Deeper
into Enlightenment
(Selection from Fire from Heaven:
Dawn of a Golden Age by Kiara Windrider)
September 2005
There is an assumption that once you
are enlightened you will never
experience sadness, grief, anger,
jealousy, or pain, that somehow you have
overcome all negative thoughts or
emotions. This is far from the truth.
The nature of the mind is unchanged.
The contents of the mind may also remain
unchanged. But without the self to
dictate terms, or to differentiate so
obsessively between right and wrong, you
experience that the ‘charge’ begins to
disappear. You are established in a
state of ‘witnessing’, where the
emotional charge disappears. It is a
continually deepening process.
Many people associate enlightenment
with tremendous states of cosmic
consciousness, clairvoyant perception,
omniscience, and so on. All these may
or may not be associated with the state,
but should not be mistaken for
enlightenment. Enlightenment itself is
a very simple event, and is simply the
dissolution of the sense of
separateness. It is the natural state
in which your body is designed to be.
To become enlightened is to be
comfortable with the flow of life. If
you are feeling sad, you are not trying
to talk yourself out of it. If you are
feeling happy, you are not trying to
hold on to that feeling. Everything
simply is what it is, without the
additional charge or carryover from past
associations, traumas and conditioned
patterns intruding on the experience of
each moment. You become fully present
with each emotion, each experience. You
find, as the guides are fond of
reminding people, that every emotion,
when fully experienced, becomes bliss.
Each person’s enlightenment is
unique. Bhagavan says that if there are
6 billion people on Earth, there will be
6 billion kinds of enlightenment. Each
person’s enlightenment will incorporate
qualities of their own soul’s desires
and purpose. As you progress, you may
discover a natural gift for healing, or
a great capacity for wisdom, or a deep
caring for Earth and humanity. You may
experience a deep inner silence, or an
all-pervading joy, or a state of oneness
with all creation. These states may
come and go, and vary from person to
person, but there is one thing every
enlightened person will experience in
common. When the self disappears,
suffering ends.
You will still have desires, but they
won’t turn into cravings. You will
still have resistances, but they won’t
turn into aversions. You will still
have a personality, but it will be a
fluid dance of momentary personalities
that come and go. As you deepen into
the state, you will not feel the need to
hold on to resentments, fears, and
traumas, any more than you feel the need
to hold on to good times and spiritual
highs.
As you deepen into your enlightened
state, there will be continually deeper
states of oneness, peace, stillness,
love and joy. You will find yourself
more and more at home in the mystical
realms, and also, paradoxically in the
physical realms.
At first, however, the mind might
throw up all kinds of conflicts,
resistance, and doubt. It is the nature
of the self to resist change, and this
has become a memory pattern within the
mind. This may well come up with great
force as the mind tries to deny the
experience. As you simply allow this to
be, eventually a great peace will
descend.
Anything fully experienced is joy.
If this one thing were fully understood,
your path to enlightenment would be very
short indeed. Conflict fully
experienced is joy. Pain fully
experienced is joy. Sadness fully
experienced is joy. Doubt fully
experienced is joy. Anger fully
experienced is joy. Happiness fully
experienced is joy. Love fully
experienced is joy.
When the self disappears, our need to
constantly make interpretations about
reality disappears with it. When
interpretations about reality disappear,
we experience reality for what it is,
rather than what we would like it to
be. Rather than constantly craving for
what we define as pleasurable
experiences, and constantly resisting
what we define as unpleasurable
experiences, we simply become the
experience, moment to moment, of
consciousness expressing itself through
us.
Enlightenment is both an event and a
process. The event corresponds with the
dissolution of the sense of a separate
self. Beyond this, however, there is a
continually deepening process of
oneness.
Moving into oneness is not all
bliss. At some point you should expect
to go through an ‘endarkenment’ process,
or the ‘dark night’. The dark night of
the senses refers to a sustained process
of examining the ugliness of the mind.
The dark night of the soul is a period
of profound existential emptiness where
the contents of the personal unconscious
get completely cleaned out. Either of
these could be accompanied by feelings
of intense loneliness, heaviness, doubt,
or despair (see following chapter).
The ‘dark night’ could be a
psychological as well as existential
process. Psychological suffering
involves the ‘self’, and once the ‘self’
disappears, so does the suffering. The
deeper journey into existential
emptiness would be impossible if there
were still a sense of personal identity
left. When Jesus wrestled with ‘Satan’
in the wilderness, he was clearing out
his personal unconscious in preparation
for his ministry. In his journey into
the realms of hell after his
crucifixion, he was able to clear out
aspects of the collective unconscious of
humanity.
