I got enlightened accidentally when I was just short of my 18th birthday. I was sitting in between some speakers listening to music when I had the thought that I wasn't concentrating on what I was listening to but rather my thoughts were drifting around. I decided to try to focus just on the music. As I did this my back spontaneously arched backwards and, at the point when I felt my consciousness merge with the music, I felt a sort of liquid light go up my spine and explode inside my head seemingly going out to infinity. When I opened my eyes I "saw" what I had looked at before, and "heard" what I had only listened to before. I felt an intense loving energy emanating from my heart area and the centers of my palms. My eyes were soft. Suddenly I just understood things and mostly I felt that, despite the way it seems, everything is perfect in this moment. That state lasted about 9 hours. I repeated it to a lesser degree a few days later but haven't been able to since. I had no idea what had happened to me but after looking into various things I decided I had had an experience with kundalini. I've had some similar experiences in bioenergetic psychotherapy where I was suddenly "clear", as I call it, but that's been a while now, too. Needless to say, these sorts of experiences change your perception of what life is about. I've spent much of my life thinking about enlightenment. You can't get around the fact that it's thee most important thing because without being in that state you really are not perceiving reality as it is, nor being who you really are.
The model I think best describes my enlightenment experience is the zen one. They would say I had a few mini-enlightenments called kensho. The window opens for a while and then closes. Satori or samadhi is when it opens and stays open. Like I said above, you can't really see things the same way as others after you experience these sorts of things, nor can you really communicate their importance to those who haven't. For me that meant that I couldn't participate in regular middle class society so I became an artist to make a living and have had a lifelong interest in alternative healing. I felt if I could find the true healing method it would somehow lead back to enlightenment. I'm beginning to see, though, that enlightenment itself IS the true healing method. Without being enlightened your thoughts are not correct. Actions and emotions flow from that and this is what ultimately leads to dis-ease. Therefore, enlightenment is health in the ultimate sense. Anything else only serves to patch you up for a while so you can keep pursuing it. That's, in fact, why ayurvedic medicine was created as the healing adjunct to yoga.
So if anything but enlightenment is is just sort of spinning your wheels then how to accomplish it? Yoga is certainly a time honored way but I'm not so sure how effective. I commented to a yoga teacher on how many millions of people are doing these sorts of things and yet only a few seem to reach the goal. When I look back on what happened to me what it was was that "I" merged with something outside of myself, the music. Music I've read is associated with the largest number of mystical experiences such as this. But the thing is, you could pick anything really and have an experience of oneness with it. So what is the best thing to merge with? I still think it may be music or at least a sound. Music, sound, seems to go into the mind in a way that is different from anything else. I have certain songs that are purely instrumental and yet cause me to weep when I hear them. I don't know why but they penetrate that deeply into me. I know many people have felt this. Certainly you can just put on your favorite record and try to become one with the music but I've tried that and it's hard to do when you know what you are trying to do. I think my initial innocence as to what was happening allowed it to happen. Otherwise, the ego steps in and messes it up. What I think needs to be developed is some sort of biofeedback device. As you move closer to the sound, whatever measurement that is, the instrument senses changes in brainwaves and increases the frequency and/or amplitude. It's basically a system that facilitates the merging together of two points, you and the sound. Perhaps this already exists. That's one reason I'm posting this, to find out. Otherwise, I'm just sharing my experience, thoughts, and suggestions. This is so important that we can't just leave it to chance.
The model I think best describes my enlightenment experience is the zen one. They would say I had a few mini-enlightenments called kensho. The window opens for a while and then closes. Satori or samadhi is when it opens and stays open. Like I said above, you can't really see things the same way as others after you experience these sorts of things, nor can you really communicate their importance to those who haven't. For me that meant that I couldn't participate in regular middle class society so I became an artist to make a living and have had a lifelong interest in alternative healing. I felt if I could find the true healing method it would somehow lead back to enlightenment. I'm beginning to see, though, that enlightenment itself IS the true healing method. Without being enlightened your thoughts are not correct. Actions and emotions flow from that and this is what ultimately leads to dis-ease. Therefore, enlightenment is health in the ultimate sense. Anything else only serves to patch you up for a while so you can keep pursuing it. That's, in fact, why ayurvedic medicine was created as the healing adjunct to yoga.
So if anything but enlightenment is is just sort of spinning your wheels then how to accomplish it? Yoga is certainly a time honored way but I'm not so sure how effective. I commented to a yoga teacher on how many millions of people are doing these sorts of things and yet only a few seem to reach the goal. When I look back on what happened to me what it was was that "I" merged with something outside of myself, the music. Music I've read is associated with the largest number of mystical experiences such as this. But the thing is, you could pick anything really and have an experience of oneness with it. So what is the best thing to merge with? I still think it may be music or at least a sound. Music, sound, seems to go into the mind in a way that is different from anything else. I have certain songs that are purely instrumental and yet cause me to weep when I hear them. I don't know why but they penetrate that deeply into me. I know many people have felt this. Certainly you can just put on your favorite record and try to become one with the music but I've tried that and it's hard to do when you know what you are trying to do. I think my initial innocence as to what was happening allowed it to happen. Otherwise, the ego steps in and messes it up. What I think needs to be developed is some sort of biofeedback device. As you move closer to the sound, whatever measurement that is, the instrument senses changes in brainwaves and increases the frequency and/or amplitude. It's basically a system that facilitates the merging together of two points, you and the sound. Perhaps this already exists. That's one reason I'm posting this, to find out. Otherwise, I'm just sharing my experience, thoughts, and suggestions. This is so important that we can't just leave it to chance.
