Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, we're going to talk about the concept of becoming enlightened. Now it's a wonderful thing to be drawn towards the experience of waking up. This desire is what gives us the motivation to learn to release ourselves from suffering and stress and find greater degrees of freedom and peace of mind. And one of the greatest challenges on the path of awakening is that we often bring with us the condition to attitudes and ideas that dominate our mainstream culture.

Now in Western culture, especially, we're taught from a young age to strive, to accomplish and achieve things and to expect that we will feel fulfilled or more special once we get to that goal. We're rewarded, for instance, when we do well on a test in school, when we win a competition, when we make the cut of the sporting team. And then as adults, we strive after status maybe, wealth, career success, or to be the perfect partner. We have these ambitions that we constantly pursue. We love to accomplish goals.

So when it comes to the path of mindfulness and we hear about this concept of enlightenment, this possibility of enlightenment, the danger is that we bring these attitudes in and make awakening into another ambitious goal to attain in the future. Another goal that we believe when we get there will finally make us whole and happy and complete. But when it comes to awakening, you're not seeking to attain some future state. That's the mental trap that so many of us can get caught up in. We create this mental image of some special state called enlightenment that's out there in the future, something that we want to achieve.

And then we set about striving towards it. Now the irony is the more we focus on the outcome of attaining enlightenment in the future, the more strongly we attach to that idea that the more that we reinforce the idea that who we are right now and where we are right now is not acceptable, it's not enough, we're not there yet. And the attachment to that idea makes it impossible to be awakened, present in this moment right now fully, which is the only place where we can really do the work of awakening. So instead we want to let go of the goal and simply aim to be present right here and now. This allows us to approach our practice with wholeheartedness, acceptance and ease.

This message was beautifully summed up by Eckhart Tolle when he said. "Even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future." So he said, "Don't seek to become free or enlightened, just become present." In today's meditation, we'll explore this a little further. So I invite you to settle in for that. And as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here.