What Is Enlightenment REALLY?

We have this false notion that enlightenment is a state of perpetual bliss. It is the complete transcendence of all negative states/feelings and the abiding in a state of constant love, peace and happiness. It is the eternal ecstasy of some heavenly nirvana. This could not be further from the truth.

Enlightenment is not found in removing oneself from the ups and downs, the highs and lows of daily existence, but instead it is found in learning how to ride these waves with ease, grace and effortless flow. Instead of trying to become free from something, you become free with the very thing you were trying so desperately to escape. You recognize the underlying freedom that was always your inherent truth, your essential reality beyond the surface level of constant change, of gain and loss, birth and death. And thus you are able to transcend suffering, which always stems from a resistance to what is in the here and now.

Enlightenment is not about reaching a finish line, but instead it is about committing to a process, it’s about improving 1% every day, it’s the small steps that lead to great strides and shifts within oneself and the collective. Yes, enlightenment is found in the here and now, as this is all there ever is, but at the same time, the here and now is perpetually expanding, at least in terms of its manifested aspect, and so your degree of enlightenment is perpetually expanding as well.

You could look at presence, the awareness of the eternal now and the recognition of yourself as pure formless consciousness, as the foundation of a building. With this foundation, you are free to build the actual structure of the building in whatever way you so choose. It is like the parable given by Jesus, of the man who built his house on the sand and the man who built his house upon the rocks. Yet the foundation is only one aspect of the creation itself. The building can always be improved upon, it can always be refined and reformed, made more beautiful, more magnificent, more perfect. There is no end to its expansion into greater levels of divine brilliance. The process is eternal, it is infinite.

Enlightenment is a receding horizon. The closer you get, the more you realize that there is still further to go. It is a reflection of the divine paradox, being that you are already whole, complete and perfect in this moment, yet simultaneously you can always improve, learn more, do more, better yourself into an even more perfect reflection of the most high. There is no end to the infinite potential that you are.

Enlightenment can also be found in all areas of life. There is enlightenment in art, in music, in health, wealth, fitness and relationships. This enlightenment comes from gaining a greater understanding and awareness in these areas of life, both informationally and experientially. It is the path of mastery. Like the old christian term gnosis, meaning knowledge. This divine and sacred knowledge was recognized as the key to salvation. Knowledge of one’s true identity as the one eternal God Self, and knowledge in all areas of human existence in which one wishes to thrive.

So enlightenment is not some elated retirement, it is not the party after arriving at the finish line, instead it is a dynamic process, it is a flow, a surrender to the expression of life force energy emanating from the One, allowing divine grace to carry you where it will, wherever is in the highest divine order for your greatest enlightenment.

Much peace and love,

Bodhi

Moving Through Emotional Pain

Every human carries an imprint of emotional pain due to the fact that we learn to repress, deny and dissociate from painful emotions as a coping mechanism. This results in an energetic density which holds us in patterns of suffering and ego identification. That is, the density has a gravity just like any other mass within the Universe and this gravity pulls us into identifying with it and creating mental stories that feed it.

The pain-body fractals itself through pulsations in the waveform of your reality experience. This results in your life feeling like a skipping cd, replaying the same old pain and trauma over and over again. It feels as if you can’t escape from these negative holding patterns no matter what you do. No surface level actions or rearranging of things will bring you freedom from these patterns. It requires diving deep into the core density and dissolving it from within.

The key to moving past the obstructions that keep one stuck in suffering is absolute presence with the emotions as they arise and full acceptance of the pain. You will notice the mind attempting to distract you from the pain, as it fears it, the way in which the ego fears death. Just witness the mind’s antics and come back to conscious witnessing of the feeling. Do not let yourself go into stories about the feeling, but rather observe it fully without any mental dialogue.  

Be conscious of any shame you may feel as you go through this process. Shame is a surface level reaction pattern which keeps one from moving fully into the dense and heavy emotions and transmuting them through presence, thereby disidentifying from them and achieving a higher level of enlightenment.

The densities that we hold onto prevent us from feeling truly content in the moment and experiencing the type of life that we really desire. The energetic frequency of our pain reflects itself in our conscious thought processes and causes us to focus on the opposite of what we desire, making us believe that we can’t have the life we truly want. This is merely an illusion however and as soon as you bring presence into these emotional contractions that take place within your field, following them to the root of the core imprint, you will began to think, feel and believe that the life of your dreams is not only possible but is your current, living reality. You merge into the perfection that is the now.

