What do you imagine when you hear the phrase, ‘spiritual enlightenment’? Religious gibberish? Forbidden knowledge? Nonsensical riddles? Long-bearded gurus with special powers?
Listening to an ‘enlightened individual’ describe it can make enlightenment seem to simultaneously be the most wondrous and the most mundane experience. You’ll hear things like ‘I am the universe’, shortly followed by ‘every person is already enlightened’. You don’t feel like you’re one with the universe, so are they wrong or what?
They aren’t wrong, but what they’re saying isn’t very helpful. The truth is, the state of enlightenment *is* already within you, and you are living it right now. The reason you don’t feel it is because it’s being obscured, like you’re looking through a dirty window. You’ve been maintaining the dirt on this window your entire life, and it’s kept you so preoccupied that you’ve forgotten there’s a beautiful view behind it!
The process of becoming enlightened is the process of sneaking glimpses of the view through the dirty window. As you get more familiar with the view, the dirt falls away, and eventually there comes a point where the view is perfectly clear, and it’s difficult to see the glass at all.
Sounds easy, right? Why aren’t we all enlightened by now? Unfortunately, this type of dirt doesn’t like being removed; it takes removal *extremely* personally. Your entire life has been spent nurturing the dirt and you naturally identify closely with it. Removing the dirt literally involves removing a part of yourself. How easily could you cut off one of your own fingers? A hand? An arm?
The path to enlightenment is a path of boredom, ecstacy, and terror, and there’s no telling in advance how much of each you’ll encounter. You may be plagued with distracting or painful physical symptoms. You may get ‘stuck’ for years in a spiritual miasma. You may find yourself unable to stop cherished parts of yourself getting permanently erased. Enlightenment is not something you can undo.
Somewhere along the path, the journey bears fruit; your true nature shines forth as a magnificently peaceful state of oneness. You let the universe take the reins. You get insights into the true nature of reality. You don’t learn how to fly or read minds. And after a little while you just get on with your life.
For those already on the path, it’s best to continue, but if you haven’t started walking, you should really consider the price to be paid. One word of advice; if you feel like the universe keeps nudging you in a particular direction, don’t fight it.
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You have a name, a birthplace, personal interests, but that is *who* you are, not *what* you are.
You are a human being, true, but that’s a scientific classification, not useful here. Focus your intellect towards its source. This thing that you call ‘me’ - what do *you* think that is?
You might say that you are your thoughts. A good start, but even for the busiest minds there are times in life when the mind is quiet, and *you* are still present to experience those times.
Okay, you might say that you are your emotions. That won’t work either; emotions come and go just like thoughts. Depressed people with stunted emotions are still there to experience depression.
You might say that you are your sensations, what you see, hear, taste, feel, and smell, but your fundamental experience of self is not altered when you hold your nose!
Well then, you must be your memories. Granted, memories give you a sense of biography, but memories are just another mental perception, like thoughts, and are not aware of themselves.
Something deeper inside you is aware of your memories, thoughts, emotions, and sensations. Some sense of ‘you-ness’ that underlies the experience of your own mind and the wider world. What is that?
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You may be so accustomed to the concept that your thoughts, emotions, sensations are *you*, that you find it difficult to see beyond them. You may have a very active, noisy mind that makes it difficult to concentrate. This is a very common situation! Luckily, there is a technique that helps to remove both of these barriers and lets ‘you-ness’ reveal itself more clearly.
Focus your attention on something that doesn’t originate in the mind. Something with a simple continuous rhythm is best. Your own breathing is a good choice. Focus on the sound it makes, the sensation of air moving through your nose, or the movement of your chest. Or, if focusing on breathing makes you feel uncomfortable, use the ticking of a clock.
After doing this for a little while, you might suddenly realise you’ve been daydreaming; a thought carried you away and you forgot all about the rhythm. No problem, just go back to it. A little while later, it happens again! This can be a very frustrating experience, but there’s no reason to beat yourself up; there’s nothing you could have done about it! Each time you bring your attention back, you’re conditioning the mind to be a little quieter.
