 | Enlightenment: Journey into Awakening (part 3)By Kiara Windrider
It is perhaps easier for a simple person to get enlightened whose head is empty of concepts than someone who has walked for years on a spiritual path and has all kinds of concepts and expectations about what enlightenment is or should be, or what she is or should be. Ironically, the more attached we become to a spiritual persona, the more we develop a spiritual ego, and the further we get from the enlightened state. The mind delights in creating an “as if” image of the enlightened self.
Now it can continue its game of comparison and judgement, except on a more sophisticated level. Being good does not threaten its survival, as long as we simultaneously disown the bad; being spiritual is fine as long as we continue judging others or ourselves for not matching up to our neurotic expectations. We take the dim radiance of the Soul that still manages to shine through the thick layers of Mind, and enshrine it with religiosity, stifle it with morality, distort it with self-righteousness, and destroy it with spiritual egoism.
I am not implying that it isn’t desirable to strive towards morality, goodness, and love. There is a reason that religions exist, and many have been enabled by being on the spiritual or psychological path to refine or even transform their ego. As a spiritual teacher and psychotherapist, I have seen the power of meditation, and of techniques such as holotropic breathwork, psychosynthesis, regression therapies, and bodywork to begin to heal the traumas of the past and polish the rough edges of our personality.
If refining and clearing the mind is our quest, then by all means we must continue doing everything that we can in this direction. However, if enlightenment is our quest, we cannot get there by trying to develop enlightened qualities. We need to come to an understanding of the very nature of the Mind. All our efforting only strengthens the mind.
While the actual event known as Enlightenment can only happen through grace, there is a practice called “witnessing” that can be useful in understanding the nature of the mind, and thereby loosening its hold upon us.
Witnessing means to simply watch. I watch myself in my attempts to be authentic. I watch myself genuinely responding to love. I watch myself in my manipulations and my comparisons. I watch the jealousies and self-reproach. I watch the aggression and rage. I watch the suppression of my aggression and rage. I watch the conflicts within my mind as I struggle to forgive. I watch my need to be perfect or to be special. I watch myself reacting to any assault, real or imaginary, towards my cherished spiritual identity.
As we continue to witness, we begin to recognize the ugliness and insanity of the Mind, extending even to the most spiritual of our motivations. Are we being good because we are conditioned to be good? Are we striving to impress someone by our saintliness? Are we helping because we are afraid to say no? Are we loving before we want to be loved back? Do we want to be recognized for being wise or wonderful? Are we feeling so empty inside that we run around from workshop to workshop filling ourselves up with every high that comes our way? Do we talk about dying to self only to use it as yet another building block in our spiritual edifice? Do we want to be in total charge of our lives, even when we say we want to be used in service to the Divine? Do we feel the need to achieve enlightenment by our own efforts, finally placing the crown of enlightenment upon our own heads?
How does it feel to hear that you cannot achieve enlightenment through your own efforts, that enlightenment can only be given by grace, and that every effort you make in that direction may only serve as a hindrance? Witness that. How does it feel when you realize the extent of your social conditioning, whether verbal or silent, in creating who you are? Witness that. How do you feel when you realize that your mind isn’t even your own, and that this wonderful persona that you have created around yourself is essentially a mind-controlled robot? Witness that.
As I looked at myself, I noticed that over the years I had built a whole set of identities around myself. I was a spiritual teacher and a healer. I was sensitive and compassionate. I was a good person with a mission to help the world. I was deep. The problem with all this was that I had become so identified with this image of myself that these very identities became a mask. I found myself carefully protecting this image lest someone see through me into a place that was vulnerable or uncertain, angry or unloving or fearful, depressed or shy. I was forever comparing myself to others, and my sense of self came from how I felt others perceived me, and whether I thought I was good enough or lovable enough or beautiful enough. And so of course I had to put on my best face at all times. I had lost my sense of spontaneity and childlike wonder. I had lost my ability to live from my soul. Indeed, I had lost touch with my soul and allowed myself to get lost in a spiritual labyrinth of the Mind.
To truly witness yourself means to begin to see through these games we play with our mind. There can be no more pretenses. We begin to recognize our needs for approval, for acceptance, for love. We notice how we are eating up the world around us in order to survive. More is better. Bigger is better. We notice how this applies as much to our spiritual as to our material quest. We notice how we dress up our vices to become virtues. Our fear of others becomes our need for “solitude”. We cultivate “humility” because we don’t have the courage to stand up to abuse. We “love” because we are too afraid to be alone. We embark on a mission to “save the world” because we are too afraid to be judged by our own souls. We recognize how unloving we really are, how fragile and hollow our ego really is.
