What, How, & Who We Are

Is "enlightenment" true? Is it necessary, or even important? Our staying alive relies upon our natural capacity to know if things are helpful, harmful, or deadly. This means being accurate or appropriate with reality. To do this, we rely upon our natural capacity for perception, awareness, and cognizance to gain knowledge and understanding. Knowing what and how things are, who we are, is the only way we survive, which means it's "necessary" to notice things, and "important" to notice things accurately. Our human qualities of wisdom, compassion, and knowledge, offer us insights into reality. Traditional spiritual practices cultivate these qualities through the skillful means of study, contemplation, and meditation, practices allowing us to be good at doing something we naturally do, noticing, with both intention and equanimity. Adventitious life experiences condition preferences, assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes that can obscure our ability to be accurate with ourselves, to have integrity with how and who we are. Contemplative and meditation practices allow us to clarify any misunderstanding or confusion about what, how, and who we. Awakening is seeing who we are, the reality of our humanity, and our precious opportunity to realize the importance of being accurate, compassionate, and equanimous with ourselves and each other because living and life on earth is existential. Is it necessary or even important for us to survive? The universe is indifferent to whether we exist or not. Either from the degradation of the environment, or another nuclear winter precipitated by climate change, global tensions, a coronal mass ejection, or another asteroid the current odds of another extinction event on earth don't favor life as we know it. There's a chance we might increase our odds for survival, by having a wise/loving relationship with how and who we are, with each other, and with the earth! This would mean taking responsibility for being awake, aware, even enlightened, willing and able to see ourselves and each other objectively, with equanimity, able to sustain a global community (common-unity) for the sake of life. Evidence of anyone realizing enlightenment suggests it should or could be possible for all of us to do so. Why don't we? Either we don't know how, or we don't recognize it's both necessary and important for us to awaken.