Andrew Cohen has just updated his blog with an awesome post titled, "What Is Enlightenment Anyway?"  Responding to questions about why he doesn't simply hand enlightenment diplomas to his students--such as myself--and send them off into the postmodern spiritual marketplace to preach the good news of freedom-here-and-now, Andrew has composed a very clear explanation of why traditional "personal enlightenment" is dead.  And why, contrary to popular opinion in our quick-fix Happy Meal society, waking up is actually hard to do.

Here's a choice excerpt to whet your appetite:

When I started teaching, over twenty years ago, many people who would spend time in my company experienced the same kind of dramatic, energetic enlightenment experience that I had when I met H.W.L. Poonja in 1986. (You can read the complete story in a short book I published from the diaries I kept at the time, entitled My Master Is Myself.) In those early days, because of what was happening in front of my very eyes on a daily basis, I thought so many people would become “enlightened” as a result of spending time with me that pretty soon the world wouldn’t know what had hit it! It all seemed so easy, so immediate, so effortless... As absurd as it sounds, I even remember wondering why the Buddha forced people to meditate in order to get enlightened. Yes, those were heady days...

Oh, and unlike Andrew's previous blog (see post below), this new one isn't 11 pages long. So even you super-time-pressed evolving souls should be able to check it out... :)

Q: I’m having trouble with meditation.

A: If you’re having trouble with meditation, that means you’re not really doing it. The powerful thing about meditation is its radical simplicity — be still, be at ease, pay attention. That’s the beauty of it — meditation means doing absolutely nothing. And there are only two positions in relationship to that: you either do it or you don’t. But often human beings find this simplicity unbearable. It confronts us with ourselves at the deepest level, and most of us just can’t bear that degree of transparency. But that’s why it’s important to learn how to meditate. It is only in the exquisite simplicity of doing absolutely nothing that you begin to be able to see yourself in ways you ordinarily would never be able to do. If you really engage with this unbearable simplicity, it’s impossible to hide from yourself.

Andrew Cohen