Chasing the Phantom

We all have a phantom that we’re chasing. This phantom could be anything from health, wealth, freedom, romantic love, lasting peace, or even the highest levels of spiritual enlightenment. Any ideal state of being or life situation that we wish we could permanently abide in is the phantom we chase. But we can never seem to really find it. We may have glimpses, brief tastes of our most sought for desire, but it never stays. We are teased to the point of torment. But let me tell you this; the only thing worse than never getting what you want, is actually getting it.

Let me explain why. Before you got what you desired, you at least had hope. But as soon as you get it and you realize that it doesn’t really make you happy, your hope is taken from you. There is nothing left to chase, no idealistic goal to move towards, no tantalizing fantasy of the grass being greener on the other side of life. This is the point at which you have two choices; to either kill yourself, or to kill your idea of self.

The ego self has a great many mechanisms to maintain its own survival. Most of these are deeply habituated and have their roots in the subconscious. But the most powerful of all its survival mechanisms is the idea that things would be better if. If only this were the case, or that were the case, I could be happy. This is an inherent denial of the now, as wanting something else, by default, means that you do not want or accept what is. The problem with this is that all you ever have is what is at this moment. So you create a dynamic of continuous suffering. Yet the ego itself loves this, because it cannot survive without suffering. Resistance is the structural tension which holds the ego in place. Without it, the ego collapses in on itself. Without any suffering, the ego ceases to exist. Because without suffering, there is only complete love and acceptance of what is.

The Buddha said that there are two base causes of suffering. Attachment and desire. Without desire and without attachment, there is no suffering, and one’s true nature is fully realized. So what does it mean to have no attachment and no desire? It means that you do not cling to the fleeting forms and experiences that come and go in this temporal existence, and you also do not desire for things to be a certain way, for them to be other than the way that they are right now. This state of being is the essence of self-realization or enlightenment, as the true self, your true nature, is beyond all that comes and goes. It is untouched by passing sensations and experiences, and it is the only constant in an ever-changing reality.

The reason why we chase our phantom is because we believe on some level that the phantom is us. We believe that the only way to be our true selves is to achieve this certain state or circumstance and that only then can we be free from suffering. But the truth is that we first free ourselves from suffering by realizing that no state of being or circumstance could ever bring us lasting happiness or bring us closer to who we really are, and then our life circumstances fall into place effortlessly. At this point, we know that nothing that comes and goes can bring us happiness, so we don’t really care if things fall into place. There is no desire. And even if we do get what we want, we don’t care if it leaves us. There is no attachment. Therefore, we have found lasting freedom, we have achieved the ultimate liberation, and we have come to find that the destination had been exactly where we were standing all along.

Death and the Value of Life

“I do not believe that people seek the meaning of life so much as they seek the experience of being fully alive.” - Joseph Campbell

I witnessed someone die today. The irony is that not five minutes before this experience I was questioning whether or not I even wanted to continue with my own human existence. Whether or not I wanted to continue with a life that often times feels burdensome and void of real purpose and meaning. Not that I felt acutely suicidal, but merely in a state in which I felt the pointlessness of my mundane existence, knowing deep down that I could be living more fully, more vibrantly and purposefully.

I think that often times we walk through life oblivious to the fact that someday, we will die. We don’t like to reflect on this deeply sobering truth, because it threatens our personal ego, the person who we think we are. So we hide death, we lock old people away in nursing homes, we put dead bodies in caskets and fill them with fluids to preserve the body and then cover their face with makeup to make death more pleasant to look at. But why? Why is death so bad? It is a natural and normal part of life which should be celebrated the way that birth is. Because, as far as we’ve seen in all of human history, no one gets out of here alive.

So there, in the street by a corner store, a man lay dying. The people around him appeared to be in a state of simultaneous confusion and despair. A state which I imagine a lot of people experience when confronted with death. But there is a profound beauty in death. Without death, we could never really appreciate the magic and wonder of this all too impermanent existence. Our mortality is a burning fire, pushing us to be our best selves now, to taste the fullness that life has to offer, and to leave the most inspiring and impactful legacy that we can.

