Enlightenment Is Just Remembering: Mark McCartney Returns To JUST PRESS RECORD

There's something almost subversive about Phil Pearlman casually reducing "Buddha for Dummies" down to "Enlightenment is just remembering." I don't know why a state of Zen feels like it shouldn't have any bad bits in it, or maybe more simply, why being present would require anything past or future, but he corked this idea in my brain and I can't shake it.

When he told me and Jessica Yarmey this idea, in a story about the moment when the proverbial clouds parted and suddenly he was 11 again, racing against Josh and Evan and David at Wellwood Elementary, I knew it was going to be one of those concepts that would haunt me in the friendliest of ghostly ways.

I showed the clip to Mark McCartney on a JUST PRESS RECORD (out now). Mark reflected on it like this: "It's more about revealing or remembering something that's innate rather than creating or constructing something or adding on to what we already are. This idea of reveal, not add, so like it's already there, maybe it was always there, but you have to actually take away, not build stuff on top of it."

Take away, not add. In a world obsessed with more - more productivity, more optimization, more everything - it's a rebellion if not an outright revolution to even suggest that we already have what we need. We’re humans. Modern humans. We pile it on, we don’t excavate and evaporate until there’s nothing but empty space(!).

If enough is already within you... Phil, Jess, Mark... this is unlearning in action. I'm shook.

"How would, unless I've ceased to exist, how could I not be?" Mark asked, challenging our (or my) collective (ok, definitely my) anxiety about doing enough. "And yet, how could so many of us feel that we struggle with the idea of being and not doing?"

There's poetry in that tension, isn't there? The space between who we are and who we think we should be. Between the enlightenment we seek and the wisdom we've always carried. Between never enough and enough. Between enlightenment and remembering.

Maybe that's why these conversations matter. Not because they teach us something new, but because they remind us of what we've forgotten. Sit with those thoughts. Treat this episode of JUST PRESS RECORD like a meditation (except you don't have to download an app or subscribe to yet another service promising to fix what was never broken, these answers are within you, you know?).

ps. Don't forget to get yourself connected to Mark, Phil, Jess, Justin, Sean (author of "When Life Begins to Whisper"), and everybody else mentioned in this episode—my network is yours too, get up with the get down!