddhas. He sees them, to use a phrase of G.K. Chesterton's, "but now a great thing in the street, seems any human nod, where move in strange democracies a million masks of god." And it's fantastic to look at people and see that they really, deep down, are enlightened. They're It. They're faces of the divine. And they look at you, and they say "oh no, but I'm not divine. I'm just ordinary little me." You look at them in a funny way, and here you see the buddha nature looking out of their eyes, straight at you, and saying it's not, and saying it quite sincerely. And that's why, when you get up against a great guru, the Zen master, or whatever, he has a funny look in his eyes. When you say "I have a problem, guru. I'm really mixed up, I don't understand," he looks at you in this queer way, and you think "oh dear me, he's reading my most secret thoughts. He's seeing all the awful things I am, all my cowardice, all my shortcomings." He isn't doing anything of the kind; he isn't even interested in such things. He's looking at, if I may use Hindu terminology, he's looking at Shiva, in you, saying "my god, Shiva, won't you come off it?"

So then, you see, the _bodhisattva_, who is--I'm assuming quite a knowledge of Buddhism in this assembly--but the _bodhisattva_ as distinct from the pratyeka-buddha, bodhisattva doesn't go off into nirvana, he doesn't go off into permanant withdrawn ecstasy, he doesn't go off into a kind of catatonic _samadhi_. That's all right. There are people who can do that; that's their vocation. That's their specialty, just as a long thing is the long body of buddha, and a short thing is the short body of buddha. But if you really understand that Zen, that buddhist idea of enlightenment is not comprehended in the idea of the transcendental, neither is it comprehended in the idea of the ordinary. Not in terms with the infinite, not in terms with the finite. Not in terms of the eternal, not in terms of the temporal, because they're all concepts. So, let me say again, I am not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and methodical way as being schoolteacherish, and saying "if you were NICE people, that's what you would do." For heaven's sake, don't be nice people. But the thing is, that unless you do have that basic framework of a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline, the force of liberation will blow the world to pieces. It's too strong a current for the wire. So then, it's terribly important to see beyond ecstasy. Ecstasy here is the soft and lovable flesh, huggable and kissable, and that's very good. But beyond ecstasy are bones, what we call hard facts. Hard facts of everyday life, and incidentally, we shouldn't forget to mention the soft facts; there are many of them. But then the hard fact, it is what we mean, the world in an ordinary, everyday state of consciousness. To find out that that is really no different from the world of supreme ecstasy, well, it's rather like this:

Let's suppose, as so often happens, you think of ecstasy as insight, as seeing light. There's a Zen poem which says

A sudden crash of thunder. The mind doors burst open, and there sits the ordinary old man.

See?

There's a sudden vision. Satori! Breaking! Wowee! And the doors of the mind are blown apart, and there sits the ordinary old man. It's just little you, you know? Lightning flashes, sparks shower. In one blink of your eyes, you've missed seeing it. Why? Because here is the light. The light, the light, the light, every mystic in the world has "seen the light." That brilliant, blazing energy, brighter than a thousand suns, it is locked up in everything. Now imagine this. Imagine you're seeing it. Like you see aureoles around buddhas. Like you see the beatific vision at the end of Dante's "Paradiso." Vivid, vivid light, so bright that it is like the clear light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's beyond light, it's so bright. And you watch it receeding from you. And on the edges, like a great star, there becomes a rim of red. And beyond that, a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You see this great mandela appearing with great suns, and beyond the violet, there's black. Black, like obsidian, not flat black, but transparent black, like lacquer. And again, blazing out of the black, as the _yang_ comes from the _yin_, more light. Going, going, going. And along with this light, there comes sound. There is a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can't hear it, so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then along with the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals, down, down, down, until it gets to a deep thundering base which is so vibrant that it turn it turns into something solid, and you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures. Now all this time, you've been watching a kind of thing radiating out. "But," it says, "you know, this isn't all I can do," and the rays start dancing like this, and the sound starts waving, too, as it comes out, and the textures start varying themselves, and they say, well, you've been looking at this this as I've been describing it so far in a flat dimension. Let's add a third dimension; it's going to come right at you now. And meanwhile, it says, we're not going to just do like this, we're going to do little curlicues. And it says, "well, that's just the beginning!" Making squares and turns, and then suddenly you see in all the little details that become so intense, that all sorts of subfigures are contained in what you originally thought were the main figures, and the sound starts going all different, amazing complexities if sound all over the place, and this thing's going, going, going, and you think you're going to go out of your mind, when suddenly it turns into...

Why, us, sitting around here.

- Alan Watts

Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?
— Hakuin Ekaku

"...in the beginning a monk first thinks a kōan is an inert object upon which to focus attention; after a long period of consecutive repetition, one realizes that the kōan is also a dynamic activity, the very activity of seeking an answer to the kōan. The kōan is both the object being sought and the relentless seeking itself. In a kōan, the self sees the self not directly but under the guise of the kōan...When one realizes ("makes real") this identity, then two hands have become one. The practitioner becomes the kōan that he or she is trying to understand. That is the sound of one hand." — G. Victor Sogen Hori, Translating the Zen Phrase Book

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan

The Divinity within me perceives and adores the Divinity within you.

