Enlightenment doesn’t have goals
The idiocy of goal-oriented ‘spirituality’
Many spiritual practitioners, and soul-seekers, target enlightenment. They aim for it. They want to attain it, achieve it, and hold it. While they do this, they will never experience it. Enlightenment doesn’t have goals. It isn’t about finding anything, but about losing everything. It won’t help you ‘in the physical’ because it has nothing to do here.
Capitalism consumes everything. It breaks it down, reformulates and repackages it, and markets it as a product. It seeks to monetize every organism, every cell, every moment, every breath, and every second of attention. It mimics life as an ideology of endless metabolism. So it’s no surprise that is gobbled up spirituality and crapped it out, unrecognizable and stinking of bullshit. At least, it tried to. But you can’t eat nothing. You can’t metabolize it. And you can’t harness it for other means.
Sadly, whole swathes of people have been fooled. Traumatized by existence, and brainwashed by utilitarian propaganda, they fell for the oldest trick in the sales book. For $x you can have this thing, and it will make you $x++. They are being gaslit. Many are gaslighting themselves. Then, believing they have found the secret key to becoming earthly royalty, they gaslight others.
Life is. Trying to make it better increases suffering. Perhaps not for you, at least not in the short term, but it will have a negative impact somewhere. There’s a reason for this. It’s also the reason that spirituality does not identify with earthly things. All life is a process of metabolism, and this metabolism is a process of taking something in, consuming it, and spitting out waste. To transcend the physical is to abandon metabolic idealism.
Anything that involves a metabolic metaphor is a lie. Growth is an obvious offender. It’s about ingesting material, getting bigger, consuming more, becoming a larger presence in the world. Enlightenment is about letting go. It doesn’t take in. It doesn’t yearn for worldly presence. It doesn’t procreate. And it certainly doesn’t seek to grow. It cannot grow because absence is not substance. It isn’t higher or lower because nothing has no position. It doesn’t expend energy because it does no work. It doesn’t make sense because there is no cause and no effect.
You cannot ascend to enlightenment. It will not lead to a levelling up. It isn’t a lesson to learn that will bring utility in another dimension. Beings from another planet will not greet or speak with enlightenment. It will not make you rich, recognized, or respected. Enlightenment has no clothes. No badges. No designs. These words are not enlightened because enlightenment doesn’t write. If you stop looking, you’ll find it everywhere. It does nothing, and it can do nothing for you, too.