After my spiritual awakening dawned on me, I dropped out of society. All the things people strove for to “make it,” to find relief from the constant turmoil of the human ego-mind, were meaningless to me. I didn’t want what other people wanted. I wanted the “Peace of God that passeth understanding.” And I wanted to explore the spaciousness of the background instead of being focussed solely on the foreground.
I owned nothing for 5 years, including the clothes I wore, which I borrowed. The only money I had was from odd jobs for the moment. Most of the food I ate, I grew. I devoted myself to living in the light of the Divine Consciousness of the Universe. I studied the great spiritual masters and lived in inspiration. That isn’t to say I didn’t experience physical difficulties but I felt courageous and free.
Yet certain necessities of survival and family matters propelled me back into the “normal” life. Circumstances made having a regular income a must at that time. Though dropping out was appropriate for me before, now it was appropriate for me to bring the context of enlightenment into the regular workaday world. It brings to mind the old Zen Buddhist saying, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
The meaning of the quote is that:
I owned nothing for 5 years, including the clothes I wore, which I borrowed. The only money I had was from odd jobs for the moment. Most of the food I ate, I grew. I devoted myself to living in the light of the Divine Consciousness of the Universe. I studied the great spiritual masters and lived in inspiration. That isn’t to say I didn’t experience physical difficulties but I felt courageous and free.
Yet certain necessities of survival and family matters propelled me back into the “normal” life. Circumstances made having a regular income a must at that time. Though dropping out was appropriate for me before, now it was appropriate for me to bring the context of enlightenment into the regular workaday world. It brings to mind the old Zen Buddhist saying, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
The meaning of the quote is that:
- Enlightenment does not change your life. Life will still go on being life, with pain, sorrow, loss, suffering, with happiness and good times too. You just view it in a different context and don’t take it personally. You are not its puppet. You are the observer.
- Enlightenment is not about fireworks and wild ecstasy. It is simple and has to do with performing simple things mindfully. You are living in the now and not doing everything because you think the future will bring you salvation from your present unease. You are not putting yourself on display as a paragon of anything.
- Before enlightenment, you still needed to chop wood for the fire. Now most of us don’t chop wood on a daily basis, but when this proverb came out, that is what we did if we wanted a fire. The fire didn’t appear magically when we wanted it. It’s the spirit in which we do any task that is the underlying hallmark of enlightenment. Also, even if we don’t go down to the river now to fetch a bucket of water, our bodies would perish if we didn’t get the water for ourselves from the faucet or the grocery store.
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