January 5, 2024 at 5:27 pm
Photo: https://lonerwolf.com
For many people, what “forces” them to work hard on their spiritual journey is the promise of enlightenment. After spiritual awakening we can experience kundalini awakening and after long internal work we are finally able to achieve enlightenment, right? Well, it’s actually a joke (not a funny one). Enlightenment is like a big juicy carrot dangled in front of a hungry mind that believes it is broken and has missed something important. In other words, enlightenment is a story created by the ego, an ego that feels disconnected from God. The source of the frustration is that, by blindly striving for enlightenment, we continue to fuel our suffering and exhaust the content of our spiritual search. We believe that the imperfect self will eventually reach a perfect and ideal “enlightened” future state. However, this is mental idleness, writes Lonerwolf.
“All the answers are within you.” I know it sounds cliché, but there’s a reason it’s a common saying. Combine this with the practice of gratitude and you will emerge from the endless game of seeking, grasping, and consuming that is the foundation of spiritual materialism. Instead, gradually deepen your appreciation for the beauty of What Is and the wisdom that is always available within you.
– Gangaji
The more we search, the more we strengthen our separate self, or ego. The more the ego grows stronger, the more we seek. And so the cycle of unhappiness and despair continues. See how tiring it can be? Enlightenment does not exist because there is no “I” that can become enlightened. How can I become enlightened if the entire “I” is from the beginning just a spiritual story – a story that the entire spiritual journey is destined to demolish?!
The central purpose of the spiritual journey is not to strengthen this narrow and separated ego, but to reveal its contracted “I” energy. To make space in the mind and let us savor the Truth of Who We Really Are: Our True Essence.
Author and teacher Scott Kiloby puts it this way:
There are many spiritual methods and belief systems that promise us luck, money, or other success in the future. But if you look closely, the general idea is that you can achieve anything as long as there is a separate “you” that is missing something… As long as you seek enlightenment, enlightenment is unattainable. When you search, you are operating from a false concept, as if you were a separate entity that was missing something. It is this concept that creates the need to search. Enlightenment is the recognition that there is no separate “you” that can personally gain anything from life. There is only life and you ARE THAT LIFE. There is no discrepancy. In this recognition, your resistance to what is completely disappears and the deepest spiritual truth is revealed.
First, it’s important to understand that awakening to your True Being, connecting to your Soul, however you want to say it, doesn’t happen through what “you” do. It happens by grace. It will come when it comes.
It reminds me of an old Bible verse (Eph 2:8) – “For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – and not by works, so that no one can boast.” This is to say that while you can’t control when the shell breaks, when the seed drops and when the flower opens, you can create a fertile environment that encourages flowering. It’s here, it’s in you, it’s in me, it’s in all of life. Both in known and unknown life. It’s everywhere. As long as you look for it, you will never find it because you will assume it is somewhere else.
Without realizing it, we accumulate a lot of clutter in our lives
Any confusion is a burden on the mind (which creates hyperactivity in the mind). Confusion can be what we experience or accept externally. Or, on the contrary, what we carry inside us. Examples of external disorder can be excessive things, too many unnecessary responsibilities, disordered social relationships. Internal confusion can include, for example, unthought beliefs, ideals, desires, and traumas. I’m not saying that you should sell everything now, cut all ties and go to a monastery or monastery. Instead, simply try to create as much space as possible in all areas of your life. Practice non-attachment. Do it at your own pace and hand in hand with self-love. Making and creating space allows important things to grow and flourish.
Psychotherapist Robert Johnson says: Creating space means both allowing awareness of your Higher Self and allowing existence to “send” desired things. In this sense, “creating space” is a metaphor for self-awareness… If we do not create space, if we are too caught up in our ego, its chronic tensions and distrust of existence, then in that state there is no space for this creation.”
Your spiritual practice will not “earn” you awakening or self-awareness of your True Self, but it will help you make the garden of your being fruitful (if that thought makes sense). As Bonnie Glass-Coffin Ph.D. and Don Oscar Miro-Quesada write: It’s difficult to stay awake and recognize your true nature, even after briefly seeing it. The ego fights strongly against our enlightenment. This is why spiritual practices are so important.
Exercises such as meditation, inner work and soul work are important. They help create internal (and external) space, resolve internal blockages and contractions, and relax our inner being. They help us experience spiritual maturity.
