YOU HAVE ENLIGHTENMENT, NOW USE IT
-Gary Null PhD.
Use the Clarity That Changes Everything in Life
The Blind Men and the Elephant
There is an old story from India that serves as an excellent tool for understanding the meaning of our expanding into enlightenment. The story was made popular in the 1800s by John Godfrey Saxe in his poem entitled “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” Once there was a group of blind wise men who sought out an elephant to try to understand its nature. One wise man grabbed the trunk and said it was a snake. Another felt the animal’s ear and mistook it for a fan. The tusk felt like a spear. The elephant’s frame was a wall, the leg a tree, and the tail a rope. None of the wise men were correct, yet each believed he was right. Saxe’s poem reveals how the personal truths we live by seduce us into mistaking a part of a problem for the entire reality.
Plato told a version of the same story twenty-four hundred years ago, though he set it in a cave rather than a zoo. In the allegory of the cave, prisoners chained since birth see only shadows on the wall in front of them and mistake those shadows for reality. When one prisoner is freed and sees the sun for the first time, he is blinded by the light. And when he returns to the cave to tell the others, they think he has gone mad. The pattern is identical: we mistake the small piece of reality we can perceive for the whole, and we resist anyone who suggests that there is more.
When we grope through life with our eyes closed, we may wake up one morning and think: My God, here is my to-do list and I am not even on it. I cannot handle all these tasks when I should be dealing with my everyday relationships and responsibilities, my self-image, my children and community. We usually panic at this point and use various coping mechanisms to numb out. Some people will buy things they do not need, or overeat, or watch too much television. Others go gambling, or they first take tranquilizers and then go gambling so they will not feel bad after they lose. We distract ourselves and we find numerous targets to blame for our troubles: society, our childhood, a boss, abuse, or neglect. But we give little thought to the choices we make that are the true cause of our problems.
In the twenty-first century, we have built the most sophisticated distraction apparatus in human history. The average person now spends over seven hours a day consuming digital media — scrolling feeds algorithmically engineered to trigger emotional arousal, watching content designed to prevent the pause in which reflection might occur, engaging with AI-generated material so convincing that the line between authentic and synthetic has become nearly invisible. We are the blind men, and the elephant has never been larger, and the parts we are groping have never been more carefully curated to feel like the whole.
Do you see the endless games we play?
So how can we bring clarity, some enlightening awareness, to our problems and our lives? How can we rediscover joy and happiness and gain mastery over ourselves and our environment?
“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
— Anaïs Nin
It’s Time to Throw Out Your Garbage
First, you need to thoroughly clean up the mess you find yourself living in. Rearranging the parts of a large problem does not solve anything. Everything in your life needs to be changed so you can start anew. A fresh start is only possible after you recognize that something you are clinging to needs to be surrendered. Two different energies cannot share the same space with equal intensity at the same time. If you are holding onto something negative, you cannot hold onto a positive energy and expect something good and healthy to manifest for you simultaneously.
The philosopher Heraclitus understood this twenty-five hundred years ago. He taught that everything flows - you cannot step into the same river twice, because the river has changed and you have changed. Life is movement. Life is exchange. And the refusal to release what is stagnant, what is toxic, what has outlived its usefulness, is the refusal to participate in the fundamental nature of reality itself. Clinging is not stability. Clinging is death dressed as safety.
There are many things you can do to start changing your life. If you are starting at a point where you are out of balance — if you are ill, overweight, anxious, angry, or depressed — the first thing to do is step back. Ask: Where am I out of balance? Where am I putting my energy?
One reason people are so frustrated and accumulate negative energy leading to disease and suffering is because they cannot control others or get what they want. How many things in life can you actually control? The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave and became one of the most influential moral teachers in Western history, drew the most useful line a human being can draw: some things are within our control, and some things are not. Our opinions, our intentions, our desires, our aversions — these are within our control. Other people’s behavior, the economy, the weather, the government — these are not. The only thing you can exert real control over is how you choose to feel about yourself and the world. When we cannot control or possess our desires, we tend to resort to force, which by its very nature is a negative energy.
