Contrary to popular belief, enlightenment is your natural state. In a sense there is no “effort” needed to become enlightened but more a “letting be”. Things in the way that you have accumulated mentally are stopping you from the direct experience of enlightened being. Why would God only let someone who has been lucky enough to be given a good education or spent 10 years in a Buddhist monastery gain access to enlightenment? What is you only had a month to live?
Anyone can learn how to reach enlightenment right now. I would say it will transform your life but apart from being a huge cliché, it is a massive understatement. It will literally change the structure of your mind and how it views reality. In this article I will try and answer questions like “Does enlightenment involve work once achieved?” and “What is the role of mind after it is realised as not your identity?”.
As with a lot of spiritual teachings, the words used are sometimes misleading. You have probably reached outside for things your whole life (money, love, power, truth etc). Reaching enlightenment is paradoxically the opposite of reaching. Reaching comes from the idea that there is you and a separate state that must be achieved.
Enlightenment is embodying what you are and realizing the mindset of more as a bottomless illusion. In a sense, you are enlightened, you were born enlightened, you just aren’t aware of it yet. You may find your mind chewing on this and trying to logically make sense of what is being said here. Silence that voice that has controlled you and wronged you in the past for a minute by becoming an observer of it and then go and experience the truth for yourself.
As you learn how to reach enlightenment, you may find your mind saying “I am enlightened”. Disregard this voice. The mind can’t understand enlightenment and is just trying to fool you. You will know it personally as an indescribable feeling and a natural lightness accompanied by inner peace. As soon as you are in the territory of thought you have entered the arena of judgement, multiplicity into one here and another there and the enlightened connection is lost.
You may find that a shift in your perceptions will occur immediately. Things will appear less serious and you will feel less alienated to the world. Your mind, just like everything else in the world is fighting to live. The beginning of this process is like a huge mental detox where lots of the bigger more obvious unconscious patterns that you were already partly aware of are flushed out. Because you have identified with your mind for most of you life, this deep pattern of unconscious habits will come up again and again and at the beginning it will be extremely intense but it cannot prevail against your focused awareness. Like a rocket breaking through the atmosphere, the initial push it the hardest part.
You must be like a man who wants to cross a river by a bridge but rain has caused the river to burst its banks and he cannot access the “other side”. He sits silently a distance away and watches intently for the furore to die down before checking the waters are still and crossing the bridge. Your mind is the river, your focus is the man, and the bridge is the spiritual path that leads to the “other side” of enlightened conscious being.
Bringing Darkness Into The Light
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
~Chinese Proverb
Light gives of itself freely, filling all available space. It does not seek anything in return; it asks not whether you are friend or foe. It gives of itself and is not thereby diminished.
~Michael Strassfeld
From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
From an external time point of view your aim is to be conscious at all times and to continually improve your consciousness by removing attachments and shining the light of focused awareness onto your unconscious habits. Your aim right now, internally? Be conscious in this moment. Sitting in a room silently for too long is great but your unconscious habits will only come to fruition as you go about your everyday experience. This is where they were created and swallowed up by your subconscious mind. If you have the tendency to judge your family as annoying you for example, then the emotion that comes with that will have to be faced in real life situations.
Go out into the world and just be intensely aware of inner physical feelings and your emotion/mind state at the moment. Have your default state to be sat at the base of your mind observing with no judgement. Kicking yourself when you mess up is just another layer of unconscious habit. This is a life long process externally and you will progress to become conscious of all that is. This will lead to heightened sense perceptions too. You will notice smells that never existed before.
What Is The Purpose Of Mind After Enlightenment?
When you split from the one consciousness into an apparent individual form, your mind is used for navigating the world of form with your individuality in comparison to other individuals – learning from the past, planning for the future etc. For most humans, mind is like a razor blade that is used constantly and no care it taken to sharpen it. Sparse use and tending to the razor keeps your mind razor sharp and ready to pounce when challenges come along as its not preoccupied with trivial things. When using your mind for future planning, go into it with full consciousness. Try and raise your consciousness to even higher than your normal state because mind is the arena of illusion and may try and get you to identify with it again.
Your mind will naturally be more silent when you start learning how to reach enlightenment. You will start to notice the link between mind stillness and the peace you feel inside. Your mind will become a tool that you can put to great use and it will become extremely focused as you become aware of its erratic patterns.
The purpose of it is now as a tool rather than you identifying with it. The mind is not an evil thing, this is a common bad perception just like having a material possession with you is supposedly evil. It’s attachment and identification that is the true evil. Honestly believing things like “I am the owner”, “This is mine” and having an energy behind it is identification as opposed to mere words to convey meaning. Some people choose Asceticism to remove all temptation but it’s not the path for me although I’m content with little. You have to keep the knowing that you are not your mind with you at all times and use it only when you need too for its purpose. Stop thinking of the future too much, you can never experience it.
Once you achieve the state of enlightenment it will be obvious to you. You will be your true self for perhaps the first time and it’s beautiful, far more beautiful than anything else you can ever experience. You become like a baby in the world. Everything seems new and you have the sense of wonder that seems to belong only to children. Fears will fall to the side. Once you are in this state you have in a sense already achieved enlightenment. You have hit the first step and become consciously aware. Hardly anyone gets this far. Then, you just keep unravelling and transmuting other unconscious layers as you go through life. Your aim being to just keep doing this and be continually aware of old patterns trying to take a hold of you again.
Realizations I’ve Had
Since I started the path towards enlightened being I have realized many deep truths. Some of them are:
- Every judgement we make is basically saying to the Universe/God “You’re not good enough, I can make better of this than you”. You bring in a separation of “you” and “the universe” which alienates you and you have also cut yourself off from the formless state that is you. A recipe for catastrophe. How can you live the natural life if you don’t know what you are? The one thing that you only need to know is the thing that you don’t have.
- All actions will flow out of your increased consciousness. Just do what feels natural to you. Realise though that all these questions about whether I’m doing the right thing are coming from your mind and this is what we’re trying to bypass. Feel its power. Where do you feel it physically. Concentrate on that and observe it dissipate. Then the natural solution will come to you.
- My thoughts continually manifest into reality at a quickening rate. This is what Jesus did when he performed miracles. Extreme mind control changes external reality.
- The matrix idea isn’t as stupid as first though
. You will start to see people as all plugging into collective mindsets and it is seriously freaky at first. They have a glazed over look in their eyes and you will see that they are basically sleeping through their life. Find highly conscious people and socialize with them as the unconsciousness can take you under as quickly as you escaped from it. - The journey never really ends. You will always be bringing the light to new unconscious patterns. You will experience deeper and deeper peace throughout your life if you follow this path and all of your actions will be your own.
- You realize yourself as formless. You are not a form. You can view your mind, body and thoughts so what are you? Something beyond them. How can something with no form die? It was never born. Yes, your apparent physical body will dissolve one day but this becomes less and less important in place of serving. Your body feels less dense and in spiritual mastery, you have no body.
- You find that life is living through you and that there really is no life and you as separation. Instead of a mental understanding of this, you will come to experience and know it as daily existence.
- You become like someone who plays with the forms of the world. You do things just because you are curious about the outcome and will come across as not serious to many. This all stems from the realization that you’re not your body
I leave you with this quote which sums up what I’ve found nicely.
Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer – Eckhart Tolle
