To seek enlightenment is to seek your true self. Enlightenment is the most aware state of existence and also the most natural, because it is where you came from. Your home is a place of profound love, peace, and joy. When you return there, you will experience yourself as one with God. At that moment you will realize that your desire for happiness was only the beginning. Your deepest desire was for the freedom that comes with complete awakening.
A human being is a creature who has received the order to become God.
—St. Basil
Being fulfilled means going beyond everyday experience. At a deeper level human beings have always longed for ecstasy, a feeling of euphoria, joy, peace, and love. Addiction to drugs and alcohol is evidence of our society’s starvation and longing for real ecstasy. Everyday happiness gives us only a taste, leaving behind a hunger for more. Happiness, then, is the beginning of a journey that reaches for higher fulfillment.
Many people have accidentally experienced the most intense happiness, often called a peak experience. These experiences may have occurred in intimate moments in Nature, in dance and music, in play, or in lovemaking. What sets a peak experience apart is not its intensity but its meaning—it feels as if a much greater, freer, more expansive reality has been revealed. Everyone who has had a peak experience tries to recapture it. Most are disappointed, because a moment of higher awareness isn’t the same as attaining higher awareness. What is needed is a path to transformation guided by a vision of the possibilities that the first taste inspires.
In the world’s wisdom traditions, the search for ecstasy is completely natural. Ecstasy is your original energy state. To return to it is to return home and make it your permanent abode. There are many names for this goal: redemption, salvation, transcendence, and enlightenment. There are as many paths as there are faiths and spiritual teachers. But in the end a single truth is being espoused: The human soul longs to return to the place where ecstasy abides. There, union can be found with the mystery of God.
Is it possible to expand your consciousness until it merges with God’s consciousness? The answer offered by wisdom traditions is yes, but for the individual, the only proof lies in experiencing that union. A life decision is required. Flashes of intense happiness, even a moment of ecstasy, can happen spontaneously—the clouds clear and suddenly you see the sun. But seeking enlightenment implies a shift that you make of your own free will. Instead of pursuing happiness, you pursue bliss. The problem for most people is that such a shift seems extreme, alien, and perhaps threatening. This is understandable. As wisdom traditions declined, a false belief sprang up about enlightenment. It became identified with renunciation, sacrifice, poverty, and solitude.
None of that is true. How could discovering your true self possibly be a form of sacrifice? But your ego benefits from this misperception by making you feel that there is no other self but the one it has shown you. It is up to you to discover the truth. When you become mindful, you begin to witness what is happening in and around you. The witness sees what the ego tries to hide, that daily life is not fulfilling when your deepest desire has been blocked.
In the previous chapters we explored different ways to make the necessary shift. Now let’s look farther ahead on the journey. You can gain a glimpse of enlightenment with a simple exercise. Close your eyes and imagine a beautiful sunset over the ocean. See the colors as vividly as possible; catch the shining glint of the sun off the water. Now open your eyes. Did you see the sunset? That picture was not in your brain. If we looked inside your brain, we would find electrochemical reactions coursing through synaptic networks. There are no images inside the brain that match what our eyes see. There isn’t the slightest glimmer of light inside the visual cortex. But when you close your eyes and imagine a sunset, you don’t experience electrochemical reactions. Where, then, is the picture of the sunset you saw? It exists not in your brain but in consciousness. The same holds true if you try to imagine anything with your five senses—the smell of a rose, the sound of a newborn baby crying, the soft texture of velvet, or a full-blown kiss on the lips. There are no sights or sounds or tastes or smells in your brain, only a dark silence flickering with faint electrical impulses and chemical exchanges. Every sensation exists in consciousness alone.
Now extend this awareness to your body. You experience your body as a series of sensations—the weight of your limbs, the in and out of your breathing, the thumping rhythm of your heart when you run. But, once again, none of these sensations can be found in your brain, even with advanced imaging like CAT scans and functional MRIs. Only electrochemical signals register on these scans. Therefore, your body also exists in your consciousness. There is nowhere else to experience it.
Look at the world around you. Everything about its color, sound, taste, and smell seems totally real, but where is this world located? If you pick up a rock lying in the sun, your past conditioning leads you to say, “If this rock feels heavy and warm, it’s real.” But if your body, which also feels heavy and warm, exists only in consciousness, so does a rock. Anything you can possibly experience, extending out to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, exists in your consciousness. To find your home, you must find where this consciousness resides.