Hours later we were waiting together for the subway to open. We were back outside now, on another glorious sunny spring morning sitting on a bench together. We were in an area of town that had quite a few passing homeless people, and once again "L." had managed to say something to me that caused this moment of satori in my heart and soul.

One second they were just " bums " . After she finished speaking, they became me - and I became them. I saw them for the first time as the people, and the souls, that they really had been all for that time.

It seemed so much like part of some plan. Literally a few minutes later, while I was still reeling from that moment of sudden enlightenment, a rather strange looking homeless man walked up to us - holding a clean winter jacket in his hands.

He was very polite, and he had noticed us sitting together there.

He asked us only one thing. He was dressed warmly, and he didn't need the coat he was holding. He politely asked us if he could leave it on the bench beside ours. His only request to us was that we could tell anyone that wanted it to take it.

And then he walked away...

On cue, about ten minutes later, this East Indian fellow walked by - in shorts. In March... It must have been ten or fifteen degrees Celsius...

He was shivering. I have no idea how, or even why, he could have been dressed like that on such a day. He looked rather surprised at the warm winter coat on the bench beside us, and we motioned to him to take it. We explained all about the man, and his gift.

He took the jacket off the bench, slipped it on over his shoulders, zipped it up - and walked off happy at his sudden change in fortune.

I looked up at that clear blue spring sky, and said a simple thank you for the lesson that I had just received.

There are no coincidences in life, I truly believe that to be the case. There are just messages that we can chose to ignore - or to learn from.

(Thanks L. , for pointing that one out to me.)

- "Walking along the road to satori on a fifteen hour date"

Do you think there are times when Knowledge can be an obstacle to enlightenment? Do you feel that "learned" people have more difficulty with enlightenment because of their ego?

I have come back from my uncle's funeral...

I am exhausted.... but... just to share... on my way to the funeral, I saw two sets of numbers that just kept coming back...

Numbers 777, 444 in all kinds of combinations...

my car's odomoeter... 77 777 (I know... yea... )
The one to count kilometers from point at to point c.... 44.44

Licence plate of a truck in front of me... 77...44... in the number... there were others but they were the first two and the last two...

44 on those little gree tabs that count the kilometers on the highways...

Then.... on the pew at the church I noticed the number 74... I did not chose that pew. My father did... He had no idea that I had seen those numbers on my way to the funeral...

Then... on my way back from the funeral, I saw a crow in the middle of the highway just there, facing me... This road is a two way street but a highway nonetheless. I slowed down and had to stop the crow would not move and I was not about to hit it with my car... I looked at the back of my mirror there was no cars...

Then, I looked at the crow almost about to toot my horn to try and make it go away from the road... It then, in slow motion almost spread out its wings and flew straight up slowly and on the right side of its body, the right wing had a white "stripe"... I figure a stripe of white feathers and it did something that I have never seen a bird do... it spiraled upwards with its wings fully deployed and saw its wings fully spread out and the white stripe was not only on the inside of its right wing but on the outside of its wing also...

I thought of a POF friend telling me that crows mean they are taking the spirit to the light... It was a beautiful sight to see this crow with its wings stretched out and spiralling towards the bright sunny rays of sunshine up to the sky...

I had tears falling down and remembered what an other POF friend told us when it is important to release and led the feeling go through you... Then, I said thank you to the crow and tried to let the feelings, (I have no words to describe those feelings...) , I felt this surge of energy just burst out of my chest and I felt sooooooo at peace... I remembered what an other POF friend said... ground yourself... I breathed deeply and let my tears flow and let the gates of my chest open and I have finally "found" a place for me to be able to cope...

This gift for me is soooo priceless.... I have no intentions of becoming part of any organized religions EVER...

The only "need" I have is to learn and finally understand that I am not alone and that we all have these "gifts" if only we let our soul come through... Be rooted in mother earth and stand on our own two feet and reach for the sky while never forgetting the roots where we come from...

To me this is the essence of Native spirituality... I never intented to "steal" any sacred practices... I just need to be TRUE to myself and show compassion and love and all the while knowing my limitations... Respect myself and let people confide and lead by example...

I am starting to understand little by little and I do "get it". I sooooo "get it".

We need to unite and just accept each other for who we are and grow and become more than the sum... (I am refering to the synergy effect...)

Anyway...

Thank you for taking the time to read and I am sincere in saying... Do take the time to not just read this thread with your eyes but to read it with your soul... I am sure all of you will "get it.

btw does OP mean original post or original poster? Enlighten me here...

Enlightenment is the space between "who am I" and "why am I here"...

It's the time between the "realization of being" and "relationship to being"...

It's the continuum between "life" and "living".

So finally... Enlightenment is the "peace that passes understanding" which we find only in the space time continuum of the pursuit of truth.
(Oh that's gooood, I need to write that down!) .

Wow... This thread makes me think...

Zen koans are those "impossible" questions that get asked to a student, which challenges him to see the essential problem with "rational" thought. It's a form of "jamming that stick into the spokes of his rational bicycle" , and throwing him over it's handlebars.

There are no coincidences in life, I truly believe that to be the case. There are just messages that we can chose to ignore - or to learn from.

Do you think there are times when Knowledge can be an obstacle to enlightenment?

Do you feel that "learned" people have more difficulty with enlightenment because of their ego?