Mindfulness turns any task into a high definition masterpiece. When you are fully present in the moment, you notice details you would miss otherwise. The world comes alive through presence. Without a world in detail, days are laborious, people are sour, and the world is the manifestation of a bad day. But once you catch a shaft of light illuminating a rock on the road, once you catch a person smiling for longer than is necessary; once you notice the clouds drifting aimlessly and contentedly through the atmosphere, then you might wonder what else you’re missing.

The truth is that the world is so grand, so detailed, so flush with colors and light and sound, that you will never be able to comprehend it totally. You might grasp a large piece of it through an enlightenment experience—your brain kicking into a higher frame rate as it cleans house of preconceptions—but ultimately, these moments fade back into ordinary life. And when they fade, you will have reality once more, but with a new sense of appreciation. Skip the enlightenment experience that wakes you up to appreciating the world around you; go straight to appreciation. It’s the most direct route to enlightenment.

The place to start is the only place you can start: right here. Whatever you’re doing, do it with your full attention. Let the world wash over you. Soak in the light reflecting off the veins in the fallen leaves. Bask in the hisses of a passing garbage truck. Gorge on the texture of smooth smartphone glass against your fingertips. These perceptions will lead you to the experience itself, a pureness that defies all language. When you touch this world—a world without thought, preconceptions, desire, or labels—you’ll burst into an enlightenment that is always here, now. There’s never been a better time to find enlightenment than right now.

You might want to feel something. You might want something to shock you out of your daily life, to “wake up.” But waking up isn’t important. It’s what comes after: returning to your every day experience and realizing how sublime everything is. Your enlightenment lies in the otherworldly crunch of chewing morning toast. It’s nestled in the tender clouds that wash the landscape. You’ll find it hidden in the brush of paper on your palm. The experience itself is the reward. And when you step out of your labels enough to see the world through a lens different than your own, you immediately “gain” everything there is to “gain” from enlightenment.

But to label enlightenment as “gain” or “loss” returns you to the ego. Joy lives in the unlabeled experience. Sadness and pain don’t evaporate through enlightenment; you simply allow them to exist as they are. It just means this pain or sadness isn’t weighed down by your heavy assignations of meaning. Feel the world as it is, without wanting it to change. Sadness, if experienced in a label-less state, can be a joy. But first divorce yourself from labels. I hesitate to say this is “possible,” because telling you can do it implies that there’s something to gain, some goal you’re after that is finished with the tick of a check mark. But the labels only cage you in your own experience. How angry is the sky?

Experience the beauty without connecting it to what has or will happen. When you give up labels, you free yourself from your own story—which means you free yourself from what’s good and bad and instead edge closer to understanding the whole. You experience the world.

Bring yourself into the fold of the world by gently reminding your ego that it doesn’t need to label things. The labels—”good weather,” “mean comment,” “last apple”—define our experience in terms of what things can do for us. In doing so, we telescope our experience to what is in our immediate orbit. When we do this, we can’t see the experience for what it is. We miss the world as labelless, worthy of being experienced on its own. And that unlabeled experience is the truth that comes without words.