Understanding Enlightenment

Understanding Enlightenment is different from having the experience of enlightenment or being enlightened. However, a little understanding can go a long way. Putting words or descriptions on something that cannot really be described in words can be considered foolish or unenlightened. And yet at times there is value in attempting to limit the unlimited just long enough to be able to possible get on the ride and go for a short spin.

A useful starting place in understanding enlightenment is to define enlightenment on a very broad canvas and to do that we’d like to look at two words that are used in spiritual circles and give new meanings that may be more useful in this pursuit.

Awareness…
There are many words that are used in place of awareness. Some of them are Universe, Spirit, All There Is, unconditional love, No-thing, Oneness, potential energy, God, matrix, all possibilities, zero point field, source, implicit order, quantum soup, etc, etc, etc. For our purposes of understanding enlightenment awareness can be understood as the source of everything. It is everywhere and everything. It penetrates, holds, and surrounds everything. It is still, silent, and impersonal, the unseen silent observer.

Consciousness…
Is the extension of awareness, it proceeds out of awareness, it is the movement of awareness (stillness), the game player, duality, visible, physical plane, impersonal, it contains everything that seems to happen. Its major component is ‘the sense of separation’.

In actuality all there is… is Awareness.

An interesting bit of information about both Awareness and Consciousness is that both are non-attached to anything or detached from everything. Consciousness extends out of awareness and everything else extends out of Consciousness. Each different aspect of Consciousness offers preferences (likes/dislikes) from the single cell to the planet to animals and humans. It seems apparent that each aspect of Consciousness calibrates preferences and yet only humans judge.

Judgment seems to be the stumbling block to most of life and to the individual experiencing more Awareness and Consciousness. Judgment is the foundation to attachment over preference. It is judgment that creates patterns of thought that keep humans from being conscious or aware. Calibration can be a useful tool to learn to release judgment and allow the individual to relax into more Awareness and Consciousness.

As a Master Teacher we can coach you into more calibration of Awareness and Consciousness which will help in your understanding enlightenment and yet when enlightenment shows up there will no longer be the sense or feel of “a separate individual”. It is hard to explain and yet even if you never experience enlightenment and only understand it, experiencing more Awareness and Consciousness will improve your life in unheard of ways. The joy, happiness and love will be off the charts. All areas of your life work better and are more harmonious.

In Enlightenment there is only Awareness, there is no one being aware, only awareness being or beingness being. The wonderful news when it is really understood is everything is awareness or beingness or No-thing showing up as separate individual people, places and things. So it is all awareness and it is all OK, even the part that thinks it isn’t, that is awareness as consciousness playing the game that there are aspects that aren’t equal or aren’t OK.

All of this is only a mental understanding until it moves to experience and without the experience it will be considered psycho-babble or fantasy or some other dismissive label which allows individuals to not consider deeply the possibilities. However, for those who want something better... the practice of being more aware and seeing and using consciousness for the tool it is, this can make all the difference in the world.