I want Enlightenment, Empowerment and Ecstasy in my life
I want Enlightenment, Empowerment and Ecstasy in my life, how do I get there? Enlightenment is not so much a final destination as a continual exercise in cleaning up our perceptual filters and the resultant judgments and actions that derive from assumptions based on our perceptions. It is more like routine maintenance. One cannot expect to clean one’s house once and have it remain clean forever, dirt will eventually drift back in. The tricky part is that our perceptions are based on our senses, nervous system, and past experience, including social conditioning. Our experiences are received by our perceptions; our perceptions are interpreted by our experience. A neat cosmic Catch-22, eh?
Does a dog have a Buddha nature?
- Zen Koan
One might question whether Enlightenment and true objectivity is possible given the limitations of our human state and social conditioning. Wars have been fought over the definition of the “One True God”. From individual relationships to spiritual communities, to entire nations, we have clashed over what is proper ethical conduct. We indoctrinate ourselves and our children in what we believe as true. We anthropomorphise our perceptions of the divine. We arrogantly assume we know what is right, proper, and desirable, and this varies from culture to culture! From the inside, it doesn’t look good. Yet, if we entertain the concept that humanity is created in the image of the Divine, that everything from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the largest galaxies are connected by a nexus of energy, cause and effect, even consciousness, then it might appear that the sky is the limit! In our continual process of clarifying and expanding our consciousness and self-definition, we can move ever closer to reclaiming ourselves as the Divine.
The vehicles we can use for this journey are numerous. It has always been the intent of all religions and spiritual paths to bring the individual seeker into harmony and consciousness of the Divine. The tools used vary greatly from era to era and culture to culture. It might at first be difficult to see the similarity of Castaneda’s Don Juan, Lao-Tze, Christ, and Buddha, yet the truth within each tradition remains eternal. (Moreover, these guys probably get together occasionally, have a beer, and chuckle over our insistence on there being One True Path, all others being inferior or wrong. To a higher entity, we must seem like a religious version of the Keystone Kops: policing our dogma with a great sound and fury, and continually running blindly into each other and falling down!) The question is what path is most efficient for a given culture and time. This question is becoming more urgent as we insist on moving through our lives at ever-greater speeds.
Most spiritual paths evolved in simpler, slower times. To reach the highest spiritual Enlightenment, one removed oneself from society to live a solitary or monastic life. The purpose of this was to remove oneself from the unconscious reactivity due to constant external stimuli bombarding our senses. Spending hours every day in contemplation and spiritual ritual limited the amount of stimuli taken in by the seeker and allowed for adequate time to internally process one’s Karma under the guidance of a master. It is easy to see that our Western, externally focused materialistic culture doesn’t exactly support this. When was the last time you put rice in the bowl of a penniless sadhu standing on a street corner? How many of us have ever taken off a few months, let alone years, to claim our birthright of clarity, peace, and joy? We are increasingly driven by our careers, status, family obligations, and material desires, and we are expending more and more time, energy, and peace of mind to maintain this. So, it would seem that for most Westerners, there is a conflict between our desire to live a worldly life and the rigors of a traditional spiritual inquiry. Yet, if it is true that we recreate our world daily, we can create a middle path that allows us access to both worlds easily, even simultaneously, by utilizing some of the more powerful eastern and western techniques. © 1998 Keith E. Hall.
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Tags: Enlightenment, karma, Kundalini, middle path, Tantra