The Fork in the Road to Enlightenment

Have you ever tried to achieve a Buddha like level of enlightenment? I tried once and lasted less than 24 hours. Too many other distractions were getting in the way, like my work commitments and a real estate purchase I was trying to close. Unfortunately, a true state of enlightenment requires a level of concentration and detachment few would ever succeed at. But I kept thinking about it, for to have a peaceful mind at that level sure sounded appealing. In the end I concluded that I would have to trade away too many “things” that I held important — I would be left naked and it was too big a risk. At the center of it all was the real question of who I would be without all those things? And that got me thinking about the dual concepts of identity and attachment. Identity, defined as the condition of being oneself and not another, is unique to humans. As individuals, we are not content being just another ordinary zebra in the herd. We humans are constantly trying to distinguish ourselves from the rest. We attach our identity to groups, in the cultural religious and societal sense. But we also strive for our own individual identify. We measure individuality and rank it in a number of ways, from job title, income, social status, material possessions, celebrity, or right down to the year and make of the car we drive. We are continually jockeying with some or all of these things to somehow differentiate ourselves from our 7 billion peers.   READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN THE HUFFINGTON POST