You Don’t Have to Do Anything For Enlightenment

If you take a good look at the way you have been put together and the way you function, you will find that inside your head there is a whole program stamped into you, a set of demands about how the world should be, how you should be, and what you should want. Now, however old you are or wherever you go, your computer goes along with you and is active and operating at each conscious moment of the day. It is imperiously insisting that its demands be met by life, by people, and by you. If the demands are met, the computer allows you the only peace you can ever know —a temporary respite from negative emotions. If the demands are not met, even though it is no fault of yours, the computer generates negative emotions that cause you to suffer. It becomes a way of life. It is a pathetic existence that is constantly at the mercy of things and people as you try desperately to make life conform to your programming’s demands.

In short, you’ve been trained to upset yourself. For instance, when other people don’t live up to your computer’s expectations, it torments you with frustration, anger, or bitterness. When things are not under your control, or the future is uncertain, your computer insists that you experience anxiety, tension, or worry. Then you expend a lot of energy coping with these negative emotions by expending even more energy trying to rearrange the world around you so that the demands of your computer will be met. If that happens, you will be granted a measure of precarious peace; it’s precarious because at any moment, some trifle—a plane delay, a device that doesn’t work, a document that hasn’t arrived, a spot on your tie or blouse, you name it—it is going to be out of conformity with your computer’s programming, and the computer will insist that you become upset again.

Who is responsible for the programming?

Not you. Would anyone in their right mind sit down and knowingly and willingly and deliberately upset themselves. It isn’t really you who decided even such basics as your wants, desires, and so-called needs, your values, your tastes, and your attitudes. It was your parents, your society, your culture, your religion, and your past experiences that fed the operating instructions into your computer.

These things depend on the criteria society establishes; they depend on your social conditioning that was stamped into you. You’ve been programmed with this. You’ve been conditioned this way. This is what you’ve got to understand. These things in you that you struggle to fix just need to be understood. If you understood them, they would change.

You see, you don’t have to do anything for enlightenment. You don’t have to do anything for liberation and spirituality. All you have to do is see something, understand something. If you would understand it, you would be free.

Are you getting some inkling of what it would mean if you really grasped this? You’d be above it all. That’s one definition of spirituality. Spirituality means no longer being at the mercy of an event, or a person, or anything else. say not to love people. It’s important hear that. You’re no longer at the mercy of an event, or of a person, or of anything else. In other words, no matter what happens, you no longer upset yourself.