Spiritual teacher Jeff Foster points out:
All your preconceived notions about “enlightenment” will shatter into a million pieces; your happy ideas of “spiritual awakening” will not survive this, oh no! You are forced to face life head on, without the comfort of mom and dad, without the shield of faith, without the protection of the ego, without the apparent security of fixed points of reference. Even your most beloved spiritual gurus and philosophers are no longer useful. Raw, unfiltered pleasure and pain, finally! You are not dense, you have the same soft vulnerability you had in the beginning, before you knew right and wrong, right and wrong, God and the devil. It’s scary at first, this complete dependence on inner authority, on your gut, on your gut, this absolute openness to experience, this respect for yourself; but you learn to trust the journey of the completely unknown and make your nest in the warm heart of uncertainty. And everything is kept in the deepest silence. And yes, there will definitely be heartache! But there will also be joy, the one you only dreamed of!
Trusting an inner authority does not mean becoming an egomaniac or denying all help/guidance from external sources. NO. Instead, it means honoring your deep innate wisdom that is completely outside the realm of reason. There is no need to demonize the ego, but it is a deceptive character. The ego does everything it can to convince us that only if we tune our chakras a little more, awaken our kundalini, or erase all our past karma, will we become enlightened. If that wasn’t hard enough, other egos around us also confirm this – and this is why practicing discernment of spirituality is so important. Without self-awareness and without clearly seeing one’s mistake, it is easy to fall into the sticky web of cosmic “Lalaa-land”.
Remember that awakening to your True Self (known as moksha or Enlightenment) is not something that is “achieved” by the individual self or ego. To recognize true Being, we must be able to discern what the truth really is. In other words, we must have direct experience of the transparent/transcendent nature of the ego and the underlying immutable presence.
Perhaps the easiest way to do this is through self-inquiry or by asking the question “Who am I?” by submission. This can be done both through meditation and contemplation. The Indian sage Sri Ramana Maharshi popularized this technique, which has been adopted and taught in many meditation circles and spiritual fields. So who are you? What in you is not subject to birth, change and decay? We’ll leave it to you to discover. 🙂 You can study the book “Who am I?” for further instructions.
After reading all this, you might think, “Jeerum, this all seems so complicated…”
Don’t worry. It is not so. Even if it seems like it is! Our minds have a way of complicating things; create stories and obstacles that don’t actually exist: transform a fly into an elephant. Believing that we must “earn” freedom to obtain it. As the spiritual master Unmani writes:
After years of seeking fulfillment or enlightenment, saying that I am already fulfilled and enlightened seems too easy. Surely it must be something more, something very spiritual. Enlightened people should act a certain way and look a certain way. They should be vegetarians, they should not smoke or drink. Enlightened people are those who have achieved a special spiritual state after years or a lifetime of meditation and self-inquiry. They have resolved all their karmic debts and opened all their chakras. It is reflected in their compassion and their aura that exudes unconditional love for humanity… Why should life be anything but simple? The assumption is that it must be difficult, because in the game, if I want to get something, I feel like I have to work really hard to get it. The nature of life is really not complicated. Look at a flower; Does he really work hard to be a flower? Does it have to contain an image of a “flower” to be a flower? Here it is indicated that Life recognizes itself. Life is life. A flower is a flower. It’s so easy, it all happens by itself!”
In other words, this is life
You are the one. You are already what you are looking for. You don’t need to pretend to be something or someone special. What you are looking for is not in the ideal state of the future. Everything is already here. Why shouldn’t it be? When we turn to this simplicity, we find the truth. We discover the door to awakening. We learn that simplicity is truth. We understand that simplicity is clear, pure and pristine, while complexity is mind-created, complex, dramatic and stressful. The mind believes that everything must be a super intriguing game. It gives the mind the illusion of “achieving” something special by staying busy.
But what you seek is what you already ARE, and what you already are cannot be achieved! So choose simplicity. And understand what it means for you.
Awakening True Being is both the end and the beginning. It is the end of the spiritual quest, but the beginning of freedom. And in the end, that’s all we’re after. Every lone wolf who embarks on the journey of soul searching carries within them the desire to reconnect with who we truly are.
Source: https://lonerwolf.com
Translated and edited by Anneli Roots
2024-01-05 15:29:26
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