What Is Enlightenment?

So, why aren’t you enlightened? You’ve read the books, you’ve gone to workshops, you’ve learned and practiced meditation. Let’s look at the standard answers to this question and show why they are non-answers. We will then look at how your barriers to enlightenment probably lie in what your understanding of enlightenment is and is not. Finally, we will look at what it takes to become enlightened and how Integral Deep Listening (IDL) supports that process.

It is simple to look at the standard reasons we are given, or we give ourselves, for our lack of enlightenment, and then discover why they are inadequate. You may have been told or believe you are not enlightened because you either haven’t used the right approach or because you just haven’t done the sacred rites appropriately or enough. You are visualizing Avalokiteshvara when you need to be visualizing Manjusri. You are doing hatha yoga when you need to be doing kundalini. You are attempting to open the wrong chakra, or open them in the wrong order, or using agni yoga instead of bhakti yoga to open them. You are following channelings from the White Brotherhood instead of following Jesus. You are following Jesus instead of finding your totem animal and going on your vision quest. You are not doing Tarot enough or doing Tarot instead of I Ching or kabbala. You are wasting all your time in that spiritual mumbo-jumbo instead of becoming a rational scientist or secular humanist. So if you’re not enlightened it’s all your fault.

The “right” approach always ends up being whatever I, the master, the authority, tell you to do; if you aren’t using my preferred method you are using the wrong approach and that is why you are not enlightened. However, because most, if not all approaches and teachers operate from this set of assumptions, the only reasonable conclusion is that searching for the right approach to enlightenment is a fool’s errand. There is no one “right” approach. If there were, it would consistently produce enlightened individuals. Where are such people? Where are such approaches?

What we find when we look are people who are more or less awake, and none of them perfect. We find approaches that will help you wake up in different ways, depending on your own aptitudes, interests, and needs. Do they produce enlightened individuals? Go take a close look at those making such claims and draw your own conclusions.

This also means that no, it is not true that every approach is the “right” approach or that any and all roads lead to enlightenment. This is the bland, fuzzy thinking and excuse making of the egalitarian and pluralistic world view often associated with late personal levels of development.

If you have practiced some approach like Transcendental Meditation for years and still cannot levitate (a claim it makes) and are not enlightened (another claim it makes), is it because you haven’t used TM enough or done it correctly?

In order to know, you have to be able to look at the entirety of their lives, not just who they present themselves to be in public.

Enlightenment claims are effective for those who want to believe and who therefore do not ask too many questions. In fact, a preliminary demand of most spiritual paths is that you suspend disbelief and doubt and have “faith.” You accept whatever you are told as true.

Integral Deep Listening (IDL), one of the options discussed on this site and explored in detail at IntegralDeepListening.Com, offers one path to greater wakefulness, but that is quite different from making claims that you will become enlightened if you use it.

Notice that IDL is not saying “reason is better than belief” or that “adulthood is better than childhood.” Instead, it is saying, “You need to combine and integrate the strengths of both childhood and adulthood, belief and reason if you want to transcend both.”

We can also gain clarity by asking, “What are the psychological benefits of making claims that we are enlightened and can teach it to others?”

I first encountered this sanctimonious groupthink in the psychology of enlightenment when I was about twenty-one…

Clearly, there are people and organizations out there that will take advantage of any misunderstanding of enlightenment that you have.

What is this clear state of consciousness that, in some ways, is the destination of transformation? Setting enlightenment as your goal ensures that you won’t get there!

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: Love is a highly subjective measurement.

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.

Ecstasy and Bliss: These are signs of spiritual opening, not enlightenment.

Mystical Experiences: Saul on the road to Damascus…

Near Death Experiences: Draw your own conclusions.

Ability to Lucid Dream: Children and criminals have reported this ability.

The End of Pain: There is an important difference between pain and suffering.

The End of Limitation: The other side is increasing responsibility.

The End of Evolution: Is enlightenment the end or a way of continuing?

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.

• Ability to witness – to continually watch yourself go by.
• Ability to stay out of drama.
• Increasing perspectives that transcend and include.
• Awake in waking, dreaming, and deep sleep.
• Polyperspectival awareness.
• Balance among confidence, empathy, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing.
• Dedication to service.
• Cosmic humor.
• Enjoyment of life.
• Thinks it’s ridiculous that people view them as enlightened!

Enlightenment often refers to fulfillment of the self-line, not perfection in all lines.

Think of enlightenment as a never-ending process of waking up.

Enlightenment is an ongoing, never-ending process of awakening.

Approach enlightenment as an integral, ongoing process.

IDL recommends triangulation, interviewing emerging potentials, and balanced development.

Think of enlightenment as a two-fold process of moving away and moving toward.

IDL teaches recognition of scripting, reduction of drama, and elimination of cognitive distortions.

IDL uses interviewing, acting on recommendations, incubation, meditation, pranayama, and triangulation.

Enlightenment requires balanced development in cognition, self, morality, and empathy.

IDL assumes enlightenment is a never-ending developmental process.

If you think you already have The Answer, you will wake up more slowly.

IDL encourages you to build on what you already do, not abandon it.

IDL is designed to provide your own unique way forward into ever-expanding enlightenment.

For more information about IDL, see IntegralDeepListening.Com, DreamYoga.Com. Introductory texts include Dream Yoga: Accessing Your Inner Compass and Waking Up. A free app is “End Nightmares Forever!” You can learn how to become an IDL coach here.