Wednesday, September 29, 2004

My apologies for absence these past days. To compensate (?) here's a
longish blog:

Light Switches
There is a current trend that there can be ‘Awakening’ or ‘Realisation’
that comes and goes and finally stabilises after some time (especially
after the practice of this or that ritual). I do not embrace a concept
of ‘partial Realisation’. Nor do the cells of your body!!!

I recognise there is the mind-motivated ‘seeking’
I recognise there can be the stimulus of intellectual inquiry and

investigation. I recognise there can be spiritual experience that
is progressive and cumulative that is, most surely, a process of
self-revelation.

I recognise there is the final ‘Acceptance’ which is often sudden,

existential and irreversible and after which time there can be no
further progress - nor is any desired -toward ‘Enlightenment’.
Once *Enlightened’ you cannot be more or less enlightened:
compare,for example, that your body cannot be more dead, or
less dead - you can’t be dead plus. You do not ‘stabilise’ into
your deadness and there are no ritualistic levels of deadness.

‘Enlightenment’, ‘Realisation’, ‘Acceptance’ are not variable

degrees or qualifications or teacher-authorised standards.
They are immutable, unchangeable aspects of infinite existing.

In my definition of this ‘final comprehension’ (’Acceptance’)

gradual or evolutionary enlightenment is not possible - unless
your mind chooses to make it your own pathway, thus making it
an intellectual as opposed to a spiritual occupation. There are
often very real spiritual experiences in which you KNOW the
‘One-ness’ of all things: such experiences ebb and flow as the
tides of existing within this reality career across the shores of

your consciousness. We touch spiritual realities and then move
away from them, just as the stars are in constant motion within
the galaxies only to re-orbit. We revisit a spiritual reality
at another time - often finding it clothed within another

experiencing.

This is what I call the process of the pathway, the soul’s
agenda of experiencing unconditional lovingness in as
many permutations as is possible.

This process has been increasingly defined as ‘enlightenment’ or
‘awakening’ or even the ‘practice of the presence of
super-consciousness’ (which additionally required, according to
many teachings,the sublimation of the self, or the self-ego).
In fact, much of the modern satsang movement is based upon a

theory of spiritual experience that is trendily called ‘enlightenment’.
So after your spiritual experience has been officially declared to
be ‘enlightenment’ by someone who had their own spiritual
experience declared to be enlightenment by someone else who
once flew over Lucknow(as an example) or visited some previously
unknown corner of some mystic nation - you are then urged to teach
that to others as a doctrine, a discipline, of being ‘awakened’ or
‘enlightened’.

It is the goal of every seeker to enjoy the search! It’s like going to

the supermarket to look for a ‘bargain’ that you can then savour
with absolute delight. The search is even more stimulating when in
a foreign country surrounded by an unknown culture and language.
Such a search appeals to the ‘conditioning of childhood patterns of
learning and social approval’ which are ingrained in our emotional
responses.

Implicit in the notion that ‘enlightenment’ is progressive is that

‘enlightenment’ is a condition, a state - an experiential state.
Whereas, by definition, an experience is transitory, im-permanent.
If you are experiencing something, then it will change - not least
because your subjective observations change Change, constant change,
is integral to fullest life-experiencing. Indeed,what we call ‘life’ is all
movement and change. The absence of this physical movement and

change is what we call ‘physical death’.

Does the sun seek enlightenment? Is not the sun in a constant state

of change and yet it remains the sun?

The mitosis-like permutations of experiencing derive from the soul’s

desire to express this fundamental truth of ‘knowingness’ in every
possible form and manner

Enlightened IS what you are.

Experiencing it’s many aspects IS what you do.