“There is a smile that does not come from wit or consolation. It is not mockery or ironic evasion. It is a sober, lucid smile that bursts forth when the tension of a search that never made sense subsides. It does not signal a discovery, but rather the unraveling of a fiction, the collapse of an inner fantasy. It is the final gesture of someone who, after trying everything, understands that the journey was unnecessary and that the destination was always right under their feet. This gesture does not arise from an extraordinary experience. It does not respond to any spiritual practice or moral achievement. Awakening, in this context, is not an eruption or a revelation. It is rather evidence that does not need to be imposed: too close, too simple to have been recognized by a consciousness accustomed to seeking complexity rather than clarity. It does not demand transformation but cessation.
Ignoring the obvious is not the result of an accident. It is inherited, learned, repeated until it becomes a collective habit. Ignorance, when institutionalized, becomes culture. Through languages, religions, traditions, educational systems, national narratives, and ethical doctrines, a system is consolidated that not only conceals being, but also turns it into a promise for the future. Nothing is hidden more effectively than the obvious when it is postponed in the form of a desire or an aspiration.
For generations—or incarnations, if we adopt another language—a sophisticated architecture of distance was constructed. The detour from the present was called inner evolution. Absence was dignified through the language of virtue: purification, ascension, redemption, renunciation. Evasion became an itinerary.
Enlightenment is an uncomfortable word. It has been overplayed by religions, emptied by ideologies, ridiculed by rationalism. And yet it has not been surpassed. Its strength lies in what it names without being able to explain: a cessation of effort that reveals the original condition. It is not a conquest or a prize. It cannot be attained, achieved, obtained, taught, or learned. It is recognized. And in recognizing itself, it deactivates all pedagogy of improvement. This thesis is intolerable to the seemingly separate “I.” It needs to defer the truth in order to manage it. It feeds on goals and objectives. It organizes itself around deficiencies. Its identity is affirmed through projects of transformation. Its narrative revolves around a fiction: that of an “I” that is still incomplete and must become.
Hence, it seeks enlightenment, but not to find it, but to avoid the moment when it is revealed to be unnecessary. We are already where we pretend to be going. And we forget this with discipline. Not out of stupidity, but out of fidelity to a narrative that precedes us. A narrative that turned lack into virtue and delay into a path.
The story attributed to the Buddha expresses it clearly: a man bowed before an enlightened being, and the latter, without hesitation, returned the gesture. “Why do you do that?” he asked. “Because you are already what I am. Only you don’t know it.”
This is not naive consolation. It is an ontological statement. If being cannot be lost, then it cannot be acquired. No method can lead to it. Any technique that promises to achieve it only postpones it. Even the most refined spiritual practice, if it starts from the assumption of a lack, consolidates the fiction it seeks to overcome. The question is not how to get there, but how the illusion of not having arrived is sustained. What habits maintain it? What forms of thought repeat, with nuances, the same denial of what already is?
It is not necessary to withdraw from the world. No retreat or consecration is required. There is no monastery more demanding than a mind that has abandoned all strategy. There is no height more legitimate than a moment lived without representation. There is no symbol more complete than the disappearance of all symbols.
Twenty-nine years ago, the effort ceased. There were no visions or ecstasy. No words were revealed. What happened was an interruption in the attempt to correct myself. Tired of dividing myself, I stopped demanding to be someone else. And when the conflict ceased, nothing new emerged. Only what had never left was revealed. It was like waking up from a deep sleep, composed of commands and expectations. And in that awakening, no promise appeared. Only presence. Nothing was missing. Nothing required transformation. The mental structure that demanded another state had dissolved. Only the evidence remained. I recognized the same thing in others. They were also there, although convinced that they were absent. Not out of spontaneous ignorance, but out of loyalty to a system that makes effort its justification and enlightenment a future goal that must never be achieved.
Perhaps it is a joke. Not cruel, but perfectly woven. A way of hiding the obvious behind a game of conceptual disguises. A strategy of existence to preserve wonder: to forget in order to remember, to search in order to laugh.
Enlightenment is not earned or achieved. It is not granted or attained. It is not pursued or sought. It is allowed. It does not demand willpower, but rather the cessation of its insistence. It does not call for action, only the interruption of the project of transformation.
When it happens, there is no message to proclaim. There is no doctrine to transmit. There is laughter. Silent, without arrogance. The laughter of someone who is not beginning, because they were already there. Laughter that does not start a journey but dissolves it.”
Prabhuji
