Posts Tagged ‘enlightenment’
The Eye of Dreams
By Tony Crisp
It took me forty years of experience and exploration to write this book.
The reason is that I was constantly exploring the limits or boundaries of the mind. In fact in recent scientific statements I see some of the findings I defined many years ago now stated – but in what I have written in this book I go steps further.
As I say in the introduction: The journeys I took, alone or with others, led into realms of experience that comparatively few people know exist. They are realms in which the world, our life and preoccupations, are seen from completely new perspectives. In those realms we move beyond thoughts and conjectures, interpretations and dialogue, into the jungle and mountain peaks of the direct experience of what was previously unknown to us – into passions, torrents of energy, oceans of awareness, castles of ancient defence and aggression, into the river of time. They are realms of experience that are incredibly creative, containing treasures equally as fascinating as any tomb of Tutankhamen.
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Read this book!
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Fundamentally the book takes us to the frontiers of human thought, and it is that that brings us freedom – freedom from the habits that rule us, release from the fears that dominate us even in our dreams, the freedom from the thoughts and beliefs which are our masters, the awful ordinary lives that are the causes of so much pain.
Chapter Headings
Through the Eye of Dreams – How dreams can be as valid a means of exploration and discovery as the microscope or telescope.
The Standing Wave – Our body and mind are like a standing wave that persists although it is constant change
Liberation – Liberating ourselves from the crushing habits, the prison of beliefs and fears is possible.
Religion Society and Identity – We as a person are not the the independent being we often like to believe. We are made up of what we surrounded by; social beliefs, parental influence and religious beliefs – even though we fight them.
Sex, Marriage and Relationships – A critical look at what constitutes love and relationships
Growing up – The Maturing Process – The most important task that faces us in transforming our selves and the world.
Work, Destiny and Meaning – Many of us fail to find that all consuming interest; yet we all have it.
Secrets of Mind and Spirit – Many of us live a life within tight walls we cannot see beyond. Here is proof that we are more than we ever believed.
The Way In – The ways to find liberation and seeing beyond the walls of our physical senses.
Example 7 Out of Body
Once the awareness is independent of the body, the boundaries of time and space as they are known in the body do not exist. One can easily pass through walls, fly, travel to or immediately be in a far distant place, witnessing what may be, or appears to be, physically real there. Sir Auckland Geddes, an eminent British Anatomist, describes his own OBE, which contains many of these features. See: second example in spiritual life in dreams.
Example: Becoming suddenly and violently ill with gastro-enteritis he quickly became unable to move or phone for help. As this was occurring he noticed he had an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ consciousness. The ‘A’ was his normal awareness, and the ‘B’ was external to his body watching. From the ‘B’ self he could see not only his body, but also the house, garden and surrounds. He need only think of a friend or place and immediately he was there and was later able to find confirmation for his observations. In looking at his body, he noticed that the brain was only an end organ, like a condensing plate, upon which memory and awareness played. The mind, he said, was not in the brain, the brain was in the mind, like a radio in the play of signals. He then observed his daughter come in and discover his condition, saw her telephone a doctor friend, and saw the doctor also at the same time.
Enlightenment
The Next Step in Evolution
Enlightenment is a process of personal growth that is possible for many today. Just as humans started their journey as an animal with no speech and no rational mind, and moved on into what we know today as self awareness; so we are ready to take another step in our evolution. This is called Enlightenment or Cosmic Consciousness, and is a growth in awareness as far ahead of self consciousness as self consciousness is of primal animal consciousness.
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Chapter Headings
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What part do thoughts and feelings play in enlightenment?
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Is enlightenment a state of mind I can develop?
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What is the Experience of Enlightenment like?
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Why is Enlightment Sometimes Called Liberation?
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Are Heaven and Enlightenment the Same?
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How Can I Know Enlightenement?
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Is Enlightenement the Same as Awareness of God?
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Toward the Light that is My Self
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Teaching of Yogu Trime Lodro
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Some Teachings of Zen Masster Dogen
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Enlightenment Today
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Suzanne Segal on the One Life
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A Dream Points the Way
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What is it Like to be Enlightened?
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Enlightenment – Being or Becoming?
