The only thing better than taoism...

[No-thing-ness]

enlightenment is simply the removal of the conditioned mind. I've yet to meet an enlightened soul though! I have met many enlightened souls on my Journey, but not one enlightened soul!

The Tao is what we are, but when we speak of it it loses its essence!

[FallingLeaves]

Originally Posted by the_crow

I don't think it does.
The masters live this state, and largely forego the dubious practice of attempting to describe it. Perhaps they forget there was ever a preexisting state. Or even that, for them, there wasn't one.

I envy them. They were born into a time where everything they said wasn't ripped into by forum-goers demanding various proofs and sources :)

they weren't allowed to share outside their own clan either...

[No-thing-ness]

drop all beliefs
erase all deceit.

the tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal tao.

claiming to be enlightened then reveals one is not enlightened - the tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal tao.

don't take this personally, just interested as to why you think you are enlightened because an enlightened soul has no need to confess this to the watching eyes on the forum.

enlightened - a mind free of all the accumulated conditioning. our natural state of Be-ing.

somewhere along the pathless path we became very lost.........religion, politics and education has herded people into conditioning pens!

All I know for certain is I Am.
I am not this body, mind or thoughts/emotions - this is a temporary, complex vehicle of navigation. The character I Am playing is just that - a character in a story; which I have become detached from as I Am simply observes and is entertained by what is observed.

I Am not even human - a label is not what I Am!

Greetings Vecta,

I see my taoists are being poetic as usual! However, even though words can't fully describe something (especially the Tao), they are a good start. Being stuck in a rut of "not defining" is just as bad as being stuck in a rut of "defining".

Vecta, I agree that having an ecstatic experience is no indicator at all of enlightenment. I have had many and I am far from enlightened. Also, have you ever been to a pentecostal church in the United States? If spiritually ecstatic experiences meant that you were enlightened, we would have droves of enlightened people in my country alone! What is enlightenment in the Taoist tradition, then? From my studies, there are two steps, one that can be described and then one that is up to you to answer:

Step 1: Reach a point where you can perceive nature clearly, without your vision being clouded by desire, rhetoric, rules or feelings (among other things). Now, notice that I didn't say that you can't want things, use rhetoric, follow rules or have feelings. Rather, you realize where all of these things come from and that none of them should take priority. One famous Taoist saying attributed to Lao Tzu's student, Wen Tzu can be paraphrased as "Once you realize something is useless, you will no longer seek it. So the key is not to teach people to force themselves to not want something. The key is to get them to understand that it is useless". A lot of the various methods of Taoist practice is focused on getting to the point where we can see the world around us (and inside us) as it truly is and know what is of the utmost value instead of having our worldview subconsciously warped without our knowledge by ideas and emotions!

Liu An sums this up perfectly in his parable of the thief, in which a thief robs a stand of gold jewelry, not noticing that there were many police nearby. When the police surround him and easily catch him, they ask him why he attempted such a robbery with so many of them around. The thief replies "I didn't see all of you, I only saw the gold."

Step 2: Act in accordance with the Tao. This is the part of Taoism that is left up to the practitioner. Once someone reaches a point where they are relatively aware of all of the forces that influence their perception and have eyes (well, metaphorical "eyes") clear enough to see the world as it truly is, no book, quotation or person is a better teacher than the world that they experience before them. THIS is the real Tao that can't be spoken of, because the practitioner can now see clearly enough that their only use for words, perhaps, is to aid others in understanding. Amusingly enough, I've never interpreted enlightenment as "arrival" because even after this point, there may well be MUCH more to learn... However, once you reach this point, you are learning from the greatest teacher in existence. Anyways, I hope this helped. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Best regards from a simple fool,
-NoPlaceToStand