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There's a lot / of / talk / about / enlightenment. // It's a concept / that's very old / in Buddhism, / but also / in other / spiritual traditions. // And / it can mean / so many / different things, / but / in / my Zen / tradition, / it really / refers to: / "Waking up / to the truth / of what / life is." // And / to / some of the surprising aspects / of life / that we don't / normally see. // Most specifically, / the / interconnectedness / of everything, / the / essential oneness / of everything. // That / yes, / on one level /, everything exists / separately. // I exist / separately from you, / and / this chair / exists separately / from me. // And / at the deepest level, / none of it / is separate. // All of it / is completely interconnected / and always changing. // That / is / awakening/ to / the truth / of life. // Now, / enlightenment / is often / held out / as a thing / that we can get. // And in fact /, you can read accounts / of people sitting / in long periods of meditation, / sometimes / on retreats, / where / they essentially have / these amazing experiences. // Sometimes / they feel like / out-of-body / experiences, / and they can / write elaborate descriptions / of what these / are like. // And / sometimes / people feel like, / "Well, / if I just have those experiences, / then I'm enlightened. / And if I had / those experiences / once, / I want them back, / so I want to try / to get them / back again." // What we teach / in Zen / is / that / that's actually / dangerous, / that / nobody / lives in a kind of / unusual altered state / all the time. // Most of us / never do. // And if / we have / unusual experiences, / it's very brief, / an experience of, / for example, / complete interconnectedness / and oneness // cannot / last. // In fact, / one Zen teacher / did a set of interviews / with people / who had had / enlightenment experiences, and / he put them / into a book, / and the title of the book / was / "After the Ecstasy, / The Laundry. // And what he meant by that / was / that / no matter / what kind of unusual experience / we might have / of waking up, // of enlightenment, / we always go back to / needing to do the laundry / and needing to brush our teeth / and needing to go to work, / but that is just / how life is. // So, / although / most of us, / myself included, / wish / that there were a way / to get enlightened / and stay that way, / to get to a place where it's always / blissful / and we never suffer, / I have never met / a human being / on this Earth / who gets to that place. //