We’re not just sitting here waiting for enlightenment to plop on us out of the sky. We’re looking for an enlightenment into what we’re actually doing right now.

"Karma, what people do, in the present moment: This is one thing you can know directly. You can know directly what you’re doing. When you focus the mind, you know you’re focusing the mind. When the mind settles down, you know it’s settling down. When the mind wanders off, you know it’s wandering off. These are things you really know here and now. When you experience suffering, you know. When you experience a lack of suffering, you know.

So those are the two issues the Buddha focused on: the feelings of suffering and the knowledge of actions. The second knowledge suggested that there was a connection between the two, so the Buddha decided to see if this was true. These two are very certain things. When you’re suffering, no one can convincingly tell you, “That’s not really suffering; you’re not suffering.” Other things you might know can be shaped by the rules of the languages you’ve learned, but your experience of suffering is pre-linguistic. You know it more directly than anything else. At the same time, when you do something, you know you’re doing it. So the Buddha wanted to see if people’s experiences of pleasure and pain are related to their actions. For his answer, he looked in the immediate present. “What are you doing right now?” he asked himself. “Is there any relation between what you’re doing right now and an experience of pain or lack of pain?” The next question, when he saw that there was a connection, was, “Is it possible not to do anything? What happens then?”

So he worked to let go of the craving and ignorance that lead to action, that are involved in action, to see what happens then. In this way he was dealing with realities that are immediately apparent, immediately present. He was running an experiment to see: What happens when you do it this way? What happens when you do it that way? He wasn’t dealing in visions; he wasn’t dealing in mystical abstractions. He was looking at very ordinary things — the actions of the mind — and seeing what they resulted in.

We’re trying to do the same thing as we meditate here. That’s where the focus should be. We’re not just sitting here waiting for enlightenment to plop on us out of the sky. We’re looking for an enlightenment into what we’re actually doing right now."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Treasure Hunt" (Meditations2)

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