Seeing Is Believing

If happiness and peace sound like worthy goals, use your imagination to "pretend" enlightenment. You'll be surprised at the results.

By Sally Kempton

When I began my spiritual journey, I never thought I was looking for enlightenment. If you'd asked me what I was looking for, I probably would've said, "To get some peace, to have some control over my thoughts." If pressed further, I might have admitted I wanted to be happier. Or I might have confided that I'd had some experiences of feeling connected to everyone and everything, that this state of connectedness felt better than anything else, and that I wanted to find some way to live there.

Perhaps the same thing is true for you. Perhaps you've had glimpses of something more than ordinary that are really glimpses of a state the sages would call enlightened.

Still, it was years before it occurred to me that my search for peace, happiness, and connection actually amounted to a search for enlightenment—the only state in which happiness, peace, and the feeling of being connected do not go away. I thought of enlightenment, if I thought of it at all, as an exotic state accessible only to mystics and similar otherworldly creatures.

SHIFT YOUR VISION
A few months ago, I received a letter from someone who claimed to have done more than glimpse enlightenment. He'd been practicing a technique where you focus your attention on the energy in your body in order to experience the inner presence that lies beyond thought. Suddenly, his vision shifted, and he "saw" that everything around him and everything he could think of was part of one fabric and that the fabric of the universe was the fabric of his own consciousness. This shift in vision was accompanied by a sense of total relaxation and peace. This new vision, he wrote, hadn't gone away.

His question was, if this could happen to him after a few years of practicing techniques that anyone can pick up from a paperback at an airport bookstore, it must mean that enlightenment is a lot more accessible than people think. So, he wondered, why aren't more people enlightened?

While this man's experience may sound dramatic, most of us, especially in the yoga community, have glimpsed facets of the enlightened state. If you've stood aside from your own mind and become the witness of your experience, or felt loving toward someone you ordinarily don't like, or stood in nature and sensed the interconnectedness of everything, you've touched one of the flavors of the enlightened state. If you've ever lost yourself completely in a task, in sexual ecstasy or dancing or music, or felt pure happiness or compassion well up for no reason, you've touched enlightenment.

Of course, human beings have had such experiences forever. And full enlightenment—which I'd define as the realization that there is one energy in the universe and that all of us are part of it—is not something that comes easily. It requires effort, commitment, and grace.

Yet surely ours is the first moment in history when massive numbers of ordinary people have a context in which to understand their experiences of deeper connectedness and have access to practices that can help make them a regular part of life: You can buy books by the Dalai Lama and Eckhart Tolle on the Web; you can listen to esoteric enlightenment practices on CD; you can rent popular films like The Matrix and What the Bleep Do We Know!? Consider all of this, and this man's question makes a lot of sense. Why don't more people make enlightenment a goal?

Page 1 2 3 4

See All Philosophy Articles »