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Hello Scott,
I really enjoyed reading your post. I agree with a lot of what you're expressing here. I do have one question though - you mention the little "mini-Awakenings" that can happen before the full, permanent one happens. Do you feel that you've had permanent Awakening, or just a number of the mini ones?
I think you're spot on when you talk about how Enlightenment is *the* only healing "method". In fact, there is a healing modality that works from this assumption as well, called VortexHealing. The idea here is that all suffering and all disease come from the fundamental experience of feeling separate from what we really are, and true healing cannot occur until that separation consciousness has been addressed. The process of releasing that separation from one's consciousness is the same process that eventually leads to Awakening and Enlightenment. My own Awakening came about through the use of Vortex and the guidance of my Vortex teacher.
I should say, though, that even Awakening isn't the end. Awakening creates a tremendous amount of space in which healing can occur, but by itself doesn't cure very many problems. You still have to do the leg work to address your issues and patterns, it just becomes a lot easier when you have no fundamental identity with those issues and patterns.
One other thing that I'd like to say is that when Awakening happens, it usually isn't very "Wow!" It's more like "Hunh...." accompanied with laughter. When you've lost identity with what you aren't, you're simply being what you are, and there's nothing fancy or amazing about that. It's just your natural state; no big whoop.
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these experiences are little signs telling you that you are on the right path.there is no "right way".just keep with "i am",i don`t know how else to say it. you are the no thing, the ultimate silence background, perhaps a mirror in which everything imagined is imaged. own none of it but just the "i am".2 men are standing on a high cliff looking at the sea. 1 man sees waves the other man sees only the sea.
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I had an illumination experience, quite a few years ago, and of the many things that I've thought about it since, it struck me that I was so disconnected from any experience of fear that, in such a state, I couldn't live in the real world. In a feeling of infinite love and peace and joy, the ways and motivations and concerns of the world at large don't make much sense, or seem very important. Perhaps that's why some who've attained go off to live in caves and the woods. If you can hold onto it, or get back to it, it's easier to stay there than be here. The Budda said, Joyfully participate in the suffering of the world. That, it seems to me, requires more courage and fortitude than withdrawing from it. Maybe it's only for a Buddha to do. I don't know.
It also seems to me that people who meditate and practice and seek are at some advantage if they do find illumination. That is, perhaps they've learned and practiced some inner disciplines along the way that will help keep them more centered latter on. Those of us who've just had a brief and unsolicited experience or two, end up having to make sense of it in hindsight, in some isolation, and probably with a serious lack of knowledge/perspective, and end up still in our lives and still being mostly the same people we were before. I was half primed and half on a path beforehand, but a few years after the fact, I was struggling to make a direction for myself, still am, in a round about way. Overall, I can't help but look at it as a gift and a grace. It helps me sometimes and leaves me flat others (or maybe I'm the one who leaves me flat). In any case I'll never be quite the same.
The central choice to make afterward, and probably over some years, is whether to put all your efforts into getting back to that experience or just going about your life. I've choosen the later, but with some purpose, some plan, and some understanding of what I'm about, that and it isn't as much about me anymore. A sudden illumination is something you have to grow into, a kind of hero's path. I think this can take as much time on the backside, as some people put into finding it on the frontside. Either way, a bliss is a wonderful nothing. Live, laugh, love. -
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before enlightenment go to the grocery store, pick-up the dry cleaning
after enlightenment go to the grocery store, pick-up the dry cleaning...
Love
Light
Bow
K
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Old, your post really resonated with me, how I feel about it, too. On the one hand it's thee most important thing but, on the other, you still do have go on with your life.
And I understand how you say it's no "big whoop" but then again it's the biggest whoop. There's that dichotomy again, the union of seeming opposites that is a part of enlightenment.
No, I'm not enlightened now although those who are say we all are fully enlightened but, for some reason, chose not to be at this moment.
There's a big question then, why would we chose not to be enlightened? I feel it's difficult to be enlightened when you are surrounded by others who are not. There's a loneliness about it. It's like you're seeing and understanding things in a completely different way so now who is there to share your life with? At least that's how I've explained it to myself.
I had the thought the other day that, if we all are in fact enlightened and just chose not to be, perhaps it's because we've imagined ourselves out of enlightenment. We want to fit in and, in a sense, "win" at the game of life as we see it around us so we imagine ourselves to be whomever that winning person is. That's basically the ego. What we were originally was enlightened but it didn't seem like that would work very well in this world. So start imagining enlightenment again and moving back towards what we really are. We all intuitively know what enlightenment is because that is our true state of being. Take some time to imagine how you would be or what you would do if you were enlightened. That may slowly bring you back to it.
Finally, if we never were unenlightened how would we know what enlightenment is? The koan, does a dog have a Buddha nature?, points at that I believe. The dog has no ego, is living in the moment, etc, etc, but he is not aware of it. So the answer must be that he isn't. Maybe then we must be unenlightened to become enlightened, otherwise, like the dog, or infant in our case, we would have no awareness of it.
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