“Many people have the Great Vehicle Root Nature, but there are also many people who lie. Having cultivated without success, such people claim to have the way. Though they have not certified the fruit, they claim to be certified sages.” –Bodhidharma

Quite often this little site receives email from someone writing to say that they are enlightened. The letters usually run something like this: “After years of hard work I found my master and awoke in her presence. I am now filled with light and joy. Everything shines. I am done with worry and pain. That is over forever. I do not know what I will do next, but finally I understand. It is all so funny. Now I am done.”

We are always filled with joy to hear that someone is happier than they were. Yet it is our own small experience that true awakening may be rather different than the release and emotional catharsis so many describe. And different too from mere understanding. This lovely poem by Hafiz, translated and transliterated by Daniel Ladinsky speaks beautifully to this:

Nothing needs to happen. Happening is a trick of the light - ephemera only. Love is never ending, filling and overflowing forever. Why try to impede its flow with the concept that you are ‘awake’, or need to be. If Truth can be attained, it can also be lost. Surely that which can be gained or lost is mere ephemera? True awakening, therefore cannot be about gaining new ideas, concepts, understandings, states, perceptions, epiphanies. Perhaps instead it is an unsophisticated state of affairs - a simplicity where nothing more needs to be added. True awakening is what occurs automatically every morning before you arise. But we choose to ignore it, foregoing freedom in the obfuscating belief that there is something more to be attained.