MISCONCEPTIONS IN THE WAY OF ENLIGHTENMENT
But I was mistaken… Enlightenment is not about finding inner peace, happiness or feeling immense love, although it will dawn as a result. Love and peace are just a couple of aspects out of the entirety of the range of experiences within the wholeness of Awareness, and is not the complete picture. Enlightenment can also be painful and depressing, and the love and peace so much more fulfilling than what I, the inner peace goddess, experienced and claimed as “it”.
Enlightenment is the dissolution of the sense of ”I”, the sense of being a separate person. It is the realisation of the unmanifest as your true nature, and the manifest as the play of creation, where you directly experience “you, the formless essence” as present in every particle, here and there, where the sense of being a person in a world dissolves into pure being.
This is not a mental understanding, but an inner paradigm shift. When the sentence ”I am enlightened”, or even “I am hungry” becomes impossible to say without the feeling that you are pretending, because there is no ”I” there anymore. When dissolution of the “I” has occurred there will indeed be inner fulfilment of love and peace, as further levels of realisation and integration will continue to unfold.
When we look for love and peace we only look for concepts, which we associate with through the mind. Although, there is opportunity to immerse in love and peace in every NOW moment, but we try to grasp it with the mind and miss the opportunity to experience true love, peace and beauty, which arise spontaneously from within, in stillness and silence of the heart.
An enlightened life is not just feeling inner peace and stillness. It is not just peace, unconditional love and compassion, it is also chaos and constant change, and the surfacing of pain and suffering, facing the brutal truth of the world and the illusion “I”, as the unmoving changeless essence of choiceless Awareness pervades.
Love is recognition of the underlying awareness in all beings and particles, it is seeing yourself in others and others in yourself, it is losing the sense of boundary with the rest of creation. Love is metaphysical gravitation, the force by virtue of which hearts come together and galaxies collide into one.
Happiness is knowing yourself as absolute wholeness, immersing in bliss of your own eternal beingness.
Peace is to know your self as eternal, with no boundaries or limits and pervading all there is.
”When you awaken, all becoming ceases. Being awake means that you realize by direct experience who and what you are. You do not become anything. All becoming is in time, which is mind. Awakening is outside of time: You awaken from time to that which is timeless. Wisdom and love are aspects of your own Self and as such do not need to be created or pursued. Many people try to become wiser and more loving, and they remain in a constant battle with themselves. This approach never works because it assumes a separate ‘you’ who wants to be a better person. It is the you that is the dream, a thought only. In taking yourself to be a separate entity, you blind yourself to the Truth of your being which is love and wisdom.”
Adyashanti
Art: A galaxy within by Robrey