Posts Tagged ‘experience of enlightenment’

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.

Chapter Headings

1. What part do thoughts and feelings play in enlightenment?

2. Is enlightenment a state of mind I can develop?

3. What is the Experience of Enlightenment like?

4. Why is Enlightment Sometimes Called Liberation?

5. Are Heaven and Enlightenment the Same?

6. How Can I Know Enlightenement?

7. Is Enlightenement the Same as Awareness of God?

8. Toward the Light that is My Self

9. Teaching of Yogu Trime Lodro

10. Some Teachings of Zen Masster Dogen

11. Enlightenment Today

12. Suzanne Segal on the One Life

13. A Dream Points the Way

14. What is it Like to be Enlightened?

15. Enlightenment – Being or Becoming?

16. Jesses Journey Through The Mind

17. A New Look at Enlightenment

18. A Personal View

19. For a wonderful handbook by the founder of Enlightenment Intensive Charles Berner – please click HERE.

20. Modern Approach

 

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

Suzanne Segal on the One Life

Enlightenment Part 11

Tony Crisp

I had always believed that the presence of fear—which I experienced often, and for no apparent reason— meant that, despite years of practice and numerous insights into the nature of being, I must be doing something wrong that prevented me from integrating my insights into my moment-to-moment existence. If only I could get rid of the fear, I reasoned, then I would be free. But the more I struggled with it, trying to breathe or cathart or love it away, the more seemingly solid and entrenched it became. What Suzanne helped me to realize was that fear doesn’t mean anything except that fear is present. It does not obscure our true nature unless we believe the story it tells us or take it to mean something it does not. In fact, the infinite awareness that is our true identity contains everything within it, including all mental and emotional states. Fear, anger, jealousy, sadness, and other seemingly “negative” emotions are there too, like seaweed floating in the limitless ocean of ourselves. There just doesn’t happen to be a separate self to whom they refer. After all, if the infinite— which we all are intrinsically—is indeed infinite, how could it be otherwise? In the wintertime of relationships, there was a constant attempt to look like I was someone in relation to a person who took me to be that someone, even though I always knew I was no one. The memory of what it was like to be someone lingered, and the mind’s fear about being no one inspired so much anxiety that relationships evoked a fear-constructed outline of somebodyness. Once it became clear that the presence of fear and anxiety meant only one thing—that they and everything else were present simultaneously in the vastness—then the relational season changed. The springtime of relationships was awesome. To see with the eyes of the infinite—which is the substance of everything and perceives itself from within every particle of itself using its own sense organ—that relationships had also never involved a personal doer was so radical a vision that the mind “rolled over” and admitted that it simply could not grasp this inconceivable truth. Once the mind admitted to the parameters of its own sphere and stopped pathologizing what lay outside it, the non-personal, indescribably joyful flavor of the vastness experiencing itself moved radically to the foreground forever. With the realization that everything was made of the same substance, relationships ceased to exist, since there was no longer any experience of an other. Without an other, there was simply nothing separate to be related to. Of course, the relational function continued as before, and it always looked like relationships were proceeding unimpaired. Quoted from Collision With the Infinite, by Suzanne Segal Link Back to Chapter Headings – Link to Chapter 12

What is it Like to be Enlightened?

Enlightenment – Part 13

Tony Crisp

Many people have had an experience of enlightenment. It simply means they transcend the limitations of thought and conditioning for perhaps a moment in time. These moments or periods of enlightenment usually leave a marked impression or leave deep insights into the nature of oneself or of life.

There are stages in the process however, and the very beginnings are in an extension of intuition, or the transcendence of the senses and physical boundaries created by your body. One of the stages for many people is a sort of cleansing, a discharge of what has been called in the East as Karma – influences from the past we still cling to or are held by. In todays terms this would be thought of as clearing out old traumas and cultural conditioning.

A next step might be a growth of intuitive knowing and for some a wonderful experience that is like a continuing synchronicity. This gradually extends into a sense their personal awareness expanding and so they know, as through an intuition, so much more about their place in the universe and what it means.

Often this brings crises of change and of massive ‘spiritual’ experiences. Maybe their body vibrates as the inner changes are occurring. And in a way it is all only an extension of what is normal; for being self aware is a form or enlightenment. So any so called enlightening experience are footsteps on an endless path of discovery.