The Two Energies
Everything in life is energy: every feeling, every experience, and every location. There are two principal energies in life: the positive and the negative. Positive energy is a very light energy. Why do we feel content gazing at the ocean or sitting quietly by a lake? Why do we experience joy in the presence of children, pets, and positive people? It is because the energy they share with us is positive. How often do we take a little bit of that energy as a respite and fall right back into the negative vortex when we return to work, our family, or our friends?
So many people say to themselves: Well, I feel secure with my job and money is coming in. There are people who I consider friends and who understand me. What else do I need? Yet their lives remain toxic. They are willing to exchange true happiness and an authentic life for a superficial security, which is imbalanced. Others are convinced that redemption comes from their suffering, but we are not a better person if we suffer. We are merely a more toxic person.
The neuroscience confirms this at the cellular level. When we are in a state of chronic negativity — chronic stress, chronic resentment, chronic fear — the brain releases cortisol and adrenaline in quantities that were designed for short-term survival, not for permanent residence. The result, over time, is what researchers call allostatic load: the cumulative biological cost of chronic stress. It suppresses the immune system, inflames the cardiovascular system, accelerates cellular aging, and literally rewires the brain to prioritize threat detection over creativity, curiosity, and joy. You are not imagining that negativity makes you sick. The science has been measuring it for decades.
Conversely, when we are in a state of genuine positive connection — when we are present with someone we love, when we are absorbed in meaningful work, when we are in nature without devices — the brain releases oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine in patterns that promote healing, neuroplasticity, and what the neuroscientist Richard Davidson calls emotional flourishing. The body responds to positive energy not as a luxury but as a biological instruction: grow, repair, connect, thrive.
The philosopher Baruch Spinoza, writing in the seventeenth century, described what he called conatus — the innate drive of every living thing to persist in its own being, to grow toward its fullest expression. Every organism, from a single cell to a human being, has this drive. It is the acorn reaching toward the oak. It is the infant reaching for the mother. It is the adult reaching for meaning. When we align our choices with the conatus — when we choose what feeds our growth rather than what feeds our fear — we are not being selfish. We are fulfilling the deepest biological and spiritual instruction we possess.
“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
— Baruch Spinoza
Visualize and Release
Insecurity and fear so often prevent us from making positive exchanges, but there is an exercise we can all do, a simple practice that can have a profound impact on changing our lives for the better. Visualize what you need and then project your visualized need into the universe. Just take your thought and put it out there. Now here is the key: do not chase your need. Do not force it or try to control or manipulate it. Just let it go out into the universe without any effort.
As I mentioned, everything in life is energy: every rock, plant, animal, and person. Everything vibrates. It is all alive. So if I believe in the interconnection and completeness of life, I put out a need. I am also trusting that the universe understands. Every time I have had a situation when I needed something and I put that energy out into the universe, and worked on it with discipline, focus, and patience, I have received what I asked for. People will argue these are just coincidences, but when you have done this enough and experienced the results, you will think very differently.
The ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism describes this principle as wu wei — effortless action, or non-forcing. Lao Tzu wrote: The Tao does nothing, yet nothing is left undone. This is not passivity. This is alignment. It is the recognition that when you stop trying to force the river to flow in the direction you have chosen and instead allow yourself to flow with the current that is already moving, extraordinary things happen. Not because you have become magical, but because you have stopped fighting the natural order of things.
Modern neuroscience has documented a version of this in what researchers call the default mode network — the constellation of brain regions that becomes active when we are not focused on any specific task. It is during these moments of apparent idleness — daydreaming, walking without a destination, sitting quietly — that the brain makes its most creative connections, synthesizes information across domains, and produces the insights that feel like they came from nowhere. The great mathematical and scientific breakthroughs have almost always arrived not during periods of intense concentration but during moments of release: Einstein on a streetcar, Newton under an apple tree, Archimedes in the bath. The act of letting go is not the absence of effort. It is the condition under which the deepest effort becomes possible.
The Cumulative Cost
All energy is cumulative. People do not just wake up overweight one morning, but over time. People rarely become bankrupt immediately, but through mounting debt. Relationships are not destroyed the day after partners fall in love. There are other negative energies involved that are cumulative. Our lowest points in life are reached when one day we have exchanged so many positive things for negative ones that our balance is completely lost.
