Point and Center

I’m responding with a fresh post to Marcia’s comment. She wrote:

As I understand after practicing…
When we practice meditation, or mindfulness, we feel that our scattered mind are suddenly called back again in it’s wholeness and all our different “parts” are put together in one moment, even if for a second. We feel ‘centered’. It seems that everything go to it’s proper ‘place’ again. So things get clearer and we can “see”, as when we turn on the light in a dark room and we see where things are, whereas before we where just stumbling around.

Is this feeling of “center” somehow related to the word ‘point’ in the sense Rinpoche uses it?

Another question- in what sense ‘to be enlightened’ has to do with ‘being’? Or even ‘center’? Or being of the word? 

I think Rinpoche does not use the word ‘point’ in relation to the center of experience. The idea of ‘pointing out’ is basically negative. When we point something out, we freeze it in place; we also take a distance from it. On the other hand, when we experience what appears in terms of the ‘zero point’, we free it from this freezing. But I think that goes beyond our focus.

Now, the connection of ‘enlightenment’ to being. That’s a big question. It has always been interesting to me that Rinpoche has never objected to the word ‘enlightenment’ as a translation of ‘bodhi’ (Tibetan ‘byang chub’), even though these terms have very little to do with light. I think the connection has to do with clarity. Light has many qualities, but it is the clarity of light, which is completely without limits or restrictions, that seems to connected it to what we call ‘enlightenment’.

Jack