Ricky Lee Nuthman:
Every time I read a thread like this, I am left wondering what the hell I hope to accomplish with this practice - or what is even possible to accomplish.
The funny thing is - not much. You basically cannot accomplish anything except the peace of mind. You can't "change your reality" as some people in spiritual circles like to say - you can only accept it, which is where the peace of mind comes from. "Changing your reality" amounts to the same thing that everyone else already has in their disposal - if you want a job, go get one; if you want friends, go make some.
But also, of course, compared to a state when you're fully immersed in dreaming, the peace of mind is percevied to be so profound, so surreal that it is no wonder it is often times described as a different reality altogether, or a supreme attainment or accomplishment. When I was living in the mind, the mind was my reality, I paid very little attention to anything else. But it's still not an accomplishment - it's the opposite. It comes from not needing to accomplish anything else to be content with oneself anymore.
So, authentic spiritual practice doesn't really help you accomplish anything - it helps you disillusion yourself from the notion that something must be accomplished in the first place. That something must change before you can be happy, peaceful, content, that there's something missing. Meditation can be described as a simple practice of doing nothing while paying keen attention to why doing nothing is so damn unsatisfactory hehehe.
That's pretty much all you can ever "accomplish". The rest are just spiritual experiences, states of consciousness, which come and go, certain shifts of perception that people attribute way too much value to, but those are always temporary, even though many people get stuck in those experiences and they can last years and years. But enlightenment is neither an experience nor is it a state of consciousness. It is simply peace.
And even this peace is not accomplished, it is not earned. It is what happens naturally, spontenously after being exposed to all your internal unrest, all your internal resistence, yearning, discontent, fear, anxiety, hatred, anger, drama, trauma etc. and having been exhausted of it all. That's what practice does. What's left is peace.
When you don't have to accomplish anything anymore, you are free to just live. There is no greater freedom than that. We all have it. We're just struggling with the unrest, with our desires to accomplish something to make our lives better, to make ourselves better, instead of looking inside of ourselves and realizing that we are already perfect, and our lives are perfect simply because they are the only lives we are given and there will never be anything else. And we are always looking for something else.