And so often that tipping point manifests as a disease in the body — a heart attack, a stroke, cancer. But it was all cumulative. It may have taken twenty or thirty years for the disease to progress to the appearance of symptoms. Just because you do not observe evident symptoms does not mean you are not manifesting a negative energy that is an actual disease in process. You may not have lung cancer from smoking today or a damaged liver from drinking when you wake up tomorrow. But sooner or later the accumulation of negative energy — in your thoughts, behavior, and environment — will take its toll.
The science of epigenetics has now confirmed that this accumulation is not merely metaphorical. Your gene expression — which genes are turned on and which are turned off — is directly influenced by your environment, your stress levels, your nutrition, your emotional state. Chronic stress changes your biology. Chronic negativity changes your biology. And those changes can be passed to the next generation. The physician and researcher Gabor Maté has written extensively about how the body stores what the mind refuses to process — how unresolved emotional patterns become chronic physical conditions. The diseases we develop are not random. They are, in a very real sense, the body’s final attempt to communicate what we have been unwilling to hear.
So on that day when you finally say, “My God, I do not know why I am so sick,” take a look at the accumulation of all your beliefs and actions, of cause and effect, and you will discover that your situation reflects your actions, which always follow your beliefs. Realize that you have become whatever your mind told you. Our beliefs are only perceptions, and our perceptions are defined and controlled by the particular paradigm we buy into.
Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps, observed this from the most extreme position imaginable. He found that even in Auschwitz — even in conditions of total physical deprivation — the human being retains one freedom that cannot be taken away: the freedom to choose one’s attitude. The prisoners who survived were not always the strongest or the youngest. They were the ones who found meaning — who chose, in the face of unimaginable suffering, to believe that their lives still had purpose. If meaning can be chosen in Auschwitz, it can be chosen in your kitchen. If attitude can be changed in a death camp, it can be changed in your living room. The question is not whether you have the power. The question is whether you will use it.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
— Viktor Frankl
Sustainable Living, Sustainable Self
The next step for learning to exchange energy positively is to reflect on what is necessary to live a sustainable life. If we begin to live every day with the idea of sustainable living, then we will only make choices that we can realistically sustain.
Say I want to sustain my health. Then what do I have to do? I need to make different choices around food and exercise, exchanging my negative habits and thoughts for positive ones. How do I sustain my happiness? I need to be around people who are internally joyful and, whenever possible, avoid dysfunctional people. We feel weighted down in the presence of people who hold onto the negative energy of unhappiness.
How many times have you found yourself acting as a rescuer, only to discover the person crying to be rescued has wrapped a rope around your waist with a giant boulder and is leaping off a cliff? You cannot rescue people. Ultimately, they have to want to be rescued. A person who demands to be rescued may be manipulating a game you do not understand. They have mastered it, and they will take your energy down to the dark recesses where they reside as victims.
The psychologist Stephen Karpman described this pattern with clinical precision in what he called the Drama Triangle: a rotating dynamic of Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor that plays out in families, workplaces, friendships, and nations. The Victim says: I am helpless, save me. The Rescuer says: I will sacrifice myself to fix you. And the moment the rescue fails — as it always does, because the Victim’s need is not for solutions but for attention — the Rescuer becomes the Persecutor: After everything I did for you! The only way out of the triangle is to refuse to play any of the three roles and instead engage from a position of genuine autonomy: I care about you, and I will support you, but I am not responsible for your choices.
When you see how our society connects with that which is negative, it informs you about what we have become as a culture and as a nation. You can begin to understand the dynamics behind why people gamble, smoke, drink, and pursue negative activities with destructive results. And it will come as no surprise how popular our media’s moronic shock jocks are, and why they are rewarded with multimillion-dollar contracts while Nobel Peace Prize winners toil in relative obscurity.
Today this asymmetry has been amplified by algorithms. The outrage economy is not a metaphor — it is a business model. Social media platforms have discovered that negative emotional content generates more engagement than positive content. Anger gets more clicks than kindness. Fear gets more shares than hope. The algorithms that govern your feed are not neutral. They are optimized for engagement, and engagement is maximized by negativity. A 2025 study found that content expressing moral outrage spreads at roughly three times the rate of content expressing moral admiration. We are not collectively choosing negativity. We are being fed it, systematically, by systems designed to profit from our worst impulses.