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Jesses Journey Through The Mind
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A New Look at Enlightenment
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A Personal View
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For a wonderful handbook by the founder of Enlightenment Intensive Charles Berner – please click HERE.
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Modern Approach
What is the experience of enlightenment like?
Enlightenment Part 3
Tony Crisp
People attempt to describe it in many ways. Ramana Maharshi says that when you realise the Self (enlightenment), the sense of yourself as distinct from the world disappears.
Another person describes it by saying, ‘I was sitting opposite someone during an enlightenment intensive workshop. We had been posing the question for days – “Who are you?” Suddenly I realised that it was a silly question, because I was the answer. All thought stopped and I existed as the answer. My being had always been this. In this state there was an awareness of being connected with everything around me, in the beginning of creation. This was the first day.
While in the state of simple existence I was able to observe many things I am usually not aware of. For instance while I simply existed, my usual pattern of behaviour and thought went through contortions to be the centre of awareness again. I could see them almost like habits, systems, that have life, like a body does, and they were dying and twitching in their death throes. Also I saw that I knew that all thought is like a mimic, so all our thinking is like photocopies, without any real life. Also as I saw this I had an image of a monkey that was actually me normal thinking self running alongside my every motion and trying to mimic it. It was almost as if as I as a person walked along, another mechanical person ran alongside trying to keep up and mimicking everything I did in an attempt to be alive and real. Yet thought can never be life.’
Another person says, ‘Unexpectedly everything changed and my fundamental self was something that existed throughout all time. It didn’t have a beginning or end. There was no goal to achieve. I am.’
Slightly different but still the same enlightenment. ‘Everything seemed to slip away and I felt as if I melted back into the primal being of the universe. It didn’t seem as if my ego was gone, just melted into everything else. It was blissful.’
Here is a wonderful description from John Wren Lewis:
“My experience itself, which I have described elsewhere (Wren-Lewis, 1985), lacked almost all the dramatic features emphasized in the now voluminous literature on the subject (Lundahl, 1982). I had no “out-of-body” vision of myself in the hospital bed, no review of my life, no experience of hurtling through a tunnel towards a heavenly landscape and no encounter with supernatural figures urging me to return to bodily existence. I simply dissolved into an apparently spaceless and timeless void which was total “no-thing-ness” yet at the same time the most intense, blissful aliveness I have ever known.
The after-effects of the experience, however, were dramatic indeed, and I have found no account of anything comparable in the NDE literature. I have been left with a change of consciousness so palpable that in the early days I kept putting my hand up to the back of my head, feeling for all the world as if the doctors had removed the top of my skull and exposed my brain to the infinite darkness of space. In fact the Living Void is still with me as a kind of background to my consciousness. The effect is that I experience everything, including this sixty-year-old body-mind, as a continuous outpouring of Being, wherein every part is simultaneously the whole, manifesting afresh moment by moment from that infinite Dark. As “John” I seem to have no separate existence, but am simply the Void knowing itself in manifestation, and in that process of continuous creation everything seems to celebrate coming into being with a shout of joy—”Behold, it is very good!” Yet the experience is in no sense a high, for its feeling-tone is one of gentle equanimity. My impression is rather that I am now knowing the true ordinariness of everything for the first time, and that what I used to call normal consciousness was in fact clouded.
I still slip back into that old clouded state frequently, but this is not a process of “coming down.” What happens is something I would have found unbelievable had I heard of it second-hand—namely, I again and again simply forget about the pearl of great price. I drift off into all kinds of preoccupations, mostly trivial, and become my old self, cut off from the Void-Background. Then, after a while, there begins to dawn on me a sense of something missing, at which point I recall the Void and usually click back into the new consciousness almost immediately, with no effort at all.
I think this is what is meant by the mystical notion that so-called normal human life is really a state of chronic forgetfulness of “who we really are,” and I suppose my NDE must somehow have shocked me into recognizing my identity with the Void, with the result that my forgetfulness is now spasmodic rather than chronic. Needless to say, I was bowled over by all this at first, and spent many weeks coming to terms with it. I soon found that the new consciousness did not seem to demand any drastic changes of life-style. In keeping with its sense of utter ordinariness, I remained recognizably John, and neither my tendency to drift out of the new consciousness nor my ability to click back into it seemed affected in any way by variations in diet, environment, or activities such as meditation.”
