“Artus Explains Enlightenment”

“Artus sought to clarify the matter. ‘I see your difficulty, Boone. The details get a little complex at this point. But let me take a stab at it. If we were to look at an empty room and someone asked us what we saw, we might say ‘Carpet, curtains, walls, a ceiling, a door, and some windows. The Enlightened Being would see emptiness. Both objects and emptiness are there, but it becomes a question of where one puts his emphasis. Between the perceptions of an ignorant man and an enlightened one there’s this difference: the former sees the changing surface, the stray objects like the curtains, and the latter sees the unchanging depth, the emptiness of the room or the Silence of the Absolute. A common example is the sky: tonight, we might look up and say that we see clouds and a moon; tomorrow we might notice stars only, and so on. But the Saint would remind us that the sky is there constantly and that the other objects appear and disappear against its perpetual background. That’s my understanding of the Unity the texts discuss, that it’s like the sky in the analogy: always there but missed by all of us as we focus on the flashy stuff that’s flickering and changing all the time.’”