How has your life changed after enlightenment?

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Enlightenment is just a word to me. I can’t attach any real meaning to it. I’ve read The Power of Now and the advice given reflected things I’d already been doing for years. He writes about a thing called the ‘pain-body’ and states that “many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness.”

I do not relate to any of it. I was looking for practical ideas and methods that I could use to make the things I already did more effective. I do not have a tormenter in my head that continuously attacks me. I am too busy trying to think deeply about the world to have any time for misery.

I have never read a description of ‘enlightenment’ that was not either too mushy for anyone to actually met the criteria for, or that I didn’t already meet. Tolle describes a state of mind where he could sit on a park bench for hours without getting bored, with a clear head, thinking about not much. It is something I can recognize a little of in myself.

I am angry occasionally, and I sometimes have emotions in the moment that later on I wish I could have done differently. When this happens, I meditate on it and work out what happened and figure out how to not do it in the future. My work in this regard is never done because my life just keeps getting more complicated to keep up with my progress.

For me existence is its own reward. The time I have, I perceive it as a gift and I try to make the most of it. This was true even before I knew anything about spirituality. So, in a sense, I have always been enlightened, since birth. I do not know firsthand what it is like to not be this way.

In a very real way to me, time doesn’t exist. I push most everything that I’m not immediately involved with to the periphery of my attention. It used to concern me that it would kill my ability to maintain a modern lifestyle and I’d have to either compromise or become a hermit. But I don’t have to do that, if anything my ability to do things in the world has gotten better, more immediate.