Many of the traditions that speak of enlightenment teach that it is an attainment that requires great sacrifice, a monastic lifestyle, and many years of work to cleanse the mind. However, in other traditions such as Zen, enlightenment is spoken of as a sudden awakening to a direct experience of being conscious and aware. This is the enlightenment that is presented here. It is an immediate personal and direct experience that gives us a completely new perspective. After decades of doing everything I could to move forward on a path to what seemed to be enlightenment, I was not optimistic about being enlightened in this lifetime. I wasn’t even sure what enlightenment actually was other than what I had heard and read about. Then one day, I don’t recall exactly when, I saw it, and it was clear to me that enlightenment is always available to us all. I saw that time had nothing to do with it. I also saw that the root cause of human suffering is delusion, ignorance of the truth of what we are and the truth of reality. When I say truth, I simply mean the experience of reality versus the commonly held concepts and beliefs about what is real. The reality that is a direct experience. A concept is a thought about experience, and if we don’t notice that a thought is an interpretation, we are ignoring the experience and considering the thought to be the reality. You can’t eat the thought “hamburger," in the same way you can’t experience what you are as a thought. Having seen beyond the concept of myself and having experienced this awake, alive, and immediately real be-ing, I knew that there was nothing more important for me to do than to practice living this and share this in my work with people.
