Living for others is true living. If we want to be enlightened, there's two main reasons: one is to be invulnerable and beyond pain and the reach of others; the other is to be able to fully connect to others and be of real service to them.
Which kind do you think most spiritual teachers attained?
I had a thought today, the sprout of a theory perhaps: that if a spiritual teacher (mentioning no names) used enlightenment as a means to create distance and avoid pain, that would prevent him from enlightening anyone else - self-quarantine - because it's a spurious (self-serving) enlightenment and so it wouldn't be allowed to "catch". At the same time, people would get hooked on proximity, because it's what everybody wants from enlightenment: aloofness and invulnerability.
I wondered then if most of us are prevented from attaining enlightenment for this reason: because we want it for the wrong reasons, to become invulnerable? Perhaps certain individuals slipped through the net, and in the case of JDR, it happened to him at the age when we most desperately want to be invulnerable (adolescence). Yet according to Joseph Chilton Pearce, this is also the time when it is naturally supposed to happen, and maybe the reason it doesn't is because we have been traumatized and already started building our personal defense system; so, again, we can't be trusted with enlightenment.
What if enlightenment is a start point and not an end point? A cracking of the chrysalis of the constructed identity and false self that allows us to begin to move and flower with the flow of life instead of cut off from it? If so, then enlightenment is the most ordinary thing, and it is the rest of us that are the freaks. But somehow the ratio got reversed.
8 comments:
I like where you are going with this -- We become enlightened to reflect the light of the sun for our neighbors, that our children may inhabit a brighter world than we do, and that the world may grow closer to wholeness.
What is enlightenment? And why do we want enlightenment if we don't know what it is? Even if we attain (what we think is) enlightenment, maybe it's transient, much like everything else, and if we do attain it for selfish reasons, for a way out, an escape, perhaps that could be the starting point towards helping others, but then who's to say what's best for others? Perhaps it is the most ordinary thing, right under our noses all along. So as for enlightening anyone else, can we give somebody something they've already got? Maybe they want to pretend they haven't so they can continue to search for it.
Trauma is highlightable. I really don't want to turn anyone on to the Ruthless Truth less it's seen as a tool and but a foray into an enlighten-mind, making middle C easier to find.
Yes, it(enlightenment) is indeed just the start.
Or so I have found.
Love,
Terri in Joburg
My comments here are all I got, my sum of knowledge in a nut-shell.
On one starry night I saw the light, heard a voice that sound like Barry White said "Sho' you right".
A fine candle.
And that's Jenga!
"what profit the man who gain the whole world. just to lose his soul and his main ol' girl..."
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