Awareness of death gives us a powerful context for life. We need not despair nor preoccupy ourselves with imaginary “problems, for as some wise sage once said, “this too shall pass.” None of us will be around too much longer. So the next time you see people; friends, family, strangers, bring into your awareness that these people, all of them, will one day die. It could be tomorrow. It could be 100 years from now. But either way, it will happen. And it is inescapable.

So I ask you, with this awareness of your own death, what are you doing with your life? If today were your last day, would you be content with the way in which you had lived it? What would you have done differently? And how can you live tomorrow differently so that you would be pleased if it did end up being your final day upon this Earth?

We have all heard the saying “Live everyday as if it were your last.” But how many of us actually do this? How many of us live every precious moment of our lives to the absolute fullest, to the best of our capacity in that very moment? Very few. Most of us live with blinders. We remain in monotonous, mundane routines that drain us of life, hoping that one day we will reach a place where we are free to live the life of our dreams. But that “one day” never comes. So the only choice is carpe diem. To seize the moment, to milk it for all it’s worth, and to arrive at death with a smile on our faces and joy in our hearts, knowing that we did everything we possibly could with this most precious of divine gifts: our human life.

The End of Suffering

"There is the state of being wrapped up in or identified with something, then there is the state of detached witnessing, and then there is the merging with it and the becoming of it; your presence transmutes it into itself. This point is the end of all suffering."

The unwillingness to experience even the worst hell is literally what creates it, as the resistance we have to suffering is what holds it in place. An open willingness to explore all experiences and sensations that could ever be is the essence of enlightenment.

The original polarity was the split between the essence and the experience, or the observed and the observer. This then fractured infinitely into a fractal of polarized reality, the mind being a by-product of such. We, as the eternal underlying essence, then lost ourselves in this fragmented and fractalized reality experience so that we could recognize ourselves once again to gain a higher level of self-awareness. It is a perfect ever-evolving eternal process of expansion and evolution both within and without. Both on the level of experience and the level of awareness, as both are perfect reflections of eachother.

This polarity is what in fact gives rise to all of creation. Nothing could be without it, there would be no matter, no sensation and no experience. It is the original split or division that occurred within the space of consciousness when it first had the desire to know itself. This polarity exists on an energetic spectrum. Everything in experiential reality is the same substance expressed at different frequencies, or imbued with ever-changing information. Hot and cold are really the same thing, just expressed differently. This difference in expression is what gives rise to the conception of duality.

Polarity is what gives birth to the conception of the "self" and the "other", both being mind-based perceptual delusions. The belief in the "other" gives rise to the feeling of separation and fear. We fear that which we feel is outside of our control, that which we feel is separate from us. But how could anything be separate from you if it all arises within your own consciousness, your own awareness? All that could ever be must be within the space of your consciousness, for nothing could exist without a witness for its existence. Your truest self is the space in which all that is arises, and all that arises is an inseparable part of that. So in reality, there is no other. There is only you.

Reality itself is an ever-flowing expression of life-force energy which perpetually emanates from the one. The movement occurs in a toroidal flow pattern, whereas the center point is the singularity of consciousness or awareness. Creation bursts forth, projects itself as an externalized reality experience, and is then perceived and received as the cycle repeats. This occurs at such a rapid rate that we have no conscious awareness of it. It appears to happen instantaneously.

In the picture above, you could think of one half of the sphere as being positive and the other half as being negative. Reality is the interplay of these two polarized forces, and so long as we believe in it and identify with it as being real or "self", we are stuck in this polarized dance of highs and lows, expansions and contractions, joys and sorrows. When we recognize our true Self as the singularity, we integrate polarity into the wholeness of the Self and transcend it all together.

When you surrender to the entire spectrum of happiness and suffering, of pain and joy, you transcend it by experiencing it all simultaneously. The way in which black is not truly a color, but is the absence of color because it absorbs the entire light spectrum, the state you achieve is not so much a feeling or emotion but rather all feelings and none simultaneously; it is the peace that passes all understanding. That which Jesus described as heaven and the Buddha described as nirvana. In other words, it is the end of suffering and the beginning of your liberation as a self-actualized being free to experience the infinite magnitude of creation in whatever way you choose.