What Is Enlightenment?
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill
What is this clear state of consciousness that, in some ways, is the destination of transformation? Setting enlightenment as our goal ensures that we won’t get there! This is because the seeker is that which is being sought, and enlightenment transcends and includes all dualities, including that between the seeker and that which is being sought.
While enlightenment is usually associated with the following characteristics, by themselves they are unreliable indicators of the enlightenment of the individual expressing them. Here’s why:
Psychic Ability
Great psychics can be, and often have proven to be, morally depraved.
Oneness with Nature
Mountains, dogs, and infants are one with nature. Are they enlightened?
Oneness with God
Lakes, cats, and infants are one with God; they are not enlightened.
Love
From the perspective of the moneylenders in the temple, was Jesus being loving? Love is a highly subjective measurement. Also, very loving people can still make huge mistakes or be very foolish.
Long Life
Historically, enlightened people don’t seem to live any longer than most other people.
Good Health
Enlightened people can and sometimes do suffer from physical health problems.
Resurrection from the Dead
Most enlightened masters live normal life spans. Few resurrect.
Ecstasy and Bliss
These are signs of spiritual opening. While they do maintain a state of mental clarity and purity, enlightened masters don’t walk around in a state of constant ecstasy or bliss. They have work to do.
Ability to Lucid Dream
Children and criminals have reported the ability to lucid dream. Are they enlightened?
Wakefulness in all States
If you are awake during a dream but don’t know what it means, are you awake? If you think you know what it means but haven’t asked the other characters in the dream what it means to them, how do you know you are awake? If you were completely awake, wouldn’t you know their perspective?
Trustworthiness
Masters are not alive to live up to your expectations. Because you will tend to put a Master on a pedestal, they will almost inevitably disappoint you.
The End of Pain
There is an important difference between pain and suffering. While misery is optional, heightened sensitivity, which is often experienced as pain, is a byproduct of evolution. The more you evolve the more sensitivity that you will have to both pleasure and pain. As it is pointed out in Ecclesiastes, “In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.”
The End of Limitation
What is freedom but the end of limitation? But this is only one side of the coin of enlightenment. The other side is increasing responsibility. In Mahayana Buddhism this is expressed in the Bodhisattiva vow: “May I attain Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings.”
The End of Evolution
Enlightenment is about learning a way to look at life that keeps us from getting in the way of our evolution as individuals and as a species. Enlightenment is hardly the end of personal human development.
So, what ARE the characteristics of enlightenment?
• Ability to witness – to continually watch yourself go by.
• Increasing disidentification with your body, emotions, mind, and soul.
• Becoming increasingly aware and awake in waking, dream sleep and deep sleep.
• Constant awareness that waking life shares the reality and many of the characteristics of dreaming — without thereby discounting waking life.
Balance between doing and being, between affirming and letting go.
ª Constant thankfulness.
• Not taking things personally, because there is no real or lasting self to get defensive.
• Enjoyment of life.
• Embracing the extraordinary nature of the ordinary. While many masters have emphasized union with the ordinary nature of things, others have tended to seek ecstatic states full of visions, flames, and epiphanies. These are basically levels of enlightenment, with the former being higher transpersonal enlightenment and the former lower to mid-transpersonal levels of enlightenment. We normally think of waking experience as being ordinary in comparison to dream experience, which seems extraordinary. But waking experience is really extraordinary, overlaid as it is with all of our judgments and preconceptions and filtered through our pragmatic desire to find a “use” for everything. Enlightenment moves us beyond the extraordinary presence of words, language, ideas, emotions, and desire to embrace the ordinary experience of each moment openly, fully, and without qualification.
• Has evolved to late personal or above on all major developmental lines.
• This means that the enlightened are intelligent, morally worthy of respect, emotionally healthy and maintain mutually respectful relationships with all others, based on high order empathy. It does not mean that they are necessarily physically coordinated, charismatic, or mathematical or musical prodigies.
• Demonstrate profound compassion, wisdom, and peace of mind.
Manifest grace in their beingness.
A willingness to make mistakes, fail, accept responsibility for them, and move on, all in the service of spirit.
• High-order empathy: the ability to take the role of all others, in any state, and know your life from their perspective.
• Thinks its ridiculous that people view them as enlightened!
• Live a life that is an expression of grace rather than karma.
• Dedication to service to all sentient beings in all dimensions.
• Outstanding patience, perseverance, and determination.
• Good luck; life flows!
• Extraordinary mental focus.
• Challenging to be around. You would feel challenged to be more and do more. This could cause you to feel unaccepted and self-critical, but that would be your own projection.
• Inspiring. Awakens the best in you, but may also trigger your fears of failure, rejection, and abandonment.
While “enlightenment” is often used to refer to the pinnacle of development, it is clear that enlightened masters are not perfect in all lines of development. Upon closer examination we find that enlightenment refers to the completion or fulfillment of one line of development: your sense of who you are. When enlightened your self-sense becomes another tool, like your hand, a transparent concept that no longer defines your identity.
Think of enlightenment of a never-ending process of waking up. Just as there are levels of dream lucidity, escape from life illusion, and suffering, so there are levels of enlightenment. One of the worst forms of grandiosity you can have is to think you’re enlightened and then to proceed to inflict your brilliance on others. Integral Deep Listening, one form of dream yoga, is dedicated to two goals: helping you wake up out of your own, self-created and maintained life dream, and to help others to listen to those aspects of themselves that will help them to do the same.