Enlightenment itself will do absolutely nothing for you. (Wouldn't it be cool if I just ended the post here?). The process of attaining enlightenment can do lots of stuff for you. Here's how I see it:
Two perspectives:
Negative: There are things standing in the way of 'enlightenment'. Through practice you can diminish and remove these things until there is sufficient lack of things standing in the way of 'enlightenment' for you to suddenly be enlightened.
Positive: There are certain insights one can have that enables one to 'see clearly'. After sufficient clarity, you 'get it'.
Not one specific practice actually gets you enlightened - it's a concerted effort best described as skillfully nurturing the right conditions of/for awakening. These practices (e.g. concentration practices) should simultaneously be a practice for itself, and a practice within a larger perspective. Yeah, sure, you'll get enlightened sometime, but realize that the practice actually doesn't get you enlightened. Therefore you need an ulterior motive to practice, and that motivation should be intimately connected with what a practice actually does for you (like dramatically increasing your skill of concentration).
For example: The eight jhanas, to me, is simultaneously a vehicle for enlightenment, but also skillful means of living. By hanging out in jhana, I get my dopamine/serotonin/pleasure fix. This way I won't go unskillfully looking for a fix 'outside' of myself:
- social status (e.g. putting other people down)
- entertainment (oh, what wonders it does for attention /sarcasm)
- obsessive past-times (like refreshing the recent posts page of this forum every 5 minutes)
- sticky-icky relationships (being 'needy' to the detriment of all parties involved)
- seeking comfort in food
- stimulating-simulating good/bad emotions for a 'rush' (morbid entertainment, porn, risky stunts)
A breakthrough for me was when I saw how the vast pool of practices in wisdom/insight/spiritual traditions are practices for the 'brain', not the 'soul'. In my view, our kind and awesome Overlord Daniel Ingram has a fetish for certain types of experiences - just like I have a pronounced interest in programming and many of it's aspects, so Dan has a pronounced interest in concentration and many of it's aspects. Considering
only this, he is not anymore enlightened than me, not even a little bit. It just so happens that his interest in concentration is more conducive to enlightenment than my interest in programming.
The practice for enlightenment is a pastime with a specific set of advantages/benefits and disadvantages/harm. It has been meticulously refined and improved over the millennia to be as skillful and conducive to enlightenment as possible. But it doesn't produce enlightenment, it produces a person receptive to the grace of enlightenment.
Enlightenment doesn't
fix you and it is utterly irrelevant to
your life. But the practice leading up to it can definitely improve your life tremendously.
Matt N:
I can still see no self quite evidently, but I don't see any benefit to it. Maybe I blame myself less because I realize there really is no me, its just a series of images and sounds playing in my mind in the moment. Maybe it's a little easier to be present.
My anxiety and inability to relax are still here though. Bad emotional control and understanding are still there.
You have been tricked into believing that enlightenment fixes you. It doesn't. There are practices for you to do that will diminish and possibly remove anxiety, inability to relax and improve emotional control and understanding. I would also like to add that you are very probably not enlightened, at least by the usual standards of this forum.
If 'seeing no self' has no benefit to you, then you have most likely not gained any insight of anatta ('seeing not-self'). If whatever perception you had is not beneficial to you, drop it. Find something that is simultaneously less deluded than your current view and also beneficial to you. Help yourself, but know that a lot of people have tried to help themselves throughout history, and some of them came up with pretty nice stuff - so don't go and needlessly re-invent the wheel.
Matt N:
What real benefit is there for enlightenment then?
The benefit of enlightenment is nothing measurable. The foregone weeding out of nasty habits and obsessiveness - that is the benefit. Enlightenment is a save point. If you have no progress to save, loading the save point produces no progress.
Paraphrasing Bill Hamilton:
Enlightenment is not like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's more like you've been picking up gold pieces all along the way and enlightenment is just a pot to keep them in.
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PS: I don't want to get into this in this post, but will say that if you go on spiritual shopping, eventually it becomes clear that different people speak of different things. There are certain distinctions that can be helpful to know about, but seeing that you might not yet have been confused by that whole mess, I keep it out of this post.EDIT:
Enlightenment is not haphazard, nor is it ultimately structured. Between deterministic causation (this practice produces enlightenment) and divine grace (no grace, no enlightenment) lies the middle way.
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