beyond enlightenment

One is only enlightened when one has gone beyond enlightenment

Before enlightenment, enlightenment is an idea, a concept, a sort of theory in the mind, something to be attained. Whilst we are seeking enlightenment, we are still living the way most people live in the world, having a desire, a goal, an objective, something to aim for, something to strive for, something to achieve. This is ambition, this is the ambitious mind. It is the unenlightened way of being in the world.

As a seeker one is still in that state, that way of operating, that way of living one’s life. All that needs to change. As part of that change, the goal, the idea of enlightenment, needs to be dropped. I say it needs to be dropped, in fact it needs to drop itself. It needs somehow to disappear. It can explode, it can implode, it can dissolve away, but it needs to go.

For enlightenment to come, not only does the goal of enlightenment need to disappear, but it needs to take with it that whole way of being in the world, of having goals, of striving after things, of trying to attain things. For that to happen, we have to invest everything in the search for enlightenment, we need to gamble everything on it. It is a gamble that will not pay off, but that is the whole point. We put all our eggs in this basket and then the basket falls apart, all the eggs are lost. Everything is broken. But in that great catastrophe, we are left empty. Everything gets destroyed by that process, everything that we think we are and yet we are not. And if the process takes away enough of us, and we are left empty, then in that great space we find that life has a different quality. We are being in the world in a different way, a new way: a way without struggle, without effort, a way without choice, a simple way. We are merely being.

But all of this has to be a deep transformation within ourself. Nowadays in the West it is common for masters to talk in a rational sounding way about enlightenment. There’s nothing wrong in it, but do not think that that enlightenment is merely a new understanding about the world. The conscious thinking mind can quite easily grasp the concept of enlightenment, but that is not transformation. The rest of the mind, the unconscious – that great bulk of the iceberg which is submerged, hidden beneath the surface – that is not changed by a mere mental understanding. That is why disciplines that don’t involve thinking are an important part of the spiritual journey. The intellectual understanding can help, but whilst we are playing with those ideas, we have not gone beyond enlightenment. We are still stuck in that game. Only going beyond the idea of enlightenment do we find ourself in an enlightened state. So don’t worry too much about the intellectual understanding. Don’t get hung up on words. Relax, relax about everything in life. Most of all, relax about yourself. You are not who you think yourself to be anyway. Through this deep relaxation, with luck, we can go beyond enlightenment, and only then is one enlightened.