Is desire for enlightenment a bad thing?

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You should ask yourself why you want it first. Enlightenment is scary and stressful. You’re awake and alive, but you can’t be bothered to do anything. For weeks or months you can sit doing nothing, not being able to get up the motivation to do anything. Your subconscious will eventually kick in and keep you from, say, starving, but for awhile that’s usually the only way you can exist.

There won’t be anybody around who can really help you, either. All the enlightened folk who know what you’re going through are going to be far away, and you won’t be motivated enough to seek them out and ask for advice. You’ll be in this weird blissful yet awesomely terrifying state. You know there is no purpose at all to anything but haven’t yet figured out how to exist regardless.

I’ve been enlightened my entire life. I liken it to playing life on hard mode. I have all these weird and wonderful abilities, but no need to actually use them for anything. I can’t even find any enlightened people to help me out because enlightened people are all really different from each other.

Any time I find a goal, something to focus on, I know that goal is living on borrowed time. I can never stick it through to completion. I always find half a dozen reasons why the direction won’t go the way I want it to go. I follow through anyway most of the time because the outcomes are pretty interesting regardless. But there aren’t any stakes, life doesn’t feel real.

I live in a super-swank apartment and I make a ton of money. I’m sitting on a couch that cost me $6000 to buy. How great do you think that feels for me? Not as great as taking a nice walk. Situations are totally ephemeral, I could lose the apartment and job tomorrow and I’d be all like, “well, that was fun while it lasted.” I might feel a brief pang of loss but that would be it.

I am completely reliant on God, and the connectedness of all things. You’d think it’s great that God takes such good care of me, but I often feel like I’m just not in control of anything. Oh sure, everybody else is completely reliant on God too, but at least they get to have the illusion that they are in charge of their own lives. My life feels like one of those shooting games you play in the arcades. You can be better or worse at shooting the bad guys, but you’re still following the same path every time you play.