I was doing a coaching phone call with a shaman and they led me in a meditation to where I was in a very deep state, and they suggested I ask myself what is my real goal in life....and the answer shocked me: enlightenment! At that time I was focused on making money and raising a family, and didn't even really know what enlightenment was, and certainly didn't think it was possible for me. That was something only a select few, like the Buddha could accomplish. I was embarrassed to even say the answer to the shaman, but sheepishly did. Then quickly dismissed it and went on with life as I knew it then.
Years later I would walk the mystical path, exploring various practices and religions to gleem what truth I could from them, focusing on having an experience vs a unchallenged belief. This finally led me to vipassana, a form of Buddhist meditation which is helpful in understanding the mind, and what leads to suffering. And as we understand the mind, this wisdom has the potential to awaken us for the delusion of everyday life and understand on a cleaner level who and what we are.
One of the first things that occur with most people as they get deeper into meditation is they begin to see the randomness of thoughts, how they pop up out of nowhere to be replaced by another thought and another, feeding the sense of self. But at some point, it is possible to see that indeed these are not proof of a fixed constant self, but instead of a conditioned mind generating images and feelings that are nothing more than clouds moving across a vast sky. This sky, this vast awareness, is the constant, and the rest of life proof of impermanence of all conditioned things. Nothing that arises is constant, and everything that arises also fades away....we see this we our thoughts but we also see this with our bodies as they change every day, mostly beyond our control, and eventually leading to death.
The buddha did not say we would not experience pain, for how can we not when even good things are destined to end, along with the everyday suffering. What he suggested was that added suffering could be avoided by truly understanding reality, the dharma, for what it is, and understanding there is nothing to grasp onto, even the sense of a Self, for this grasping, this greed for what we like and fear of what we don't like, is what leads to unnecessary suffering. This is what we can free ourselves from. But we need to see things clearly, to let go of the illusions and delusions, and meditation is one of the best ways to quiet the mind and to allow wisdom to arise from this clear seeing. We can not free ourselves by just having beliefs, or doing chants or mantras, we need to clearly see for ourself what is suffering and the causes of suffering, and then the mind will let go of these habits on it's own.
