Seeing things in a different way results from it, but “enlightenment” itself is far simpler than that. When you are talking about shifting your perspective to a continuously positive interpretation, you are talking about something in time. You can train yourself, in time, to do that. Many people find comfort in believing in God because then they can believe that “everything is for the best”, for example. They start to interpret everything that way and in time have quite a glass half-full view of reality. Does that make them “enlightened”? No.

I have to put the word “enlightened” in quotes because it is a sort of huge projection, a hoax. It is nothing but to be yourself, but it is made into a huge deal. So many concepts surround it and many see it as an individual attainment. It is before all concepts and is the only thing that is not an attainment. It’s natural. To be yourself is natural. Before “enlightenment” you are unnatural — you are trying to be someone you are not, and it is exhausting and really a source of problems. To get out of the problematic predicament you are in, you wish to experience only positivity. That is where you seek salvation.

Well, let me confess to you: I practiced interpreting everything in my life positively. I was damn good at it too. The problem is it’s not honest enough. You don’t see things positively because you are genuinely positive, but because you want something. It is something you do for a gain, for a result in the future. You are always looking for the place called ‘better’. But it never quite comes. The better it gets, the more you see it’s not “better enough”. Nothing fulfills. Eventually you see positivity itself is empty. Years of hard and dedicated spiritual work only to find it is empty…

Negativity is empty too. That’s easier for people to see… that there is no fulfillment there. But positivity is empty too. After all they are the same energy filtered differently. The same glass half full/empty. At the end of the day positivity is superficial on its own, it’s poor. You depend on being able to perceive the glass half-full. Any dependency on a state is eventually exhausting. There is much effort in trying to be always positive… it’s not really natural. You don’t see squirrels trying it, or cats saying “next time he pets me where I don’t like to be pet I’ll remember to give it a positive interpretation like remind myself that he just loves me.” What a mindf*ck, excuse my Portuguese. You can’t paint life in one color. To want one thing is to exclude. To let all life in you must be empty for its fullness. Then you are rich. You don’t look only for the pink in order to escape the blue, but you see the beauty and the richness and the aliveness of it all being here.
The man who tries to escape is poor.

“Enlightenment” is no longer taking yourself to be the person you thought you were. It’s not that you are now a person who sees things positively. You are not a person at all. You are this presence… this namelessness that is just here. You know yourself as you are. You see yourself as you are. You are innocence. You are as you were when you were a baby. Before you thought of positive and negative and just directly experienced what is.

Negativity isn’t fulfilling nor is positivity. You want to have a positive view in order to control life, in order to avoid feeling certain things. That’s understandable while you take yourself to be a person — a person cannot feel all the feelings, cannot bear all the richness of life. Only what you really are can. Only this pure emptiness at the center. So, don’t just see the world and then try to control how you see the world — see the subject that sees the world. That is the cure. The subject is not a person in the world, in time, subject to circumstances.

The question is not one of “enlightenment”… simplify it… be honest and ask yourself: “What is it like to be me?”
That’s all. Right here, right now — what is it like to be myself?
It’s like you are immaterial, maybe like mist, maybe a speck of air as one 9 year-old suggested. Maybe a first-person viewer of a video game that takes place inside of you, as another 9 year-old suggested. What’s certain is that you are. But you can’t quite say where and what. If you stop… really stop just for a moment… REALLY stop considering what you are to others… you might find what you really are. What is the “place” where no one else can penetrate? The “place” where only you are, and no one else can come close enough to in order to tell you who you are. What is the place you’re looking out of at the world? Isn’t it true that no one can come so close to you so as to look out at the world as you. No one can do that. They can look at you, but not as you. Only you occupy the space that is looking out. Your very being cannot be penetrated by anybody in the world. Nobody knows what it’s like to be you. Only you can know. Just that feeling of yourself, being, that’s all. You are always you. Always remain you. It’s simple. Any child knows. This awareness doesn’t age, doesn’t become a product of the world. The person you are for others is a conditioned product of the world, a social identity — but not that which you are for yourself, that which is your center.
And that’s all “enlightenment” is — this centering. Return to center. See from where you are seeing, rather than imagining yourself from without.

One of the main effects of being yourself is that you lose self-consciousness. You no longer live to impress. You may think you don’t live to impress right now, but only when it really drops do you fully realize the extent of your self-consciousness, and how much you cared what others think — even others you don’t know. All you had was your social identity, after all. But when you find who you really are, that becomes not so important. Still important, but only peripherally.
Only after my return to center did I embrace my weirdness and no longer tried to appear perfect in the eyes of anyone. Who cares! You play the social game but are no longer bound by it. As Wei Wu Wei said, “Play your part in the comedy but don’t identify yourself with your role.”

Many things result from seeing and being who you really are and never were not. One of them is that I don’t try to have perfect feelings. If I lost my job — as you give in your example — I just might fully allow myself to feel bummed. I won’t try to escape the feeling nor will I feel it half-way. I cannot think why I should not feel it, exactly as it arises (if it in fact arises). Why not? If I try to remember why I used to try to avoid certain emotions it must have been because I thought they were wrong… they shouldn’t be there. Today I can’t imagine such an idea. What’s wrong with feeling something?

So I would feel what I feel. Maybe I won’t be bummed… it’s a hypothetical situation, isn’t it. Maybe I’ll be happy to be done with that job. I don’t know, but I’ll feel whatever arises. Then I will confide in the Unknown and trust in Its flow. That which produces the universe and holds it all in place… I trust in that. Something will come. We are always held, but we immediately worry and get all frantic rather than relax and be held. The Power Behind the World is always here. Every child knows that. We live from the Unknown, where everything is possible and the appearance of miracles is ordinary. He who lives in the known… he is the adult… who’s life is dead. Perhaps he would benefit from a visit to Neverland.

Indeed, “enlightenment” is becoming childlike. Adults have lost their minds!