Enlightenment and Burger King

To me, enlightenment is not about learning all the lingo of a certain school of thought or understanding everything I read. I can't even count wisdom as true enlightenment anymore. I suppose it all can be called a degree of enlightenment depending on how one defines it.

But studying different schools of thought, learning the lingo, becoming well versed in similarities and differences between these schools of thought, figuring out the ego is nothing more than a learned way of thinking, understanding the complex interactions on different levels of existence, controlling the energy body, realizing that the true mind is infinite and all things come from the vibration caused by true thought, living within duality and non-duality simultaneously, being able to take on completely different perspectives instantly, feel and know the oneness of all, and on and on; well, it's all rather easy (for all of us).

Sure, it's more difficult in this world because there are entities actively trying to stop us. But truthfully, if we didn't have the distractions and active manipulation this stuff would come easy. That's why we choose to to be here and experience the difficulty of this world. We don't want it to be too easy. It's more fun this way.

Now, imagine yourself as a point of awareness that just this instant became aware that it is aware. And instead of being surrounded by an already created reality with rules and mysteries, you are surrounded by the infinite void. Not darkness or blackness or space but infinite nothingness. And you yourself are nothing but an awareness. You have no thoughts and no frame of reference. No words to describe your situation. No known actions that you can take. In fact, the concept of action doesn't even exist yet. There is nothing but you as an awareness of nothing and an awareness of your awareness.

Now imagine if you will, a burger-king just popped up in front of you here in the infinite void. You may think that sounds silly and it is, but bear with me. Imagine what needed to take place for a burger-king to come into existence. Imagine that from the perspective of a single point of awareness surrounded by infinite nothingness.

Imagine the elements that make up a burger-king. The bricks, mortar, shingles, tile, ceramic, stainless steel, glass, plastic, and all the other substances that comprise the structure. Imagine what it took to bring all the things together into the particular configuration that is burger-king. Of course, you need to create cows, chickens and vegetables too. You need some kind of structure where all these elements can come from. A planet maybe. Without a sun a planet won't work though. But you need some kind of sub-structure for these things as well. Something that can have many configurations. Something we'll call an 'atom'. Then you're going to need some forces to make all these elements come together correctly. You need that planet spinning around a sun. You need these elements to stick to the planet. You need the atoms to bind to one another. You need each atom to be stable or else the whole structure will come apart.

You're also going to need some kind of container that will hold all these atoms and forces. Something like a bowl of jello where this "matter" can be manipulated and controlled. We'll call this bowl of jello, energy. Now you're liking this idea of a burger-king but how will you experience it. I mean you are just a point of awareness in infinite nothingness. You'll need to split yourself off somehow and have some complex structure to reside in that can interact with these new things you just thought up. We'll call this structure, human. Now you have to come up with a brain, nervous system, digestive system, circulatory system, taste buds, eye balls, hands and fingers, feet and legs. You need some way to get this complex structure to your new burger-king so you have to create a car. Imagine how many people it's going to take to finally come up with a car. Creating this burger-king from nothing is going to take awhile. Wonder what we can do while we wait for galaxies to form and then for suns to spit out gasses that start to rotate away from the star. Then we're going to have to wait for the planet to cool. This is going to take awhile.

Let's go back to our lonely point of awareness in the middle of infinite nothingness. There you are. No frame of reference. No cozy little universe all ready made for you to play in. No structure for you to work from. No pre-existing concepts. No thoughts. Just absolute nothing.

Now, go deep within the core of your current being. Feel the timeless and spaceless awareness that you are. Dig deep. If you can dig down and say without any shadow of any doubt that if you were just your core awareness out in the infinite void that you would have the will, patience, endurance, determination and everything else you as a point of awareness don't even have concepts for yet; that you would be able to one day expand yourself to the point of bringing a burger-king into existence, then you my friend are Enlightened.

Why? Because at that point you then truly Know Yourself.

Interesting. There's an economic theory and study, that every hard product manufactured depends on some other manufactured product, which depends upon others, etc, etc, way back to raw materials and labor. And you can measure complexity of an economic sector by how long and complex that train is. Everything is sort of interconnected, and even self-referential - for example, the raw materials used to manufacture steel are mined by machines that contain and depend on components made from that very material. I thought this was called 'long tail' manufacturing, or something like that, but I guess that's another concept.

The reason I mention this, is this post seems to be drawing the same type of parallel, metaphysically. Very cool.

As to Burger King: I find it very profound that one can order "frings" - half onion rings, have French fries, and they will happily provide the off-the-menu selection. Mind-blowing.

reply to post by Ian McLean


Thanks for the additional thoughts. Thinking about everything required for just the mundane things we take for granted really opens up the thinking.

"Frings", eh? I just learned something new. Never heard of them before. Interesting.

I took me a minute to respond to this. I had to scrape up my brains and put them back in my head.

I guess I've always taken BK for granted.

I watched a video the other day. You can find it i-am-bored.com, search "biggest star". It puts our life into perpesctive. Compared to the largest star in the galaxy (that we know of), our sun is microscopic.

It all lends creed to my idea that everything we know and are is contained to an atom on someones finger.

My head hurts again.

-spliff, out.

Seems like the Universe created just the right conditions for a Burger King to be formed.
But, that's not all, Harvey's, Deluxe french fries, Wendy's chili, OK McD's too, all these are the product of the Universe. So then are our taste buds formed in order to taste the essence of the creation.

The Universe has char broiled itself into perfection.

PS, is the angry whopper promotion really over? That makes me angry, in an exploding quasar sort of way.

Back to the subject, in no way in your meditations should a fast food restaurant cheapen your experience, it is part of the whole, not only that but it provides a satisfying meal at a reasonable price when not meditating.

[edit on 18-1-2009 by Toadmund]

reply to post by spliff4020


I watched that video. Cool stuff. I knew there were some huge stars but didn't know they were that big.

Back in 5th grade I did a visual report on astronomical perspective. It was kind of like Powers of 10. I've always enjoyed that sort of thing.

As I was looking for that powersof10 website I came across the following quote from wikipedia.

An interesting aspect mentioned by Robbert Dijkgraaf is that when one zooms out into the universe the scene viewed goes back in time (as a result of the visual delay of light travelling over great distances) and thus the farthest image of the whole universe, is really one of the universe at the "time" of the Big Bang, when it was infinitely small. In this sense, the two extremes of size come together.

[edit on 18-1-2009 by OmniVersal]

Originally posted by Toadmund
Back to the subject, in no way in your meditations should a fast food restaurant cheapen your experience, it is part of the whole, not only that but it provides a satisfying meal at a reasonable price when not meditating.

Absolutely. That's why I decided to use something as silly as burger-king to compare our little lonely point of awareness to.

Just turning on your water faucet and feeling the gravity. Or feeling the wetness of the water and really feel it without the label of 'wet'. And then realizing the incredibly complex system in place to make those two gasses form a liquid that we label as 'wet'. And what it takes to get that water through your faucet to reach your hand.

That's the meditation that one can do all day long. If someone is really interested in keeping that peaceful meditation feeling all day then this is one way to do it.

More so, it deepens our relationship with the universe. The true magic of our existence can start once again to seep through the jaded membrane of our labeled world.