Enlightenment For The Rest of Us

Enlightenment is the stripping away of what we refer to as reality. It is waking up to the fact that life as we know it is nothing like life as it really is.

Life as we know it is determined by mommy, daddy, culture, religion, schooling, training and law. Life after enlightenment is experienced as clarity. All seeking questions fall away.

For me there have been several hundred “enlightenments” over the course of my life – even now. However, the first major stage of enlightenment  -  the one that kicked the door open and kept them open- came in early 2004 when I experienced the unitive state, oneness with everything, for three straight months. Paradoxically, during this time, I was scammed out of 100000 dollars. My spiritual teachers who were advising me told me that I wasn’t being loving enough of my enemy. That my job was to be total love. I’m sure I’m a legend to the guys who ripped me off. They probably still wonder how they were able to just pick my pockets clean and have me smile the entire time – with an open heart – and just love them more and more deeply.

This experience made me realize that our cultural understandings of enlightenment were still limited. Old school enlightenment was well suited for life in a monastery, or even life of 2500 years ago – but it was poorly suited for the life in the 21st century.

The experience was the beginning of my breaking away from canonized spirituality and mythology. From my open, unititive state – I began to question everything – including enlightenment.

I grew up in New York City, so although I was in a unitive state, I was still engaged in living life. During this time, I learned a lot from simply walking the streets of the city.

I found that in the unitive state, I no longer had tools that made sense for the life I was living.

This questioning of the value and myths of the unitive state lead me to a secondary, much larger, life changing, far more profound enlightenment. This is where life wildly shook apart for me. This was the free fall from the top of infinity. The territory I was traversing was neither written about, nor – even still – is it known.

As the mind reaches this level of enlightenment, it is literally free of the pull of the magnetic field of the organizing forces of symbols, mythology, culture and survival. In this stage of enlightenment, the mind wakes from its deep slumber of darkness and its fear of annihilation.

It can be accompanied by the spontaneous release of stress from the mind and body. One of the reasons that this occurs is because life stress is held together by cultural ideas and ideals.  Yes, the body still has fears, the brain still has limbic responses to stimuli, but so much of the “pain” of life literally falls away forever – because the stories that cause pain fall away forever.

Once you realize there is no Santa Clause, for example, you simply can’t go backwards. There’s no place to go. The only way to believe in Santa Clause is to play pretend.

I have since come to realize that a great deal of pain in life comes because we have so much conflicting junk in our brains: freedom comes from removing the junk.

This deeper enlightenment is a waking up to the fact that the mind itself is a perceptual illusion – it doesn’t really exist. Nor does time truly exist. But not in some airy fairy way – but rather at the deepest understanding that the mind and all of its beliefs, stories and ideas are completely made up.

The mind as we know it is an electrical field of stored thoughts, images, symbols, traumas, stories and myths that appear to be real, right now, but don’t actually exist currently in 3D reality.

The mind isn’t real, yet it feels real.

That’s what makes this drunken monkey of a mind, at times,  such a difficult foe. And the pursuit of enlightenment is no exception. It can be like the futile Don Quixote quest – the chasing of windmills that we believe are living giants – following endless ancestral paths that lead nowhere.

The lessons of A Course in Freedom, will teach you how the perceptual field of your mind works, how the drunken monkey is communicating with itself, and what you can do to lighten it up.

Basic enlightenment is only the first stage of our path, and therefore, it is important to awaken sooner than later. It is only the beginning. No matter how advanced we believe we are, when we  finally awaken, we find that we are in kindergarten again. All things are new, fresh, and without bounds — uncertain and unlimited. Infinite.

Yet, paradoxically we must still live in the world, awake, free, but functional in the mundane world of sleeping minds and drunken monkeys all clamoring for control of our bodies, our brains, our sexuality, our pleasure and our very life.

The human brain is in the middle of a transition. It is still evolving, still working things out. It needs us to fully participate and engage in the next step of this evolution.

The Symbolic Healing Method, the work I have developed out of this 2nd stage enlightenment,  will offer you specific tools to see your life more and more clearly.

It is up to you how far down the rabbit hole you desire to go.