“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water” – Zen Proverb
A disappointing statement to the ego that many masters and teachers have shared with their students.
The mind imagines a dramatic event and a point in life that must pivot to something different and extraordinary. But this statement points to something much greater – the one who does the action no longer perceives life as ordinary and necessary to plan and strategize around.
What enlightenment seems to do is it collapses the one who is defined by the actions and identities that carry those actions. And with that falls the burden, ambition, planning, fear, the need to survive, and the need to become something other than what one is in this moment. The same action continues – the wood still gets chopped, and the water is still carried.
A teacher once said to me, “If you believe you are enlightened, you are not”, a statement that annihilated the ego around the “I have reached enlightenment” belief.
Enlightenment is not a mystical state, and it is certainly not experienced by the mind. The mind is limited to its own perceptions and ideas of what something means. When the ego hears “awakening,” it imagines itself sitting on the beach under a palm tree that grows everything that it needs for survival, while life around it unfolds in magical ways. But it’s actually the opposite of that.
For the average person, what happens after enlightenment is invisible externally. There is an exhaustion that precedes the collapse of pretending to be someone and pretending to be separate from everything and everyone. Through that collapse, there are, indeed, events that take place – some may leave careers that are centered around the identity of survival, power, and control, some leave relationships and marriages that no longer resonate, some leave cities or even countries because the old place no longer serves the evolution of the soul, and some leave entire structures, going into complete solitude.
Others, however, may remain exactly where they are – raising children, working ordinary jobs, answering emails, paying rent. The shift is not necessarily structural but perceptual, which may or may not shift the external appearance of reality. What changes is that the action continues, but the compulsive search for “healing” and completion through action falls away. This is why trying to identify an “enlightened person” is often misguided. The mind expects evidence of enlightenment: serenity and peace, special abilities, a rise in intellect – all while wearing white robes and meditating somewhere on a rock in the middle of a jungle. Yet many who believe themselves enlightened are simply carrying a more sophisticated identity—“the awakened one,” “the witness,” “the realized self.”
Enlightenment is not the refinement of identity into a spiritual form. It is the recognition that every identity, including the spiritual one, is a provisional appearance. Peace, abilities, or a deeper sense of connection with life may arise as byproducts, but identification with them can drop one into a deeper sleep state, creating what is often called a “spiritual ego” or “spiritual identity.”
The paradox is that enlightenment changes everything and nothing simultaneously. The external may not change in appearance, but the internal architecture of perception shifts entirely. There is greater intimacy with life because there is no longer a separation from it; the ordinary does not disappear, it becomes part of a whole – a state that the mind is not capable of understanding.
Chopping wood and carrying water may be steps along the way, but they are also complete as they are. Nothing is added to the moment, and nothing is removed from it, and that perfect moment is found precisely where the mind stops searching for something different from its current reality. And then something deep within recognizes that what changed isn’t reality but the one who believed they were separate from it in the first place.
न ते समाधिं पश्यामि न विक्षेपं तथैव च ।
न बन्धं न च वा मुक्तिं स्वस्वरूपस्य पश्यतः ॥
For one who sees their own true nature,
there is neither distraction nor meditation,
neither bondage nor liberation.
Avadhuta Gita