Enlightenment

– Samuel Bercholz, Entering the Stream
From Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith


This enlightenment of the Buddha's was profound and brilliant, accurate and powerful, and also warm and compassionate. It was like the sun behind the clouds. Anyone who has taken off in an airplane on a grim and gloomy day knows that beyond the cloud cover the sun is always shining. Even at night the sun is shining, but then we can't see it because the earth is in the way, and probably our pillow also.

The Buddha explained that behind the cloud cover of thoughts--including very heavy clouds of emotionally charged thoughts backed up by entrenched habitual patterns--there is continual warm, bright, loving intelligence constantly shining. And even though in the midst of thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns, intelligence may become dulled and confused, it is still this intelligence in the midst of thoughts and emotions and habits that makes them so very captivating, so resourceful and various, so inexhaustible.