But to be enlightened in a grand sense will mean that you have moved beyond time and space in a demonstrable way. The limitations of the physical senses and the body will no longer hold you to the same degree. Your ego will have melted its boundaries and incorporate more awareness of all living things. The ability to place your awareness at any point on the globe or universe, or to tap into a cosmic fount of knowledge, to be able to heal or have profound insight into the body and mind of others will be available. This does not mean you will be ‘famous’ or widely known. The enlightened person may live simply and be the person you know down the road. This was demonstrated in the life of Edgar Cayce.

But the above description does not mean an enlighten person will have all the things listed. More likely they will have a greater sense of transcending the five senses and will live a life with certainty there is no death. They will obviously be seen as different by those close to them. As one person said, you are not like other people, and I love you.

In the end, the physical body will be transformed, so there will be nothing of it left to die.

But the spirit of Life, The Tao as it is called in the East, is infinitely creative, so there can be no end defnition to enlightenment. No beginning – no end. Not this. Not that. Action in non action. See Peoples Experience of Enlightenment.

This life – of enlightenment – is just a describer, and one of the things it sees is that this state does not belong to anyone. It’s not something you can get from someone. It’s who everyone is. From here, the highest volume is the sound of the infinite ocean that we all are. Suzanne Sega.

Since there is nothing to meditate on, there is no meditation.

Since there is nowhere to go astray, there is no going astray.

Although there is an innumerable variety of profound practices, they do not exist for your mind in its true state.

Since there are no two such things as practice and practitioner, if, by those who practice or do not practice, the practitioner of practice is seen to not exist, thereupon the goal of practice is reached and also the end of practice itself.

-Padmasambhava

Liberation is achieved by the practice of non-activity, say the Masters of the Secret Teachings.

What is, according to them, non-activity?—Let us first of all notice that it has nothing in common with the quietism of certain Christian or oriental mystics. Ought one to believe that it consists in inertia and that the disciples of the Masters who honour it are exhorted to abstain from doing any­thing whatever?—Certainly not.

In the first place, it is impossible for a living being to do nothing. To exist is, in itself, a kind of activity. The doctrine of non-action does not in any way aim at those actions which are habitual in life: eating, sleeping, walking, speaking, reading, studying, etc. In contradistinction to the Taoist mystics who, in general, consider that the practice of non-activity requires complete isolation in a hermitage, the Masters of the Secret Teachings, although prone to appreciate “the joys of solitude”, do not consider them in any way indispensable. As for the practice of non-activity itself, they judge it absolutely necessary for the production of the state of deliverance (tharpa).

They never tire of repeating the classic simile of the two chains. Whether one is bound by an iron chain or by a golden chain means, in both cases, to be bound. The activity used in the practice of virtue is the chain of gold while that utilized in evil deeds is the iron chain. Both imprison the doer.

What then is this activity from which one ought to abstain?—It is the disordered activity of the mind which, unceasingly, devotes itself to the work of a builder erecting ideas, creating an imaginary world in which it shuts itself like a chrysalis in its cocoon. (Quoted from The Secret Oral Teachings of Tibetan Buddhist Sects – ByAlexandra David Neal and Lama Yongden).

A man’s experience:

“Now a most extraordinary thing happened. I experience feelings of being made love to, but not through the genitals, but through my head right the way through my being down into my genitals. For a long time it felt as if I didn’t need to breathe, and in fact I seemed to exist without breathing for quite a long time. There was a feeling of tremendous quietness. Inside something gently moving through the openness in my head down my being, flowing to my genitals. Once there it was like it opened something. It changed something. Then, gradually, that influence of change started moving up my being. I could feel it particularly touch and change things in places like my solar plexus and my heart. When it reached my throat I could feel it tickling and opening something there. It really felt painful as it went through these places, particularly as it reached into my head. It wasn’t a physical pain, but it felt as if something deep inside me was being stretched and opened, and that stretching was painful at a subtle level. I cried out in the pain. I wept. I cried out in pleasure – the mixture of pleasure and pain, just as if I were being made love to in a wonderful and delicate and yet painful way. As it touched and passed through my head I cried out, “Why? Why?”

“It is finished. I love you.”

Link Back to Chapter Headings – Link to Chapter 14