As the pretenses fade, we find ourselves moving closer and closer to our Soul-Self. This is where the Mind becomes even more insidious. Afraid of giving up its hold, the Mind begins to generate uglier and uglier versions of Itself in order to discourage the seeker. Many at this point might give in to the “shadow self”, experiencing enormous depression, self-condemnation, paranoia, and pain, feeding this last illusion as if it were the only thing that was real. Many brought up with the doctrine of “original sin” fall into this trap. Continue witnessing that. Know that even this is simply the last illusion of the Mind. How can any of this be real when the Mind itself is illusion? How can you take any of it personally when your mind doesn’t have a unique identity of its own?
At this point, Enlightenment can happen. It is like an alcoholic “hitting bottom” before he is ready for help. You recognize that there is nothing to be done, and you surrender to Divine Grace.
In the courses offered at Kalki’s ashram, the first few days are about becoming aware of the prison of our Mind. It isn’t about trying to change any of it, because you cannot change a program from within a program. You are simply witnessing the reality of your Mind as it is, the emotional charge, the habit patterns, the assumptions, the traumas, the conditioning, the masks that we build up in order to survive. You begin to strip down the social and spiritual Personas, and you begin to understand the nature of the Mind. You become aware that Enlightenment is simply about “de-clutching” from the Mind.
We need to be clear that Enlightenment does not mean getting rid of the mind, only of the illusion of a separate continuous Self generated by the mind. It is not about becoming mindless, but rather about becoming what the Buddhists call “mindful”! What changes is the realization that you are not your mind. The mind can be a very useful tool in service of the Soul. You are simply de-clutching from the Mind-Self that poses as a substitute identity for the Divine Self. After enlightenment, you find that you can de-clutch from the mind when it is not needed. When the mind is needed, however, Consciousness come through and uses the mind with a sharpness, clarity, and versatility not possible before. It is like substituting an old clunker of a car, which has only one speed and no neutral gear, with a beautiful, fully loaded Mercedes Benz!
What happens to the sense of self after Enlightenment? You realize that you are not your self. It is as if it is there, yet it is not there. Everything is everything, so how can you have a separate I? You are a self yet not a self. There is the trace of a self, and the mind still has its pathways of memory and thought, but it is no longer a solid thing.
The self becomes porous, and the winds of eternity become capable of blowing through freshly in every moment. A person may still have likes and dislikes, emotions may still come up, but there is no charge left, and as soon as they come up they will likewise go away, just like an infant throwing a tantrum one moment, and staring in wonderment at a little tiny caterpillar the next.
Likewise, after enlightenment, you realize that you are not your body. The body is not your own body any more. It simply becomes a beautiful vehicle for Consciousness to come through. During the peak experiences often following a “diksha”, the body often takes on an existence of its own, completely independent of mind and volition. It might be laughing in blissful ecstasy, it may move into intricate yogic postures, it may mimic certain animals; it may become the dance of all creation.
You understand clearly that just as there is only One Mind, and only One Self, so there is only One Body. You understand how privileged you are to have this lovely, living body as a means to express the Divine Self in the world. Each taste, each smell, each sound, each vision, each touch is exquisite, and is as if you are experiencing it for the first time. Each thought, likewise, comes from its own living freshness directly from the consciousness of your soul, an experience that the Zen Buddhists refer to as “beginner’s mind”!
In the past two months that Grace and I have been staying at Kalki’s ashram, we have been watching hundreds of people receiving the “diksha”, and going through this process. Thousands have moved into a permanent enlightened state over the past year. It is truly an amazing phenomenon. Kalki has told me that he wants me to write my book from both sides of the veil. As I come close to finishing the book, I look forward to going through my own experience as well.
We are all a dream in the mind of God, who himself dreams through us moment by moment in a continuing dance of Creation. It is a beautiful dance, and it is an exciting time to be alive. Given what I know today, there is no place I would rather be in all this vast cosmos than right here on Earth during this glorious time of collective awakening. We have waited eons and lifetimes for this, and I echo, along with Kalki, that despite all the evidence of my outer senses, there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind or heart that humanity is going to make it this time! It will be an awesome awakening! |
