Enlightenment is a State of Being, March 14, 2009

Enlightenment is a State of Being not a state of the mind and yet it’s only through the mind that that State of Being can dawn. It’s a transcendental state of perception that is revealed to the mind as long as is necessary for the mind to be cultured into knowing what that Reality is.

So for a certain amount of time the mind itself in Enlightenment feels enlightened. It adapts the perspective that it, itself has inherited or been absorbed into the Light that precedes experience that is the very foundation of experience, you could say the container of experience.

But what has been revealed to the mind on the mind’s terms is not the same thing as Enlightenment as declaring that revolutionary state of being that we call the Enlightened State. The reason is that if something enters the mind by its very nature it is not the Absolute.

Another way of saying the same thing is that if something enters the mind that we call God or Awareness or the Absolute, then what we are feeling or knowing at that point is only the sensation of the impact of that Reality upon the mind. And to be clear – and I’ll repeat this point because it’s a subtle point, it’s not easily grasped – the mind does have to go through that period of adjusting itself and knowing itself as the Enlightened Mind.

But at some point that lesson must be transcended. So that the mind adjusts itself and releases the notion that Enlightenment is in experience.

So first Enlightenment comes to experience but then it is dropped. In other words the mind learns the lesson that it is the Light, not that it has to keep on experiencing the Light, that it somehow owns the Light or lives in the Light. It has to get to this paradoxical point where it even disowns this idea that it has awakened.

Which is not to deny the revolutionary nature of the state of Enlightenment, it far exceeds any coming and going of the Absolute. The mind eventually learns to accept what its real condition is, what its real state is in this world. And that is, that it’s always interfacing into that dimension without gain or loss, without acquiring or loosing anything.

That’s when we can say Enlightenment is stable, but is not because the mind is always seeing something; it’s not because the mind has taken something and is able to hold it. Is that, it has learned, it has absorbed the meaning of the Absolute, not just the sense of it.

If you don’t transcend this attachment to the experience of the Absolute then you are going to be engrossed in notions of quietness and silence and turning inward. So it’s a difficult habit to break once it has begun, once you start to become truly Enlightened you become addicted to, and it’s a good addiction, the movement of the mind falling into silence.

But one of the pitfalls that has to be transcended through learning is that you ultimately relinquish even the notion that the mind is involved with any kind of process of elimination. It takes a while, a long time. You become inflated and elated over your Realization then you become despondent when you think it’s gone. That’s the process of evolution, of becoming accustomed to something that doesn’t come and go.

It’s an utterly humbling experience to finally admit that Enlightenment is you, is not some characteristic of you, it’s not about some part of you getting Enlightened. It’s not about some aspect of you knowing something, it’s about the whole of you and that’s why truly it’s a revolution in Consciousness. It’s a revolution, it’s an absolute revolution compared to a mind based life that has not seen the Light.