In her book Collision With the Infinite, Suzanne Segal writes, ‘In the midst of a particularly eventful week, I was driving north to meet some friends when I suddenly became aware that I was driving through myself. For years there had been no self at all, yet here on this road, everything was myself, and I was driving through me to arrive where I already was. In essence, I was going nowhere because I was everywhere already. The infinite emptiness I knew myself to be was now apparent as the infinite substance of everything I saw.’
As can be seen, there is no final description of enlightenment, just as there is no final definition of life, or love, or any human person. Everything is, in the end, transcendent.
Everything, even the commonest of objects or events, transcends final definition. For instance a cup we drink from can be seen as a household item. It can be looked at chemically. We can see it as a piece of art. There may be personal associations or feelings we link with it. There can be an atomic or subatomic examination of it, or a cultural interpretation. Which one of these is correct? Which one is the final or fullest definition?
There is no final definition. The cup is a part of transcendence. Enlightenment occurs when we directly know the transcendence of our own existence, beyond any definition. It is a direct knowing beyond thought or feeling, of the world and self as One.
I am a wave on a shoreless sea.
From no beginning
I travel to no goal,
Making my movements stillness.Here is another description from a great spiritual healer, William Lilley. Who says he was able to consciously ‘leave his body’ and visit the ‘Beautiful Place’, where he meets the dead. His description of this is typical of many other peoples, even to the ‘going through the mists’. Quoted from his book Gift of Healing.
“When I am going into trance, I breathe in the Yoga method shown me by Dr. Letari. Immediately I get a sensation as though I am falling, or being pulled backwards. As this sensation comes to a climax, I seem to be travelling through space at terrific speed. I have opened my eyes many times at this point, but the only vision I have is of passing through a dense fog. Then, quite suddenly, the fog clears and I am at a stile. I climb over this stile and immediately there is a voice speaking to me over my shoulder. This voice is always with me, explaining everything I see and everyone I meet. The stile seems to be on the edge of a large field, which rises gradually to the form of a hill. I walk up the hill, and beyond it I visit many places. It is always the same style, the same hill, the same voice, and it just seems like a large country with so many different towns to visit.
The most interesting and remarkable experience I ever had during these visits happened before I went into trance. Several people had been speaking of consciousness. They had asked me to describe the world I experienced. Was it solid? Did I appear solid? I promised them that if I could, I would find out. I arrived at my stile, the voice came to me, and it evidently knew my desire, because it said “Feel the earth!” I did. It was solid. “Feel the grass beneath your feet!” I did. That was solid too, and even had dew on it. “Smell these flowers!” They were perfectly natural and had the usual perfume. In fact, everything around was natural. Then I was told, “Feel your body”. I did so. It was as solid as I am materially.
‘The voice then said, “Close your eyes; make your consciousness passive”, or as you would do when preparing for a trance state. “Now feel the earth beneath your feet!” There was nothing. “Open your eyes”. It wasn’t dark, it wasn’t light. “Feel at your body”. It wasn’t there. “Such is Spirit” said the voice. “Just a consciousness holding within it all experiences of your lifetime, all the joys and sorrows, your desires, achievements and failures, whence comes spiritual evolution. In your world of the material, you are able to examine matter; everything is matter. When you think of the spiritual, naturally you build in your consciousness another material world.” It is an amazing inner world which offers freedom. It is ours to create, and the very core of us is bodiless awareness”.
If you want to experience enlightenment try Enlightenment Intensives in the USA or UK it really works. It has for thousands.
What part do thoughts and feelings play in enlightenment?
Enlightenment Part 1
Tony Crisp
If you think about a friend, ask yourself, ‘Is this thought my friend?’ If you have feelings about the friend, ask yourself, ‘ Are these feelings an actual representation of my friend?”
You cannot conjure your friend into existence by thinking about him or her. Thoughts and emotions are copies of things, just as a photo is a copy of something. They are never the people or things they attempt to copy. They are never reality.
Therefore we cannot experience enlightenment by thinking about it. Enlightenment is not something we create with thoughts or emotions. We cannot make it by thinking inspiring thoughts or feelings. Enlightenment is a self-existent reality. It does not depend upon what you think or feel. It is not brought about by concentrated thought, meditation or inspiring emotions. It already exists. You are it already.
