Around 40 years ago I was giving a talk to an astrology group about the idea of reincarnation. I suggested that natal charts were astronomical configurations that were ‘nets’.

When someone died all their unresolved karmic issues went with them and the soul travelled through the universe until it was caught in one of these configurations that brought them back into a body to resolve them. Thus reincarnation until there were no issues left.

Afterwards one of the attendees came up to me and said “you know, I used to be enlightened, but I forgot” and I understood what she meant.

Recently I told this story to a group of students and later in a private session one of them told me that he was thinking about this story because one day he felt happy and enlightened and the next day depressed and unhappy like he’d ‘forgotten’ to be enlightened.

My questions were:
Were you really ‘unenlightened and depressed’ or just not happy?
There is a difference.
When you were ‘enlightened and happy’ was there an underlying anxiety that you knew it was impermanent?

The Dalai Lama said that we can obtain a deeper form of happiness and peace by being neither happy nor unhappy, but actually balanced.

Enlightenment can be knowing that neither state is permanent, so we can engage but know that each day is different. We can observe it with our deeper mind and know that all the time we have a body there will be good and bad days. Just by knowing this and observing the changes, they don’t trouble us so much.

The Buddha spoke of suffering having 2 arrows, the first is unavoidable and the result of having a body, the second is avoidable because we don’t have to suffer about our suffering.

Enlightenment of our unnecessary suffering is to know this.