Does self-inquiry lead to eternal enlightenment? How?

Tagged:

Everything leads to enlightenment. Sitting on your butt and playing video games for your entire life leaves you closer to eternal enlightenment than you were before you were born. The question to ask is whether anything you can be doing now will get you there faster than sitting on your butt and playing video games.

Inquiring into the self allows you to better use it. The same way you can study any tool to get better at it, you can study yourself. When you get better at using a tool, two things happen. Firstly the tool becomes an extension of your will. You perceive no difference between wanting to do something with the tool, and getting it done.

The other thing that happens is the tool becomes demystified. In the case of the self, it becomes easier to see all of it’s limitations and flaws. Learning how to use your body as a weapon leaves you with a real understanding of why your body makes for a much poorer weapon than, say, a rifle.

The self is lazy, forgetful, capricious, and, well, selfish. Inquiry allows you to not just see these limitations in others, but also in yourself. Even as you get better at using the tool, you get better at realizing when you shouldn’t be using it.

The only time anything was ever accomplished in a Star Wars movie by a Jedi is when the Jedi decided not to use their magical Jedi powers to solve a problem. As such, when you meditate and augment your mind and its ability to do stuff, the best use for those augmentations and realizations is to see how you can solve problems without them.

This is enlightenment. The power that does things without itself.