Awakening and 3-D pictures
May 1, 2008 by brogers
Since I started reading more about Buddhism and practicing meditation in the last 2 years, I’ve wondered about the nature of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘awakening’. Is it something rare? esoteric? available? sudden? gradual? Am I getting closer? Am I making progress? Can it happen to me in this body, in this lifetime? Are my teachers ‘enlightened’? Are some more enlightened than others?
The old stories feature a lot of sudden, abrupt, what I call ‘light-switch’ awakenings, where suddenly the practitioner ‘gets’ it. More modern teachers that I’ve heard, talk about each moment of remembering, or returning your concentration to the breath or other object of concentration as a small awakening. Which is it, I’ve wondered…
When I’ve asked, the answer has always been — both — not the answer I was looking for. Now I’ve found an analogy that helps that answer make more sense to me. The analogy is a 3-D picture — you remember — those blobby pictures that were around a few years ago, that if you stared at long enough, and in the right way — suddenly revealed themselves to be images with a very 3-D quality to them. So — to the analogy part –
-some people see the hidden images easily, some have more difficulty
-you have to relax to see the image, not strain, or squint
-in my experience, most people can see it if they keep at it
-you can’t see it by looking closely
-seeing a picture or hearing a description of what you’re supposed to see doesn’t help very much
-you sometimes get a glimpse before you ‘get’ the full image
-some people aren’t very interested and give up right away
-it’s very clear when you see it — the seeing is unambiguous
-the seeing is a sudden shift
-once you’ve seen the hidden picture, you can see it more easily the 2nd and 3rd time
-you can see them more easily with practice
-there are lots of pictures to see with the shifted vision
Curious? Try it out at this website — it’s fun!
One Response to “Awakening and 3-D pictures”
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Thanks, Brenda; I really think this is a wonderful analogy which you do a great job of illustrating.
One point that I want to reiterate is how much awakening/enlightenment really does seem to be about a radical shift in one’s perspective — specifically in relationship to one’s experience — more than anything else.
Daniel Ingram’s fine “blook,” Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha — http://www.interactivebuddha.com/Mastering%20Adobe%20Version.pdf — does a nice job of mapping and demystifying the process of awakening, which is certainly not exclusive to Buddhism.
In some ways I think the world of music also provides a good analogy:
On one level, all people have an innate ability to master the skill of awakening in the same way that they have the innate ability to learn to play a musical instrument (or to recognize the Magic Eye image hidden in the noise); this ability may be stronger in some individuals than in others, but it is a skill that all people can develop given sufficient training and practice.
All the great wisdom traditions point to this process and describe it in their own terms, despite “awakening” being inherently very difficult — if not impossible — to describe in conventional terms.