In some approaches to enlightenment, such as the Zen koan, or the Enlightenment Intensive questions, enlightenment occurs when the mind is baffled and exhausted by the question. Thinking cannot answer the question and collapses. Suddenly there is enlightenment.
But someone who failed says, “Yes, I am doubtful about the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and New Age cliches about “healing the ego”. Zen is ineffective and inefficient to the extreme. 30 years of sitting and being utterly frustrated is extreme. The broad path of Buddhism is a dismal failure. How many has it enlightened? There are distant rumors of one here, another over there… nothing more. Buddhism has become so dark that it has become proud of how elusive its knowledge is, how difficult its way is, what an all-consuming challenge it makes of enlightenment.
All existing paths to enlightenment are profoundly unsatisfactory. They practically don’t work. Who would disagree? Who would claim that many have been enlightened? Who would claim the rewards of these “paths” to be reasonably attainable? Paths, paths, that is their problem. They are a path that leads on, and on, and on, the signs ever announcing “Enlightenment, Next Exit”, but the exit never comes.”
It is true, but it can be found, “But then I was shown the way out – it was by admitting that I was a heap of shit, and asking for help as the twelve steps in Alcoholics Anonymous define it. In opening myself to that wonderful otherness my heap of shit became a compost heap which offered new growth.”
Example: While in the state of simple existence people call enlightenment, I was able to observe many things I am usually not aware of. For instance while I simply existed, my usual pattern of behaviour and thought went through contortions to be the centre of awareness again. I could see them almost like habits, systems, that have life, like a body does, and they were dying and twitching in their death throes. Also I saw that thought is like a mimic. As I was directly being, thought ran alongside my every motion and tried to mimic it. It was almost as if as I as a person walked along, another mechanical person walked alongside and mimicked everything I did in an attempt to be alive and real. Yet thought can never be life.
The ego or personality was still all intact as a series of responses learned during life. I understood that sometimes people take these responses to be themselves, and attach to them with incredible power. These responses are useful in most cases – though some are habits that have outlived their usefulness, and need to be modified or deleted. Since that time, it has seemed quite clear that these can be likened to computer programs, many of which run at the same time. So we have a speech program that may run at the same time as a driving a car program, and a program dealing with social mannerisms and responses. If the person who has developed this ‘software’ becomes identified with it, there is less possibility of them upgrading it from experience, or realising that they are not the responses.
Thus, Self-inquiry is the direct path taught by Bhagavan Ramana. “The ‘I’-experience is common to all. Of all thoughts, the ‘I’-thought is the first to arise. What one has to do is to inquire into the source of the ‘I’-thought. This is the reverse process of what ordinarily happens in the life of the mind. The mind inquires into the constitution and source of everything else which, on examination, will be found to be its own projection; it does not reflect on itself and trace itself to its source. Self-discovery can be achieved by giving the mind an inward turn. This is not to be confused with the introspection of which the psychologists speak. Self-inquiry is not the mind’s inspection of its own contents; it is tracing the mind’s first mode, the ‘I’-thought to its source which is the Self. When there is proper and persistent inquiry, the ‘I’-thought also ceases and there is the wordless illumination of the form ‘I’-‘I’ which is the pure consciousness. This is release, freedom from bondage. The method by which this is accomplished, as has been shown, is inquiry which, in Vedanta, is termed jnana, knowledge. You sit and ask yourself, “Who am I”?
Link back to Chapter Heading – Link to Chapter 2
Is enlightenment a state of mind I can develop?
Enlightenment Part 2
Tony Crisp
R. D. Laing, the psychiatrist, in describing the search for ones fundamental self said, ‘The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.’
One of the enlightenment sites listed has a heading, ‘What you are looking for is what is looking.’
Enlightenment is not a state of mind you can create or develop. It is something beyond any change, outside of anything you can develop. After all, development suggests change.
The frustrating thing about enlightenment is that the harder one tries to grasp it, the further away from it one gets. The more effort one makes in trying to achieve it, the less one finds of it.
It is the ever present, self existent core of yourself that remains when all else drops away.
So the question should not be can I develop the state of mind that is enlightenment, but how can I realise this fundamental state?
