Realm: Enrollment
The Realms of Everyday Enlightenment are a conceptual way to organize the Landmarks by their complexity and difficulty. Landmarks each have a Realm they are assigned to, which makes it easy to group them and think about how to progress. As you move from one Realm to the next, you will discover a deeper richness to your meditative practices, and will find greater peach and clarity.
Being within the Realm of Enrollment in the context of Everyday Enlightenment means someone is trying to find out about meditative practices and have achieved some sort of initial Awakening where they will start to observe some of the phenomenon of the mind and existence that bring us suffering and confusion. As they move past the Realm of Enrollment, they will begin to have a basic understanding of what they have observed and experienced and will likely feel a desire to continue the journey.
Take a look at each of the Landmarks below, and see which sound interesting and achievable. Once you've identified a Landmark, read through it and then see which Trails, Guides or Lenses include that Landmark, and explore those links as well.
Landmarks of Enrollment
- Acknowledge Negative Emotions Without Judgment is where you'll discover how often we pass judgement on what goes on around us. The example chosen is driving or commuting, but you can choose anything about your typical day that may be frustrating or boring, or mildly unpleasant in some way. Learning about judgement is the first step in learning about Non-Judgement.
- Experimenting with Cravings tests your experiences with cravings and how they affect your thoughts and emotions.
- Have Experimented with Witnessing asks whether you are able to experience basic Witnessing during simple tasks.
- Impermanence Basic Understanding asks whether you are aware of the impermanence of all things at all times, that they are changing, decaying, and will not last.
- Learn About Non-Aversion is where you will practice both experiencing and being patient with aversive sensations.
- Notice Multiple Sensations starts out with simple Mindful practices of using smell, taste, and touch to Experience the Now.
- Notice Your Wandering Mind asks whether you can notice when your mind tends to wander off in different directions.
- Observe Duality and Connectedness gives you a chance to see Duality and then try to use the Lens of Nonduality to see things in a different way.
- Observe Emotions From Outside you will see negative emotions as something to observe, not something that is You.
- Observe Impermanent People is a chance to experiment with the idea that there is no permanent, unchanging self.
- Observe Parts of a Whole is a first step in seeing some common things as parts of a whole.
- Observe Your Judgment and Non-Judgment is where you will learn about how to simply observe experience and thoughts. Observation is a necessary part of being Non-Judgmental, as it is a neutral way of experiencing things. Additionally, before we can learn more about the thoughts in our mind, we first must learn to Observe them.
- Simple Mindfulness While Walking is a good place to start practicing Mindfulness throughout your day. You should be able to be mindful anytime at all, and working on micro-meditative practices can be done in many different ways and places.
- Use Sounds to be Present asks about your ability to notice how listening to sounds can quickly bring your wandering mind back to your present experience.