Those who want-to-get-to-the-bottom-of-things find the thoughts that presently appear in their mind to be unacceptable, much less enlightening. No matter what ostensible method they initially adopt to achieve the goal, it will always be based on the premise that your present mind is asleep, (or deluded), and that the aim is to awaken it from its deluded sleep. In essence: to change what your genetic fixed, temperamental mind is, and this cannot be done, any more than a man can change his height, or his stomach’s attitude toward anchovies.
Those seeking enlightenment naturally assume that what will occur will be an enlightening of their temperamental mind, and no such thing will ever happen. No such thing is possible. Your temperamental mind can no more be altered than can your individual, instinctive reaction to physical threats.
Those without the proper experience believe that a man, once awake, never again has sleeping thoughts, and this is not accurate. He does not, but his temperamental mind still does and always will.
What the few call the sleeping-state-of-consciousness, is the natural and inalterable state of the temperamental mind, and waking up to what is really going on does not change that part of the brain’s consciousness. What enlightenment does do, is activate part of the brain that is not normally involved in consciousness. It is this new operation that is: awake, enlightened and liberated. Your original consciousness, (the temperamental mind), has not changed in the process.
What is different in such a person is that they now have another part of their brain consciously active to counteract the old one. They have an alternative to the dreamy consciousness usually available and others do not. All that ordinary men can do is grouse about what goes on in their mind – that is their only alternative.
J.