Why I Don’t Want to Become Enlightened Anymore

“Being free isn’t actually that easy.” ~Unknown

I’ve always been an achiever. I’ve worked hard to reach goals: I was good at school, then got a good job, and ended up making good money. My colleagues valued my clear view of the goal, my ability to break down the big task into parts that one can work on, casting it all as individual problems that one can solve. I was diligent, hard-working, and reliable. An employer’s dream employee.

At the same time, I’ve always had a wish to be “free.” Not so much from outer constraints, but from inner ones—depressive …

“Being free isn’t actually that easy.” ~Unknown

At the same time, I’ve always had a wish to be “free.” Not so much from outer constraints, but from inner ones—depressive episodes, difficult feelings, painful experiences. It sounds terribly naive when you put it like that, but I guess it was a wish to live “happily ever after” at some point in the future.

And I was willing to work hard to achieve that, too.

In hindsight, it all seems clear how that was bound to fail. But working hard was the one thing I knew how to do, so I applied it to everything, including the wish for happiness, the wish for inner freedom.

I tried a range of different things and ended up connecting with Buddhism. I think what appealed to me was the clear outline of a path to achieving happiness, the methods, and the way the goal was described: enlightenment, awakening, the ultimate inner freedom. So I learned about the methods and began applying myself to them.

With my scattered mind, I sat down trying to watch my breath. With aching knees, I sat for hours repeating mantras, counting how many repetitions I “got in,” making progress toward the numeric goal of 100,000 repetitions of various things. That took years.

I think my wife noticed long before me that there was something unhealthy in my approach. She pointed out how I came down the stairs with a “forced smile” after a long meditation session. She tried to encourage me to “live.” It was no good; I wouldn’t listen.

The harder I tried to work at it, the more frustrated I became. Since I didn’t see the progress I craved— like peace of mind, like mental calm—I thought the solution was clear: I had to try harder. Devote more time to it, reduce other activities more. Retracting from the world, rather than living in it, my wife called it.

The big irony was that, in order to feel more alive, I cut myself off from life more and more. I tried to achieve inner freedom by applying the same habitual patterns that governed my life: striving hard, unrelentingly.

I once saw a postcard with the drawing of a parrot walking out of its birdcage, while wearing a small birdcage like a helmet around its head. The words on the card said, “Being free isn’t actually that easy.” I think it summarizes very well how I was trapped trying to be free.

When my tenacious striving ended up threatening my marriage, I sought help from a therapist, and that’s when things started to change.

I became aware of the pattern I was caught in. The narrow-mindedness of feeling that I had to achieve something big. The unspoken wish that one day, someone would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Well done.” The rejection of life in the name of an abstract goal—ironically, in my case, the goal of wanting to be truly alive.

I can’t say change happened overnight, although there was this one therapy session where I had a sense that I could feel that inner truth of just being, of awareness. That felt real and true—and much more than any external rules and descriptions of a path, it has been my compass, my guiding light ever since.

What amazes me most is that for so many years, I just didn’t see the obvious: that I was applying my habitual patterns of ambition and goal-oriented striving to meditation, to the search for inner freedom. How on earth did I not see that?

Frankly, I think it’s like with the fish and the water. The joke of the old fish meeting two young fish and asking them, “How’s the water today?” and the young fish responding, “What do you mean, water?” It’s so around you, so much an integral part of your lived experience, that you don’t even notice.

After that recognition, I think the process has been gradual, and I would say it’s ongoing. The key thing is that I recognize striving as striving now. I’m in touch with the emotional tone that comes with it and have gradua