One of the enilightenment experiences someone describes was as follows:
The many different paths to the one great ocean of Life can be summarised in a simple way because they all have a common factor. It, like dancing or meditating for extended periods, quietens your normal way of thinking and looking at the world. In a meditation seminar I attended that lasted for several days I observed this with great clarity. After three days of meditation I saw my thinking mind faint. It could no longer sustain the continued concentrated pursuit of the question we were asking. In the moment of my rational thinking mind fainting there was an experience of divine Life knowing itself as this man people call B. In that state I knew connection with all the people around me, and the birds, trees and earth. For they and I shared the same spirit. I had arrived home at the source of things. I felt I was in the Garden of Eden, and that we had never left it. That experience, as ephemeral as it may sound, has given me something that strengthened me to pass through big life changes, and travel joyfully into old age.
Human beings has evolved through huge periods of time to have self awareness, a truly amazing thing, but for many it is a state of constant pain and suffering leading many to commit suicide. But Dr. Maurice Bucke, who himself lived in constant physical pain tells of how him and many others were able to evolve to a new state in which their suicidal pains no longer were active in them. He called it Cosmic Consciousness, but it has been known for ages under different names such as Enlightenment and Liberation. Those who evolved to this level of awareness often say, “That we could all be experiencing this, if only we could stop being typical suffering humans. Regardless of what hell one might fall into an enlightened one is an ordinary person who acts like a true adult.” All the major faiths recognise this and so have left records of how to reach this evolution of self.
Here are some – Ox Herding Pictures – The Many Ways To A New Life – Psychological Vomiting – Communicating With Your Inner Guide
Why is enlightenment sometimes called liberation?
Enlightenment Part 4
Tony Crisp
The state of enlightenment is beyond any sense of good or evil, beyond any opposites, or of oneself and otherness. Because of this it liberates us from the enormous load of old habits, guilts, painful responses, limitations we carry around from the attitudes and viewpoints arising from the habits of duality, of division, of right and wrong.
The sense of oneself as a separate entity, along with all the concepts and feelings we have about the world can disappear. This is enormously liberating. You are given a new world, a new life, with immense freedom of choice.
Link Back to Chapter Headings – Link to Chapter 5
Are Heaven and Enlightenment the same?
Enlightenment Part 5
Tony Crisp
Many things that Jesus is reported to have said can be recognised as connecting with the state of enlightenment. For instance he said you do not have to earn heaven, that it is already here for us to claim. This is like saying heaven is self existent as your own fundamental nature, and you don’t have to be good or perform certain acts to get it.
The story of the pearl of great price is also recognisably about enlightenment. The story says the man has to sell all to get the pearl. In other words he gives up all and then he has the pearl. This does not mean that you have to be impoverished to know the condition of enlightenment. If that were so the beggars in the streets of the world would all be wonderuflly enlightened and wise. It is not a case of having nothing, but of holding onto nothing, of wanting nothing as fully as one wants ones own true existence.
Enlightenment often arises in a person when all their desires, all their thoughts and feelings, for one reason or another, subside, are let go of, even momentarily. That is what is meant by having nothing or giving all up.
The Pearl of Great Price is that awareness of the Divine within you that can be born out of having no preconceptions – the virginal mind.
Link Back to Chapter Headings – Link to Chapter 6
How Can I Know Enlightenment?
Enlightenment Part 6
Tony Crisp
You need to be clear that you already have enlightenment, but perhaps you haven’t realised it. Maybe that is why some people are called ‘Self-realised’.
If you are already enlightened, why haven’t you realised it? The answer is that the noise of your thinking, your desires, your concepts of yourself and the world are like loud music covering up the simple melody that constantly plays as yourself.
One way of understanding this is to use the analogy of electricity in our homes. We can enjoy the electricity as heat, as sound, as televison pictures, as energy in a vacuum cleaner, as light, or as computer programs performing in various ways. Usually we are only aware of the manifestation of the electricity as light for instance. We are not aware of the nature of the electricity itself. The light emitted by the bulb in our kitchen is not the same as the light in other kitchens along the road or in the neighbourhood. But the electricity is the same.
