Enlightenment

Buddhists talk about enlightenment like it's some sort of secret that you can obtain after spending your whole life. They say it's peaceful, it's joyous, it's happiness, it's purity, it's wisdom. Christians talk about the rapture like it's peaceful, it's joyous, it's happiness, purity and wisdom.

Men react positively to being kicked while they're down, yelled at and spit upon whereas women react negatively to being kicked while they're down, yelled at and spit upon but react positively to venting and complaining. Men hate wining, bitching, and moaning.

Some might tell you that there is only one way to enlightenment. That there is one way to heaven. That there is only one way into paradise. That there is a formula for peace, that this world is solvable and that there is a solution to everything.

I feel I found enlightenment a long time ago and I'm finally willing to admit that I found it.

Let me argue that claim using numbered points, though, having been enlightened all I can say is that if this doesn't make sense and it makes you upset or damn unhappy, even upset...well, you don't understand it because you're not enlightened.

1. You CAN control everything in your life, and if you're enlightened enough you can even control other people. How? Through various tricks of the mind such as re-framing, forced positivity, &c.

2. Life's cyclical. If you want to be ultra happy, you have to be ultra sad. The most happiness you can experience in life is the climax point where you've finally overcome your lowest of lows. Why? Because our entire lives are all about experiences. We have ingrained DEEPLY inside of us the natural desire for the next best thing. If we clutch greatness in our hands we want more. It's greedy and the longer we go without it, the more we want it and the more upset it makes us that we can't have it.

3. EVERYONE is arrogant. No one exempt from the arrogancy bug. We all want to think that we know something--or, at least we WANT to think that we know things. This is because you can't truly "know" anything abstract and even many concrete 'facts'. The only knowledge we can really be sure of are the things we are touching, smelling, tasting, seeing--and only in that moment! At any moment we can lose those experiences--if you die, your senses (which constitute your experiences) will end. What you hold in your hands you will lose. What you smell, taste, see--all gone. But you find comfort in thinking you KNOW something and have made something concrete out of this life.

4. The only other thing you can experience in this life is your own thoughts and imaginations, and your imaginary world is JUST AS POWERFUL as your reality. What you perceive you are experiencing as reality is just as powerful, maybe even more powerful than the reality of things. This is why, when we get sucked into movies, our emotions take over and we find ourselves crying in our seats. This is why, when we think someone has betrayed you, you still feel things, even when you discover afterwards that it was only something you thought.

5. Whether your own relative truth is the same as the universal truth, it doesn't matter because what you experience is real. Whether what happens in soap operas is real, or even realistic, if it can create a response from you, then in that moment it is real, you made it real when you reacted. When it made you upset, it was as if that scene was real. Whether your reason for being unhappy right now is justified or not, you really are unhappy!

6.  The only way for you to improve your situation is to change something in your life. Nothing changes, for you, without changing them yourself. This may involve various tricks of the mind, such as re-framing, forced positivity, &c. or it might require physical change on your part, but nothing will change on its own.

7. Yet the world is always changing. This is partly because other people have realized they want to change their lives for the better, and partly because this world we live in, the universe controlled by natural laws or the world created by mankind controlled by civic laws, is constantly changing in order to still exist. You can't control the changes, but you can influence them, and with enough support from other people you can shape them.

8. You can however, control your emotions. You can control how you react and respond and because you can control how things make you feel, you can control your experiences. You can control how you experience things. You can control how things shape your character and you can even control whether your experiences really are shaping you or not.  If you want negative experiences to make you stronger, you can rise above them, but if you don't do anything, then your experiences will shape you negatively.

9. The key to getting what you want out of life is to start by figuring out what you want, because if you have no wants or desires, or you are unsure what they are, then you will revert to whatever present care you have, and your present cares are shaped by your present experiences, and if you don't control those experiences, they will be 9 times out of 10 be negative.

10. Occasionally, you get a lucky break. Lucky situations, where complex details works in your favor, are the product of preparation and hard work. The effort and energy that you put into your life will always pay off no matter what; but unless you are entirely skilled, that effort and energy will return to you in a form that you don't entirely realize and possibly not all at once. Hard work always brings immense benefits and easy work will always bring simple benefits.

11. Just because you become enlightened, just because you see how the universe works and you have come to terms with it and you have learned to control it, that doesn't mean that you won't have hard times. It is all a part of the cycles, remember that in order to feel joy you first have to feel pain and the more pain you feel the more good that will come from it.

12. Self inflicted pain is caused by using positive energy in a negative way. If you want to be happy, don't force yourself to the lowest depths, because it doesn't work that way, you are wasting the control over life that you do have.

13. You are a free agent; you are moving through this life on your own and the decisions you make are entirely yours. No one can make decisions for you, and as such, no one can change your life for you or experience the same things that you experience. This makes you entirely unique.

14. Although you are an isolated individual, it is when you fight against isolation that you will find your greatest strength. This is because there are experiences you can obtain only through your relationships with other people. The highest of highs you could ever experience can only be obtained by sharing those experiences with others. No one, living in isolation, can real their full potential.

15. You were incomplete and unfinished the moment you stepped into this life, and no matter how far you travel, how far you progress, there are certain aspects of yourself that you are not meant to complete on your own. Men and women, for example, are different from one another in many ways and no matter how much you develop, you will still be just a male or a female. Even through changing your sex using hormone therapy or surgery, you can never become a male or become a female. Because you can never become one or the other, on your own you can never have a child, and on your own you can never experience the bond/relationship of a father-to-child or mother-to-child. You cannot experience everything in this life.

16. Although you cannot experience everything in life, you still need to experience somethings, in fact, some experiences are necessary in this life such as birth and death, hunger, pain, happiness, sickness, health, &c.

17. To be enlightened is to learn how to feel at peace with the changes going on around you, and what processes you need to take in order to have an upward swing when you are falling downward. There is no "perfect" life, only the perception of it.

I want to end there because I think that returns to the beginning and you can start at #1 and read through these again.

I do however, want to touch on the importance and purpose of relationships one more time before I sign off and go to bed:

#14, #15. You can choose to live a life without experiencing relationships. You can reframe your life and your experiences so that you do not feel anything negative from not building any kind of bond with anyone. You can hide behind other pleasures, some of which may include limited forms of relationships, but recognize this simple truth: you have already experienced birth. The next best thing in life is to experience giving birth. You too may become enlightened and may feel peace in this life, but this experience will always come back to you. Your conscious does not remember it because, as you age, your childhood, when you had limited abilities to experience, is forgotten. Your subconscious however, does remember this experience.  And although you think you have full control over things, your subconscious has a way of controlling you by planting little desires in you that you aren't aware their source. You will reach a point where this surfaces and you desire to experience this, and you may mask it and reframe it, but it is really there both concretely and abstractly.

My suggestion is that everyone should at least have one child before they die and I can argue that later.