| | I think that you are confusing slightly extraordinary occurrences and feelings with a more strict definition of enlightenment. While the group here might vary somewhat on what exactly that definition was, I suspect that the definition would involve something like seeing the true nature of phenomena in some way that cuts through dualistic and unitive viewpoints, cuts through the sense of their being a special center/controller/doer/perceiver/etc., involves Fruitions, seeing emptiness in realtime, or something in that general territory, and nothing particularly to do with shopping lists, enjoying life, or the like.
As to squids, eyelid colors, visions and the like, as many have mentioned very skillfully above, at some point one does have to take a stand as to how one wants to play it: the quest for meaning or the quest for fundamental insight into the universal characteristics of phenomena. Most visions arise in certain stages, such as around the A&P (described in posts elsewhere) and others, though plenty of people, through focus or natural talent, can see them at times or often, and then one can decide: do I want to try to figure out what they are in the conventional sense, what they mean, what their message is, what I can get from them, what flavor of ice cream they prefer, etc., or, on the other hand, do I want to just see them as more sensations, arising and vanishing, causal, not self, not other, just as more transient phenomena, just more flickering stuff, more opportunities to progress in basic wisdom into how things are and who I am.
I like a weird-ass vision as much as the next guy, but I am glad that followed in the path advocated by Vince Horn and others: got enlightened in the grand old technical sense early and they tried to sort the rest out from that vantageless vantage point, which is to say I have no more idea why sometimes weird things pop up than I did before, and c'est la vie. |