The analogy helps us to see that our attention is usually filled with effects, end result. The ‘electricty’ within us brings about thoughts, emotions, sexual drive, physical sensations and mental imagery. But these are shifting changing things that do not last. Like the pictures on a television screen they come and go. But our fundamental nature is the electricity.
Obviously that is an anlogy, but we take our thoughts, our emotions, our sensory impressions, to be what life is all about. We may even identify with them to the point of believing our emotions or thoughts are who we are. But our thoughts and feelings constantly shift. What is it that knows these shifting thoughts and feelings?
When and if they do pause, there is a realisation of a self-existent consiousness that has been underneath the noise of thoughts and emotions all the time.
The thing is that the more you try to realise who you are the further away it becomes. So you need to give up all effort, like going to sleep and yet remaining aware.
The biggest experience was a breakthrough to being in the High Pasture again. I was filled with the experience of that transcendent timeless light being at the core of my being. In that state I knew that the basis of my being is not myself, but the light beyond time and space. I knew that what exists and creates my being is this mystery beyond time and space. It is in everything and everybody. It can transform our being, body and soul, if we let it in. No effort is needed to apprehend it. In fact it exists in us all the time, beyond our effort or thoughts. I felt that to touch someone with that is to heal any illness they have. I once more gave my being that THAT.
It is strange that reading through the above over a year later I realise I have not said some of the most wonderful things about the experience. I sense that at the heart of everything existed an indefinable something beyond time and space. Because it was beyond time it could explore every human being, every aspect of them, every possible direction of them without the passage of time. Every possible combination of events, every possible outcome of the choice was known. But not just known, in some way that is difficult for us to understand, it was also complete and real. Therefore we have a possibility of every thing we might ask for. It is already real. It is already ‘made’ or achieved. We do not need to earn it or develop it. All we need to do is allow it into our own reality. I don’t know how this is possible, but it seemed a great truth.
If this can be accepted, then it is understandable that the important question might not be, ‘How do I attain enlightenment?’ It should be, ‘How am I constantly preventing myself from knowing what I am?’
In a few words, I got to the point where I realised that the answer I was looking for was myself. So why was there any need to make an effort to find oneself? The more one sought an answer, the less likely one was to find one. All effort dropped away and I existed in a simple state of being, of clear existence, for hours. My ego seemed to melt, yet it was still there, it hadn’t been destroyed or overcome, or denied. It had simply dropped like effort from the limbs when we sleep.
In this state I had a wonderful sense that I had been let into the Garden of Eden again. Everybody was always in the Garden but they cannot see it because they have lost their innocence. They have covered up their perception of it with too many thoughts, opinions, struggles, attitudes, fears, dreams and hopes. I could see that we play thoughts and attitudes like records, and these were not ourselves. I knew myself as the empty awareness of existence. It was heaven, it was peace, it was beyond any effort.
At one point I suddenly realised the meaning of the Cheshire Cat in Alice In Wonderland. I was touching the radiance, the self existent gentle joy of existence, and my ego was not there. It had melted, disappeared. And this was what I saw had happened to the Cheshire Cat. All that was left was the smile, hanging in emptiness. That was how I felt, like a smile hanging in space.
The most moving thing was that what I had found was completely unlike what I had expected. I had thought that it would be like a breakthrough; a terrific heightened awareness; a transcendent lift into another way of being, a losing oneself in a wider world, even a drunkenness of spirit that allows a freedom from the limitations of our usual emotions. It wasn’t at all like any of those. What happened was the simple, the everyday experience of existing, of being, without any trappings. This was so simple and beautiful I wept. I wept to see we all had it, and it was so near at hand. It was not at all a long way off. It was not something that we had to earn or fight to achieve. It was with us all the time and we failed to see it because we were looking for something complicated.
Link Back to Chapter Headings – Link to Chapter 7
Is enlightenment the same as awareness of God?
Enlightenment Part 7
Tony Crisp
This depends upon what is meant by awareness of God. What many people call an awareness of God is really exalted emotional feelings. That emotions are wonderful does not make them God. They remain emotions. They come and they go.
If what is experienced is naked awareness itself, not an awareness of an object or subject, then that is enlightenment. If what is experienced is recognised as having no cause, no beginning or end, and exists always as the foundation of you, that is enlightenment. That is also an experience of God, for God and you are the same.