Well attended meeting all seemingly happy with the world which was a happy coincidence as the two short videos we saw in the beginning were all about happiness. To sum up the way to be happy is to accept that you are perfect just the way you are, to be more loving, have faith or a spiritual outlook and be positive. Although things can help you find happiness really it is within yourself where you will truly find it. Nothing new but nice to get reminded of the eternal truths.
After a break we read the following tract which I find is the clearest explanation of what enlightenment is.
Extract
We will examines how we create a persistent alienation from ourselves, from others, and from the world by fracturing out present experience into different parts, separated by boundaries. We artificially split our awareness into compartments such as subject vs. object, life vs. death, mind vs. body, inside vs.. outside, reason vs. instinct ...
The result of such violence, although known by many other names, is simply unhappiness. Life becomes suffering, full of battles. But all our battles in our experience - our conflicts, anxieties, sufferings, and despairs - are created by the boundaries we misguidingly throw around our experience.
Who am I? The query has probably tormented mankind since the dawn of civilization, and remains today one of the most vexing of all human questions, ..When you are describing or explaining or even just inwardly feeling your "self" what you are actually doing, whether you know it or not, is drawing a mental line or boundary across the whole field of you experience, and everything on the inside of that boundary you are feeling or calling you "self" while everything outside that boundary you feel to be "not self"...So when you say "my self" you draw a boundary line between what is you and what is not you.
Have you ever wondered why life comes in opposites? Why everything you value is one of a pair of opposites? Why all decisions are between opposites? Why all desires are based on opposites?
Notice that all spatial and directional dimensions are opposites: up vs. down, inside vs. outside, high vs., low, long vs. short, North vs. South, big vs. small, here vs. there, top vs. bottom, left vs.. right. And notice that all things we consider serious and important are one pole of a pair of opposites: good vs. evil, life vs. death, pleasure vs. pain, God vs. Satan, freedom vs. bondage.
So, also, our social and esthetic values are always put in terms of opposites: success vs. failure, beautiful vs. ugly, strong vs. weak, intelligent vs. stupid. Even our highest abstractions rest on opposites. Logic, for instance, is concerned with the true vs. the false, epistemology, with appearance vs. reality, ontology, with being vs. non-being. Our world seems to be a massive collection of opposites.
This fact is so commonplace as to hardly need mentioning. But the more one ponders it the more it is strikingly peculiar. Adam was the first to delineate nature, to mentally divide it up, mark it off, diagram it. Adam was the first great mapmaker, Adam drew boundaries.
So successful was this mapping of nature that , to this day, our lives are largely spent in drawing boundaries. Every decision we make, our every action, our every word is based on the construction, conscious of unconscious, of boundaries,
The peculiar thing about a boundary is that, however complex and rarefied it might me, it actually marks off nothing but an inside and an outside., For example, we can draw the very simplest form of a boundary line as a circle, and see that it discloses an inside versus an outside. But notice that the opposites on inside vs.. outside didn't exist in themselves until we drew the boundary on the circle. It is the if boundary line in other words, which creates pairs of opposites,, in short, to draw boundaries is to manufacture opposites...And the world of opposites is world of conflict. So instead of handling and manipulating real objects, Adam could manipulate in his head these magic, names which stood for the objects themselves.
Now our habitual way of trying to solve these problems is to attempt to eradicate one of the opposites. We handle the problem of good vs. evil by trying to exterminate evil. We handle the problem of life vs.. death by trying to hide death under symbolic immortalities. In philosophy we handle conceptual opposites by dismissing one of the poles or trying to reduce it to the other.
The point is that we always tend to treat the boundary as real and then manipulate the opposites created by the boundary.
The goal of separating the opposites and then clinging to or pursuing the positive halves seems to be a distinguishing characteristic of progressive Western civilization - its religion, science, medicine and industry.
The opposites might indeed be as different as night and day, but the essential point is that without night we would not even be able to recognize something called day. To destroy the negative is, at the same time, to destroy all possibilities of enjoying the positive. Thus, the more we succeed in this adventure of progress, the more we actually fail, and hence the more acute becomes our sense of total frustration.
The root of the whole difficulty is our tendency to view the opposites as irreconcilable, as totally set apart and divorced from one another. Even the simplest of opposites, such as buying versus selling, are viewed as two different and separate events. Now it is true that buying and selling are in some sense different, but they are also - and this is the point- completely inseparable.
The inner unity of opposites is hardly an idea confined to mystics, Eastern or Western. If we look to modern say physics, the field in which Western intellect had made its greatest advances, what we find is another version of reality as a union of opposites. In relativity theory, for example, the old opposites of rest vs. motion have become totally indistinguishable, that is, "each is both". An object which is in motion for one observer is, at the same time, at rest for a different observer. Likewise, the split between wave and particle vanishes into "wavicles. and the contrast between structure vs. function evaporates. Even the age-old separation of mass from energy had fallen to Einstein's E=mc2, and these ancient "opposites" are now viewed as merely two aspects of one reality.