To improve your performance, you may attempt to actively clear the mind of thoughts by concentrating really hard and ruthlessly exterminating any thought you catch. This is exhausting, like paddling upstream. Just let the mind flow where it wants, and go back to the rhythm when you notice you’re off-course.
As you continue this process and the mind becomes less distracted, a distance begins to form between thoughts and ‘you-ness’. You’re able to perceive a thought occurring and inspect it objectively, rather than identifying *as* that thought. The concept of thoughts not being *you* makes sense now.
If you can separate yourself from thoughts, what about emotions? Emotions have more physical quality than thoughts, but the process is the same. It’s easier to use strong emotions at first. For example, next time you’re angry, go back to the rhythm and take look at the anger. Where did it come from? Have you been humiliated somehow? Try to find the part of you that has been humiliated.
The same process again can be used to investigate sensations, but their quality is entirely physical. Listen to the rhythm; what is listening? Why does the sound of your voice feel more like *you* than the sound of birds outside your window? What size and shape is your visual field?
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In this section I am defining the word 'self' as the cohesive experience of being an individual in the world. Having a name, a history, likes and dislikes, goals, relationships, etc.
To cultivate a self, one requires a sense of continuity between sensations; a long-term memory. A human body unable to form memories from birth could not keep any 'state' around with which to become identified. It would perceive the world through its senses, but every moment would be the first and only moment. Such a body is conscious, but would act near-vegetatively without the ability to build understanding from remembered activity.
Babies initially behave very reflexively, but they do have a functioning memory, and over time it will map causes and effects and begin to learn associations (e.g. breast = good). The only relatable thing in perception is the sensations themselves; the baby has no sense of an identity.
As the child gets older, seemingly external independent actors will be perceived. A unique name will be continually heard. Questions about physical and emotional state will be asked. Punishment will be given if these states are not controlled. Naturally the child begins to tie perceptions and memory associations (a 'personality') into a new little independent actor. The child becomes identified with a constructed self.
So what was the child before he became a self? He had memory, he perceived sensations and emotions. From the outside he was always an individual human being, but not so from his internal perspective. He had to 'learn' selfhood. This can be very difficult to see from the perspective of adulthood, because we are so completely intrenched in our own constructed selves, and memories of childhood are hazy.
One way to view enlightenment is an act of 'unlearning' selfhood. We cannot and should not completely erase the constructed self, but we *can* stop identifying as the self, and return to a state that more closely resembles that of the young child. Relating to perceptions directly rather than always filtering perceptions through a personality. Dismantling the boundary between self and other. Becoming a fully-conscious being again.
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Most of us would consider ourselves to exist within time. That is, we remember things we did in the past, we're doing things right now in the present, and we will do unknown things in the future. The universe is ticking along at a rate of one second per second and we are dragged kicking and screaming along with it.
Imagine if I had the power to click my fingers and wind your timeline backwards ten years. What would that feel like? Well, your physical body is winding back too, so the memories you had accumulated over those intervening years would be gone; you wouldn't know about the future you had come from. The same would apply if I wound you forwards; memories of the intervening years would appear in your brain during the transition, and you wouldn't notice any 'fast-forwarding' at all.
Now imagine I click my fingers every second (in my own magical timeline unattached to yours) and wind you backwards or forwards randomly along your timeline each time. Your memories would always match up, so how would you even know? What if I clicked my fingers a thousand times a second? A million?
If you couldn't be aware of any amount of skipping back and forth along your timeline, does it make any sense to think of yourself currently in a present moment, with a past and a future? Why should your current 'now' be the only 'now'? If there are infinite 'nows', the concept of past and future becomes meaningless. If there are no pasts and futures, why bother with so-called 'time' at all?
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More to come...