What does this tell us? It tells us we are collectively living at the negative end of the energy spectrum. And the first step out is the recognition that this is not inevitable. It is engineered. And what is engineered can be refused.
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
— Marshall McLuhan
The Surrender That Sets You Free
In order to unclutter and simplify our lives, we must surrender what we no longer desire to be. This allows the energy of our authentic selves to emerge. But as long as we are holding onto one energy, a different energy cannot take its place. That is why we tend to think at higher levels and act on lower impulses. We think light but act heavy. We think spiritually but act non-spiritually. We think positively but act negatively. We keep exchanging the energy for what we ideally want because we are not willing to surrender the energy we have become.
Let us say you and your partner plan to have a future together, a simple life where you can both do all the things you have always wanted. But it is going to be rough to reach that goal: seventeen-hour workdays, less time spent together, nights of exhaustion, and no end in sight. Yet that is all right, because the paradigm tells us we are supposed to get married, have children, buy a home, overwork, create debt, stress ourselves, and make superficial friends. The paradigm tells us security is to be found by closing our eyes, like the blind men, and tolerating the illusion. This is how people go along living and then wake up one day and realize they are overweight, alcoholic, or seriously ill. They have been sublimating from the frustration of not living an authentic life.
The philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm drew a distinction that is essential here. He identified two fundamental modes of existence: the having mode and the being mode. In the having mode, we define ourselves by what we possess — our property, our status, our credentials, our relationships treated as possessions. In the being mode, we define ourselves by what we experience — our presence, our creativity, our capacity for love and connection. The having mode is inherently anxious, because everything we have can be taken away. The being mode is inherently free, because what we are cannot be confiscated. Surrender, in Fromm’s framework, is not loss. It is the movement from having to being. And being is where enlightenment lives.
The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart put it even more directly. He wrote: The spiritual life is not a process of addition, but of subtraction. He was not speaking of material poverty, though he lived simply. He was describing the same principle that applies to your diet, your relationships, your beliefs, and your daily habits: what you remove matters more than what you add. Every false belief you release, every toxic relationship you end, every habitual distraction you decline, creates space. And in that space, something authentic can finally breathe.
“The spiritual life is not a process of addition, but of subtraction.”
— Meister Eckhart
Conscious Creating
One way to live at an enlightened level is by engaging in what I call conscious creating. You do this by tuning in to create wonderful ideas while being conscious in the moment. Avoid the habit of convincing yourself you do not have enough money, or you are not educated enough. All you have to do is trust that the universe will help you create an idea, and you suddenly find the energy that wants to light you up.
Creative energy is a rapid, vibrating energy. Try to be creative with everything you do, in every area of your life. Have fun with it. Play with the energy. If you are not creating, then your energy stagnates, and stagnant energy is negative energy. It drains you. The less you create, the less positive energy you have at your disposal. The more you create, the lighter your energy becomes.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what he called flow — the state of complete absorption in a meaningful activity in which time seems to stop, self-consciousness disappears, and the person becomes one with the task. Flow, he found, is the state in which human beings report the highest levels of happiness, meaning, and fulfillment. And it is not found in leisure. It is not found in passive consumption. It is found in creative engagement — in the moment when your skills are matched to a genuine challenge and you are fully present, fully committed, fully alive. That is conscious creating. That is the experience of enlightenment made practical and daily.
Now we face a new question that no previous generation has had to confront. Artificial intelligence can now generate text, images, music, code, and video with a speed and proficiency that surpasses most human beings in most contexts. A hundred million jobs are projected to be displaced globally. Students are submitting AI-generated essays. Musicians are competing with AI-generated songs. Artists are watching their styles replicated by machines trained on their own work. And the temptation — the enormous, seductive temptation — is to stop creating. To let the machine do it. To outsource the very act that makes us most fully human.
But here is what the machine cannot do: it cannot experience the flow. It cannot feel the vibration of creative energy moving through a body. It cannot know what it is like to struggle with an idea for hours and then feel it break open like a dawn. The product may look similar. But the experience is not similar. And the experience is where enlightenment lives. Creativity is not valuable because of what it produces. It is valuable because of what it does to the person who practices it. If you surrender that practice to a machine, you save time. But you lose yourself.
