Enlightenment...

Enlightenment Clearly Explained

By Sufi George

The experience of enlightenment is simple to state. It is the experience of awareness only, awareness that is aware of nothing at all except the existence of awareness itself.

During the experience of awareness, the thought-processing mind is empty, body awareness is lost, there is no feeling, all reality disappears. There is nothing in the imagination, there is nothing anywhere. It is an experience of nothing, of the void.

The key understanding that results from this experience of pure nothing is that one is still alive even when everything is gone. One realizes that one's existence does not depend on anything except awareness itself. One realizes that awareness is the primal reality, the permanent core of ourselves.

The enlightenment experience makes many things immediately clear. It is clear that one's existence does not depend on anything except awareness. This brings complete relief and liberation. It is clear that life is awareness, and not what awareness experiences.

So the body, the mind, the physical universe as well as dream universes, feelings, knowledge, are all non-essential to being alive. Fear and guilt vanish because awareness is beyond harm and experience is not part of one's being.

It is clear that all experience comes from outside of oneself, that experience merely flows through awareness, and that one is not responsible for the helpless act of experiencing one's experience.

In short, this state of freedom solves every problem by eliminating it, and provides a completely unburdened peace. This is so attractive, so magnetic, that it cannot be actually forgotten, only displaced by the usual contents and concerns of life.

Before the enlightenment experience, one has no idea of life without content. Rather, one's awareness is flooded with content, with all of its concerns and hang-ups.

It should be noted that, after the initial impact of the enlightenment experience wears off, it can be set aside and one can easily slip back into one's old lifestyle patterns.

Yet, after the enlightenment experience, one has a yearning for the remembered peace and freedom of the void. This yearning gradually influences one to decrease the amount of experience in awareness so that there is room in awareness for void. This becomes a balancing act between being aware of void and being aware of experience. The less experience one is aware of, the more void one is aware of, and the more free and peaceful life becomes.

With too much void and too little experience, however, one becomes an idiot, and so there is the need for learning to balance between void and experience.

With enough void in the balance, there is nothing in life that can consume one. Life is fluid and changeable. Life becomes more like a movie than a trap. More accurately, life becomes a group dream.

Yearning for the void influences in the direction of keeping awareness empty of experience. Balancing involves deliberate efforts to remember specific things out of practical necessity. The more experiential content there is in awareness, the less room there is for the void. The more void there is in awareness, the less experience there is, and the less important or consequential experience becomes.