Are you enlightened? What does that mean to you?
Enlightenment is, to put it simply, knowing who you really are.
Many years ago, when I was pursuing enlightenment, I believed it meant being someone who could control miraculous occurrences. It meant being someone who was one with God and the universe, someone who could heal people, levitate, and who could never made a mistake!
As I learned more about enlightenment, I saw that my belief of enlightenment making a person perfect was completely false! I learned that enlightenment was nothing but a fancy expression for someone who understood their true nature, and who experienced this consciously at all times.
I experienced the higher and more profound we put a goal, the further we get from attaining it. When I believed enlightenment was human perfection, I put it miles away on a mountaintop. When instead it was understanding my true nature, it became more within my grasp.
After years of spiritual growth, including contemplation and meditation, when the final realization came, something unexpected happened.
The person who I was, the person who wanted to be enlightened, disappeared!
This sounds strange, but in reality, my identity of being a person just stopped. I experienced that I was not a person with a mind and a body, but instead I was the feeling of beingness or the awareness that everything exists within.
A simple shift in understanding, albeit immensely profound, is all enlightenment really is. A misunderstood word meaning a change in understanding of identity.
It can happen to anyone at anytime. Most people believe it is so far removed from them that it will never happen, but when you believe it is close at hand, the shift in understanding can easily occur.
So no, I am not enlightened.
In fact, I do not exist. There is no one here to be enlightened. The person was always just a misunderstanding, and understanding has happened instead.
What I am is what we all are, awareness, unbound by space or time. Everything happens in the awareness that I am and that we all are. Before this realization, the only difference was the mind didn’t understand who I was.
Now, I (awareness here and now) experiences this, and the mind understands it.
Now this I better get back to work!
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Really good post.
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Hello ! This post is really nice.
being someone who was one with God, that's a good interpretation and you're right, people of God have to be a light in this dark world, so it was your natural feeling for the truth which let you think so. ;-)
Isiah 60:1 Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.