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
— Albert Einstein
Be Present in This Moment
Our most important lesson is to learn to be present in this moment. When I am in this moment, I am conscious of this moment. My conscious focus allows me to make any choice I want with utmost clarity. I can exchange any negative energy for any positive one. Then I can put my feelings into the universe and know they are honest and authentic ones. I can observe things and situations for what they are. Conditioned responses no longer exist in this moment, because I see everything, hear everything, clearly. I do not need to interpret or edit my clarity through any belief system.
Our belief systems cause us to take things out of context, which is how we are able to continue justifying violence, racism, sexism, and our personal dysfunctions. Whenever we exchange truth for an illusion, we are permitting ourselves to continue stoking the fire of our passions to think and act in negative ways. But in the present moment, there is only clarity. In the moment of clarity, you have authentic control over yourself and can surrender illusion.
This is where we gain enlightenment, because in this moment you can choose to make authentic choices. Enlightenment in life is fundamentally about the quality of the choices we make and our willingness to stand behind them.
The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh devoted his entire teaching to this single principle. He said: Life is available only in the present moment. The past is gone. The future has not yet arrived. If you are not present, you are not alive. He was not being poetic. He was being precise. The past exists only as memory. The future exists only as projection. The present moment is the only moment in which you can breathe, feel, choose, love, create, or change. Everything else is a story your mind is telling you. And stories, however compelling, are not the same as reality.
We tend to lose touch with those moments of enlightenment when we fall into our routines. Routines are a continuation of past rituals, habits, and patterns: eating the same diet, dressing the same way, watching the same programs, taking the same medications, scrolling the same feeds, checking the same apps. Most people pride themselves on regimenting their routines. They do not break their habits or challenge them. They do not surrender them in exchange for something better.
Here is a practice. For one day — one single day — put the phone in a drawer. Do not check it. Do not reach for it. Do not glance at it. And observe what happens inside you. Observe the anxiety. Observe the reflex of the hand reaching for something that is not there. Observe the strange, uncomfortable silence that opens up when the constant stream of notification and stimulation is removed. And then observe what begins to fill that silence. Because something will. And what fills it — whether it is boredom, or sadness, or creativity, or gratitude, or a conversation with someone you love that goes deeper than it has gone in years — that is the beginning of enlightenment. Not the dramatic, cinematic kind. The real kind. The kind that happens in an ordinary kitchen on an ordinary Tuesday when you finally stop running long enough to arrive.
The Simple, Uncomplicated Life
At the end of the day, it is really a simple, uncomplicated, pleasant life that we all deserve and yearn for. But our choices often remove us from our ideal life. Even the place we live can take it away. Our jobs can, too. Even our friends and associates can remove us from what we need most. Instead of moving closer to our ideal, we remain in our ideal’s antithesis. This generates such anxiety, depression, and apathy that we find ourselves succumbing to drinking, smoking, overeating, or taking medications to vent our sense of incompleteness.
We must work at rebalancing ourselves and simplifying our lives to feel that we are sufficient as we are now, every day, and discover the enlightenment possible in each moment.
The poet Mary Oliver, who spent her life paying attention to the ordinary world with the precision of a scientist and the tenderness of a saint, wrote: Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. The darkness is not the enemy of enlightenment. It is its raw material. Every loss, every failure, every moment of suffering that we are willing to face honestly and learn from becomes part of the foundation on which the enlightened life is built. You do not need to have a perfect history to live an enlightened life. You need to have an honest one.
The philosopher Albert Camus, in his essay on the myth of Sisyphus — the man condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain only to watch it roll back down for eternity — concluded with a line that has haunted readers for eighty years: One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Camus was not being ironic. He was saying that meaning is not given to us by the universe. It is created by us, in the act of living, in the choices we make, in the way we meet each day. The boulder rolls back. The routine returns. The phone buzzes. The alarm rings. And still, in the space between the alarm and the first breath, there is a choice. There is always a choice. And that choice — to be present, to be honest, to be open, to be kind, to be creative, to be alive — is enlightenment.
It is not somewhere else. It is not later. It is not for monks or mystics or people with more time and fewer responsibilities. It is here. It is now. It is yours.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
— Simone Weil
Most beautiful thing I’ve ever read! Thank you for sharing your wisdom!