Enlightenment

Enlightenment is a destructive process: it's the crumbling away of untruth.
Adyashanti

I am a person who has always been even more terrified of destruction than I love to create. But the simple truth is that you can't create something without destroying something else. There is only so much stuff in the world. The only way to get something new is to get rid of something else in order to make room for it. This goes so far as the experience that many people have that as soon as they clean up their house, something that they've been wanting suddenly arrives.

From the time we are born, we are learning untruths. We learn from the media and from the people around us what men and women and "African-Americans" and "First Nations" and other groups of people are supposed to behave like. We have stereotypes of what a woman does. There used to be a book out many years ago about "Real Women Don't Pump Gas". That was, of course, before we had to pump gas whether we wanted to or not. But that's the way we are trained to think. Real Women do certain things and Real Men do certain other things.

Enlightenment is a destructive process: it's the crumbling away of untruth. It is only when we can move past all these conceptions about how we are supposed to behave that we discover who we really are and how we are really meant to behave. It can be extremely difficult to crumble away those untruths we have learned. It is very difficult for most of us to ignore what we are seeing around us, even when we know that it is misleading us. But it is something we must all do as much as and as quickly as we can. We don't have to create ourselves. We just have to find a way to brush off all the dirt and garbage so that our real selves can shine through.