What is Enlightenment?
There has been an awful lot of talk about 'enlightenment' for a very long time. The Hindus are talking about it, the Buddhists are talking about it, Martial artists are talking about it, even Ken Wilbur is talking about it. You can walk into any bookstore and the shelves in the New Age, Religion and Philosophy section are filled with books on the subject. Everybody seems to know what enlightenment is, and they can all tell you what you need to do to get there. The question is: how many people do you know who have actually ascended?
It has been over 2,000 years since the individual now referred to as 'Jesus Christ' was present in this reality. It has been 2,600 years since Gautama Buddha was present. We have endless churches and religious groups, even wars about who has the monopoly on truth. Yet how many people have actually ascended beyond this suffering-based reality?
Do you know anyone who can heal illness immediately with energy or dematerialize from this reality, taking their consciousness with them? Humans seem to be more interested in worshipping their own mythology than in attaining any real progress. Perhaps it's our inherent lack of self-esteem that we see these goals as so unnattainable that we'd rather worship Jesus and Buddha than accomplish these feats for ourselves.
Realizing these abilities is the real point, and the true focus-- anything else is a waste of time. We need to seriously alter our ways of thinking about ourselves, the world, reality, and our role in it. We are being challenged to revisit the definition of enlightenment.
Religion or Science?
Throughout our brief record of history, religious sects have fostered practices that lead to greater awareness: yoga, meditation, dietary restrictions, shamanic training. Yet these practices have become dampened by dogma and secretism, their original and true purposes lost in centuries of confused thought. Religion is far more preoccupied with internal argument over doctrine, devoting their group meetings to endless extrapolation of scriptures. Scripture is only a human collection of heresay attributed to enlightened individuals who demonstrated liberation in the past. In their drive to belong to a group, to appear intelligent, to attain the status of mastery within the community, religious people are completely missing the point! The point is to attain the qualities demonstrated by the Enlightened beings yourself! Scripture is largely irrelevant.
Likewise, western science and academia have contributed positive tools for self-development, particularly in the realm of physics and psychology. Yet for the most part, in their intent to understand, they've become removed and disengaged, positioning themselves external and superior in relation to anything being studied. As a result of this approach, science dismisses the rest of existence as separate and unconscious, which is a complete fallacy! We are not separate from the Universe, its inherent consciousness, or any other of its members. In addition, even our budding theories of physics prove that reality exists in abundance outside the detection of the physical senses, yet our scientific method only measures reality through the physical senses! Any theories launched from these outdated scientific methods are inherently limited.
In order for humanity to evolve to a new level of understanding, both scientific and religious thinking as we have known it have to go. Both religion and science have led us to this place, but both systems of thought are limited and we need to move beyond them.
Enlightenment is a Natural, not a religious process. It is an Evolutionary process. As in Nature, change must be struggled through and strived for. As in Nature, when faced with extreme competition and environmental pressure, a species either adapts and survives, or it fails and goes extinct. Humans are currently faced with this challenge.
In order to achieve enlightenment, we have to know what it is we are striving for, and how we might plan to get there. Since our current understanding of ourselves and our reality is flawed, our ideas about enlightenment and our path to it are flawed also. It is not just one method that will get us there: not just yoga, not just science, not just meditation, not just martial arts, ...the list goes on and on. To understand the system of experiential practices embedded in the old systems will give us the tools we need to evolve into a more accurate view of reality and our place in it.
The most important precept to build upon in our evolution into a new consciousness and self-expression is this: we are more than one entity. We are multi-dimensional beings living in a multi-dimensional reality; we have multiple bodies - physical, mental, emotional, energetic, spiritual. In order to evolve into a new type of human, enlightenment must occur on all levels of being. The physical body must be purified of toxins, the mental body must be purified of false beliefs, the emotional body must be purified of unprocessed negative responses to past events, we must raise the vibratory rate of our energetic body and we must give birth to, exercise and strengthen our spiritual body.
Enlightenment is not an unattainable goal, nor is it achievable through academic and religious status-achievements. Enlightenment is an experience, not a philosophical or academic understanding. Remember: the Buddha was not a Buddhist, a Physicist, or a Religious Studies Ph.D. — he was a passionate, experiential seeker who left a trail.
Now, the question is not whether or not you have the capacity to achieve enlightenment in this lifetime, but rather -- are you willing to do what it takes to evolve?
For more information, check out the Resource Guide.