What Is Spiritual Enlightenment?

Spiritual enlightenment is elusive for we never stop long enough to contemplate our real nature. Forever distracted by temporary benefits, we remain strangers to ourselves. Duped from the cradle to the grave, enslaved by economic necessity, we are forever lost to ourselves.

We live in invisible prisons: conceptual prisons, social prisons, and, ultimately, prisons of emotional repression, and all of these strangle the incipient hope within us that we may be much more than our circumstances reveal about us.

I’ve come to the conclusion that we are souls here for the simple exercise of becoming self-obvious to ourselves, an understanding known as spiritual enlightenment. But deluded by the masks of name and form, beguiled by the social needs to perform, excel, be exemplary, we quickly disassociate from our essence. Instead, we live in the hellish worlds of the ego, where immortality, possibility, and infinite progress are surrendered to the foolish necessities of clothing, feeding, and copulating, physical needs that take all our time, leaving us with little energy to fulfill our real purpose here, which is to awaken from the dream of time-space and return to the fullness of our untrammeled nature.

The world is always dross; true gold is in spirit; and our task is to throw off all our shackles and walk in the light of our own truth, whose nature we will never discover as long as we are hungering for approval, control, and security, psychological rewards for integrating with and conforming to the established order of the social structure we find ourselves in.

Consciousness is the name of the game. Nothing else. All else is distraction. We are here to rise in consciousness, which is, in essence, to return to our spiritual nature of unity with all that exists, a state known as spiritual enlightenment. In this place, we feel light, in mind and heart, thought and feeling, word and deed, and we are in the light, understanding our place in the universe, undisturbed by the shadows of fleeting concerns. What splits consciousness off from itself is mind, and mind is the conditioned view of the world, the endless hair-splitting of details until we cannot even grasp the idea of a fully formed understanding of anything.

The human mind is a socially-engineered organism, informed entirely by the accidents of time and place that shaped it. It is the dysfunctional nature, the aberrations of this energetic encapsulation of information, that cause our lives to go awry, so we are forever trying to shape order out of chaos, never fully appreciating, even for a moment, that life is beautiful, serene, peaceful and balanced simply because it exists.

The neurotic tendency to constantly seek more perpetually leaves us with less. This is the game of the mind, a game of acquisition, of endless lust for materiality, a hopeless quest to secure some semblance of safety, yet finding, the more it scrambles, nothing but escalating insecurity. There is nothing to be gained from endless consumerism, for all that we gain has to be relinquished as we shed our mortal coil. All progress that is not directed to the education and spiritual enlightenment of our souls, our inner resourcefulness, is wasted time and effort.

Bewildered by the agitations of our minds, seeking relief from the haunting of emotions buried alive, we finally succumb to the temptation of seeking a spiritual path for relief from our own egoic insanity. Unfortunately, we almost always go about it the wrong way, surrendering the only thing we really have, our free will, to the discipline and tyranny of some group that huddles together, bandied by slogans, slokas, and symbols.

Years pass and slowly it dawns on us that we have been duped yet again--for it often turns out that the guru, the savior, the one with the answers is not the final solution. Whether or not he or she is sincere, which is often not the case, whether or not the stories we have heard about him or her are true, which is often not the case, we find that the spiritual path of another is not our way to spiritual enlightenment. The guru, assuming he or she is not more preoccupied with personal gain, can point the way, but we must walk it alone, in our own way, relying on our own inner resources to guide us to the final places of emancipation.

Our spiritual path is ours alone. It cannot be shared. No formulas lift you to transcendence. No disciplines are iron enough to remove the wrinkles of our own errors.

The truth is simple: we must face all that we have ever experienced and the spiritual path that we must trace is one that we alone must find. Awareness of who we are is the prelude to spiritual enlightenment. Sustaining that awareness deepens the state of spiritual enlightenment.

Our transcendence into the higher realms is not based on intellectual understanding of subtle truths but on discoveries made from the inner planes of consciousness. The way home to ourselves is unmarked. We must walk alone before we find ourselves one with all the world. Our guru, whether it be a person, a book, or an insight, may initially start us on our journey but we have to finish it ourselves.

The journey of spiritual enlightenment is not a social venture; although it may legitimately start there. The journey is, and has always been, contrary to everything we have been inculcated to believe. It is the journey of the self to The Self, a journey as individualistic as our own understanding of the nature of life.

The spiritual path is indeed narrow and sharper than a razor’s edge because it has been designed for our feet alone. If we wish to go where the enlightened beings from this plane have gone before us, we cannot follow another. We can ask for directions, which may be misleading, but we cannot hope for our hand to be held until we finally understand that we are not separate, not alone, and not confined to live in our own hellish creations of lack, limitation, and lust for worldly trash and trinkets.

We must walk alone to find that we have never been alone.

Go from Spiritual Enlightenment to Spiritual Growth