Enlightenment seems to be difficult to find mainly because it goes unnoticed by the soul conditioned to ignore the obvious essentials in life. The essentials are these: That the sun rises and sets; that we are born and breathe and live and die; that when we are wounded the world grows smaller and when we are healed we are healed by love. When we are healed by love the world grows larger and there is room for everything where previously there seemed to be none. Someplace inside of us, we believe enlightenment will set us free from our suffering. But what awakening actually does is to open a door to our suffering, while simultaneously redeeming it in a new idea of what freedom actually is. The only surprise in awakening is that it was there all along. Finally, we are free. But this freedom is not a freedom from, but rather a freedom with.What we call life is the union of the faraway and the near. The faraway is the seemingly outer world. The near is ourselves. A nameless, characterless quality pervades and supports both. Boundless continuity might also be called a bound infinity, that combination of the mortal and the time-bound with the timeless. The texts in Ecstatic Speech are all teaching pieces that arise from the place where the particular-that is individuals with pain and sorrow, laughter and joy-and the Silent Eternal meet. They are utterances that give shape to the Absolute and allow this vastness to enter the small chambers of our infinite hearts.In this way we learn our place in the Great Place, a place we sometimes lose because we don’t know how to hold our personal suffering along with the Great Perfection we sense within and without our selves. The pieces in this book exist to help us learn that our suffering and our awakening are a single thing, that our imperfections and the Great Perfection arise at exactly the same time and have the same aim, which is freedom. These pieces are not meant to continue the spiritual exercise of giving us peak experiences of unification, which simply lift us up only to set us down later. The view from the mountaintop is wonderful but so is living in the valley where our towns and neighborhoods are. These pieces extol both views since it is only by union that union is achieved.Said in other words: this is not a book of information but a book of practice. Enlightenment is not a theoretical position: it is meant to be dinner table conversation and the manners of everyday life.Enough said. Expect it all. Please go forward.Jason Shulman26 December 2016Truro, Massachusetts
