5.6 What is effortless activity?

Serenely transcending the illusion that conditioned existence is an objective reality and witnessing this clearly in its true nature as the manifest form of unconditioned mind, the fully realised mind continues to live out the life of the body. Wholeheartedly embracing everyday life, the enlightened person loves, works, cares, contributes and offers service to others. No matter how much work the enlightened person appears to do, no matter how much effort a fully enlightened mind appears to expend, the inner experience of an enlightened mind is of effortless activity.

The enlightened experience is of desirelessness, of contentment and acceptance. What is done is done at the moment of action, as a direct expression of that, without desire or regard for the consequences. No personal gain is sought, because the personal, and the experience of gain and loss, are known in their illusory nature.

Expressed in religious terms, the enlightened person does only the will of God. Desiring nothing, exerting no effort of mind, God’s will is enacted through the enlightened person. The fully realised mind places no barriers between the world and the expression of God’s will.

Fully involved in everyday life – loving, laughing, crying, ageing, suffering and dying – the enlightened person experiences this with the body and the individual mind, and simultaneously witnesses this with the transcendentally realised mind. Everything is experienced as occurring without effort, even if the body and the individual mind are exhausted from working. Only the body, and the mind in its conditioned individual and separate form, work; mind in its fully realised state is ever serene and free.

In the final analysis, it is only desire which binds mind in its unenlightened state to conditioned existence. Freed from the bonds of desire, the enlightened person lives in the world and knows its inherent unreality. Enmeshed in desire, the unenlightened person lives in ignorance, mistaking the world itself for reality.

As an enlightened person, it is not given to you to make the rest of the world enlightened. You cannot take away the pain of existence for innumerable individuals. The world’s suffering will continue for measureless time. But by offering your service, according to your nature, to those seeking enlightenment, you will be doing the maximum possible to alleviate the world’s ignorance and consequent suffering.

Live, Act and serve others, according to your intuition.