Sylvia Boorstein on Enlightenment (video)

Amber Larson, CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; Buddhist meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein (Spirit Rock), It's Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness

Marriage ceremony in Phuket, Thailand (Ted Richardson, Esq./flickr/thaiembassy.com)

 

Fischel's wife was a devi glowing in the dark (WQ)

When I started to practice meditation in the early seventies it was hip. Everybody was meditating; every weekend you could take a workshop in another form of meditation. The advertisements for the workshops usually suggested that at the end of the weekend you'd be totally enlightened.

I remember once going to a party that looked like a regular party -- people talking, visiting, and laughing -- and in the middle sat a woman with a strange look on her face, eyes closed, face serene, totally tuned out from the whole scene.

Somebody leaned over to me and said, "Look at her, she's enlightened," and I thought to myself, "If that's what enlightenment is, I don't want it."
 

Meditation for levitation (Ruwan_W/flickr)

What I did want, at least for a while, were exotic powers. I heard extraordinary stories of people who could bilocate or levitate. Sometimes, as I sat on my cushion and experienced an unusual lightness in my body, I imagined I was about to levitate. I hoped I would. I thought it would be a far-out thing, rising up off my cushion and floating in the air.

I think I was also influenced by a story my grandfather told about my grandmother -- a woman who died when I was nine years old. I knew here as a sickly old woman, but my grandfather remembered her as the very beautiful woman he had married when she was 18 years old. He told me she was so beautiful that "she glowed in the dark." I asked him if he really meant that, and he said, "Yes, she really did." 

He said, "At my nephew Murray Fox's wedding, the hall was lit with gaslight because it was before electricity, so it was quite dark, and everyone said, 'Look at Fischel's wife, she shines in the dark!'" I held that as a wonderful, luminous memory and as an ideal. What I wanted to achieve from my meditation practice was to shine in the dark. I think a lot of us in the early days wanted magic.

My Buddhist meditation teachers, whom I met in 1977, talked about enlightenment but not about magic. They talked about "seeing clearly" and how it could mean happiness and the end of suffering. That sounded like the kind of magic I wanted most. More

• It's Easier Than You Think (sylviaboorstein.com)
• Quotes: It's Easier Than You Think (Goodreads.com)

The Avatars Are Coming?

Semjase space devi

(NYC812) Odd narrator speculates that the sun is affecting human DNA causing the emergence of human-star-people hybrids. They are incarnating into avatar bodies birthed by ordinary terrestrial parents. Why? A mother who gives birth to such a baby will love her child no matter how different that child is. In this way, extraterrestrials arrive integrated into the fabric of the existing society. So if a black couple gives birth to a blond, blue-eyed, classically Eurocentric "angel" baby, that baby will be loved. Who can explained such children being born to Asian couples? "The wife cheated" is the rational if harsh conclusion. But then an Egyptian couple has twins, one white one not. How could beautiful, non-albino children be so white they practically glow in the dark?