Tasting Vedanta, March 12, 2008

Enlightenment must be to your satisfaction.

No Guru, no Master, no Enlightened Being can tell you when your process has consummated.

It’s simply a question of quenching all of your spiritual thirsts and only you can truly know when that happens.

This understanding should erase all the erroneous notions of “stages” of consciousness and “states” of realization, especially the singularly erroneous notion that there is a certain state, a particular “level,” that one reaches whereby one can claim real, true, genuine enlightenment.

When I say, that “it must be to your satisfaction,” it means that it is directly revealed. It means that you, yourself, inherently are the Teacher. You are the Master. And it’s your own process of slowly unveiling that mastery that gives you the authority to declare your own Realization.

However, that does not mean that one can simply say whatever one wants to say (and that’s true) [i.,e, claiming something does not necessarily mean it’s true]). I’m not saying that there is no such thing as enlightenment. I’m simply saying that it is ultimately revealed to and by and within one’s Self. There will always be characters that make false proclamations, people who claim inaccurate authorship of enlightenment. And that’s just the way it is. That’s how life is.

There are clothing manufacturers who make sweaters that will fall apart in 6 months, or so, and they still call it a sweater. There are shoe manufacturers who make shoes that fall apart in 3 months and they still say that they sell shoes. That doesn’t invalidate the truth of people who really make good sweaters and good shoes. They’re the real sweater makers and the real cobblers. So, in the same way, in the spiritual field there will always be inaccuracies. There will be, whether intentional or unintentional, misinformation conveyed. But that doe not invalidate the entire subject of enlightenment.

But I can tell you this, that if you really listen to what I’m saying, it’s quite powerful. That only you can actually know what your own condition is. Only you have access to view your heart, no one else. And when that point comes, when all of your longing, your imaginations, your desires for ecstatic spiritual understanding have occurred, then the whole project comes to an end.

Then you are living in the state of Vedanta. You are living in that State where there is an end to all knowledge, all knowledge about this topic of enlightenment.

It doesn’t mean that there is an end to all knowledge, obviously. The relative fields of knowledge will go on evolving. Geology, archeology, philosophy will all continue to evolve based on creative thinking, based on scholarly investigations and the sharing of minds.

But when we’re talking about enlightenment, we are talking about the radical self-understanding of awareness itself and — only that can be known by the subject; that’s a field that is solely within Consciousness. And it is, simply understood, a “state” in which the Bliss, the inherent Bliss of Being has overtaken — or subsumed — an individual life. When what goes on living in a life is the massive awakening of Consciousness into Itself.

So, that has a particular texture and feel to it, what that means: that Consciousness is enraptured by It’s own Presence — and the ensuing Bliss that happens as a result of that Seeing, that kind of Understanding.

So, never compare yourself with a book, a message that comes out of a book, or an image that you can glean from reading a spiritual book.

What any Master has said in the past was only relevant, essentially, to their own process of awakening; if they were a genuine Master, it was only about them.

So turn into the immediacy, right now, and let’s do this Work.