Now ask the ultimate question: Where do you exist? If the world cannot be found inside your brain, the same is even more true for you, because no MRI has ever found a part of the brain that lights up when you experience yourself. Yet you know you have a self. To find it, you must think outside the brain, in fact outside time and space. You are pure consciousness, which has no location in time and space. Think of how television works. When you watch TV, you can locate the screen in your living room. That picture only exists because of signals from the transmitter. Those signals are everywhere. Amazing as it may seem, even though you can locate your body in time and space, your consciousness is everywhere, which means that you are, too. The only reason your brain lights up is because consciousness causes it to.
Beginning with a simple exercise, like imagining a sunset over the ocean, we arrive at an astounding truth: You are holding the world together simply by observing it. The witness turns a formless swirl of photons into everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. You don’t have to do anything to accomplish this. Subtle intention is enough. You want to see a sunset, and you do. There’s no need to instruct the brain how to build the image out of electrochemical impulses. Likewise, if you want to walk down the street, you don’t have to instruct your muscles how to fire and your cardiovascular system how to bring blood to the muscles. Simply by having a wordless intention, all the right connections are made.
You hold the world together at a very subtle level, the source of creation known as God. Together, you and God produce reality, and neither of you has to struggle to do it. To be enlightened is to be attuned to this simple fact. As the upholder of creation, your role is to be, nothing else. In that realization life becomes effortless. All stress, strain, worry, anxiety, and uncertainty drop away. The secret of unbounded bliss has been revealed.
Now you know your goal and the path that will take you there. How can you tell when you are making progress on the path? By referring every day to the following indicators:
Your life flows with effortless spontaneity.
Love is becoming the motivating factor in your life.
You are discovering hidden sources of creativity and imagination.
You are accepting higher guidance into your life.
Your choices benefit you and all those around you.
Yet we could reduce all these indications to one: You are expanding the experience of happiness wherever you go.
As a boy in India I was given very simple lessons about spirituality. One of them was that enlightenment is like running back into the arms of your mother. Every child can relate to that sensation. It still holds true when you are an adult, contemplating what the spiritual path means. The journey is a progressive expansion from ordinary waking consciousness, with all its fear and isolation, to soul consciousness, which is safe, warm, and welcoming.
Having run into the arms of your soul, you are home. You no longer identify with ego boundaries. You find that you are not in the world; the world is in you. Everything to be said about consciousness comes down to this. Because the journey never ends, there is more to gain. Simply by being aware of your true self, you will progress naturally and easily to cosmic consciousness, which is the same as being fully awake twenty-four hours a day even when your body and brain are sleeping. Next you will expand to divine consciousness, or God consciousness, in which everything is made of light. Divine presence emanates from every object, every experience, and every thought. (This stage is sometimes known as wearing golden spectacles, because a radiant light fills your awareness.)
Finally, you will arrive at unity consciousness, where all divisions and separations end. Every moment is part of eternity. Every experience is shared with the cosmos. Unity consciousness was described by William Blake when he wrote, “To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.”
With all of this stretching before you, consider where you are today. If you are serious about following your path, the possibility for happiness is infinitely expanded. You will be heading for nothing less than enlightenment. You shouldn’t think of enlightenment as it is often portrayed, as a mystical state. In reality consciousness expands naturally. The state of bliss is your birthright. When you attain higher consciousness in any form, through devotion, compassion, service, or knowledge of the self, you will be on the same journey that we have been taking since the first page of this book—and the first day of our lives. If consciousness is your true home, so is enlightenment your true destination.
TO ACTIVATE THE Seventh Key
IN EVERYDAY LIFE, I PROMISE MYSELF
TO DO THE FOLLOWING:
1. I will remember that ecstasy is my primordial energy state. It is my source. I can return to it anytime I want. What is needed is a shift in attention away from my ego’s desires to the deeper desire in me, which is to find my true self.
2. I will see my thoughts, my body, and my surroundings as a single process. This process occurs in consciousness. There are no divisions in reality. Feeling separate, helpless, or alone is an indication that I have lost contact with the process. When I am part of the flow of life, all things are different aspects of one thing: the unfolding of myself.
3. I will keep alive my vision of life, a journey from waking consciousness to soul consciousness, where full awareness can never be lost. From that point, real life begins, for my path will take me to cosmic consciousness, divine consciousness, and finally to unity consciousness. Whenever I am distracted by the outside world and its constant demands, I will remember my vision and keep to my path. Enlightenment is my destination. When I arrive, I will be home at last.