Not very much can be said about this
journey, since it will be unique for
each individual. It cannot be
lengthened or shortened. It is a
necessary part of coming into mastery.
Bhagavan says that eventually each of us
will have to undergo this experience.
As we go through this individually, it
is possible that it will clear out the
collective unconscious of humanity to
such an extent that it will then become
very easy for collective enlightenment
to happen.
In the more immediate context,
Bhagavan refers to three stages of
enlightenment - the ability to simply
witness life as you de-clutch from the
mind, recognition of the
inter-connectedness of life, and
finally, cosmic oneness. The first
stage is when the interference of the
mind stops, and your senses come alive.
There is the experience of a deep inner
silence, and you begin to experience
reality as it is. This is what most
people will experience after first
receiving the deeksha, once you
stabilize following the peak
experience. It becomes your new sense
of ordinary reality.
You might also begin to experience a
sense of inter-connectedness with your
immediate world - with nature, and with
others in the human family.
Synchronicities abound and you discover
that there is an underlying unity
running through all life. This is the
second stage.
In the third stage, you have moved
beyond the sense of inter-connectedness
to complete union with the cosmos. One
moment you are a bird, then a
grasshopper, then the emptiness of the
sky. Here you experience your identity
as All There Is. You are everything and
nothing. “Aham Brahmasmi,” said the
ancient mystics of India, “I am this
whole process called the universe!”
The experience of oneness with the
universe is known as ‘samadhi’. At
first this experience of samadhi may be
very fleeting. In order to hold this
experience, every nerve cell in the
physical and subtle bodies becomes
infused with kundalini energy, and it
may take some time for the body to
integrate these heightened frequencies.
There may even be occasions when the
person appears to ‘die’ for short
periods of time, as the functions of the
body become short-circuited. In the
early stages of enlightenment, a person
may experience peak states of samadhi,
but this will not last long. As you
progress, you experience increasingly
longer states of cosmic communion
interspersed by ‘ordinary’ reality.
The ancient yogis describe four
stages of samadhi. The first stage is
known as savikalpa samadhi. There is
the experience of oneness with the
universe, vibrant bliss, and an
activation of the subtle senses.
Various inner gifts and abilities may
open up. This downpour of new energy is
refreshingly ecstatic, but can be quite
overwhelming to the nervous system,
which eventually returns to a more
operational frequency. This is the peak
state many people experience when they
first experience the deeksha.
As the nervous system becomes
adjusted to the heightened flow of
kundalini moving through the body, it
eventually becomes ready for the next
stage of samadhi, known as nirvikalpa
samadhi. Here the consciousness gets
drawn upwards into a unified state of
consciousness, while the physical body
goes through an extreme shift.
Remaining for hours or even days in
catatonic states resembling death, every
cell of the body becomes transfused with
light. This is a relatively
non-functional state, however.
Eventually, you move to the third
stage of samadhi, called sahaja
samadhi. The nadis and cells of the
physical body have now become accustomed
to the heightened frequencies of
enlightenment, and it is possible to
live in the permanent state of unified
awareness while being fully functional
in daily life.
Bhagavan remarks that the
enlightenment he gives is intended to be
fully functional, and is therefore
attempting to modify the nervous system
so that people require less time in
nirvikalpa samadhi and move sooner into
sahaja samadhi. This is the state that
Masters such as Jesus operated from. It
also requires that the unconscious mind
be completely cleared, and the adept may
consequently go through a prolonged
‘dark night of the soul’ before this
state is permanently anchored.
A fourth stage of samadhi has been
relatively rare in human history. Known
as 'soruba samadhi', the physical body
is now so infused with higher energies
that it has literally become a body of
light. The mind is now in complete
service to the soul, and the adept is
now capable of bodily experiencing any
dimension of space and time. This stage
is sometimes known as ‘ascension’, and
is the state that ascended masters such
as Babaji, Kuthumi, and St. Germaine
exhibit.
These masters have chosen to remain
close to the Earth dimensions in order
to assist humanity, and still appear in
physical bodies when needed. There are
also many stories of siddha masters in
south India, as well as Tibetan adepts,
who have taken the ‘rainbow body’, and
simply disappeared in a flash of light.
Ramalinga Swami was a well known example
of this from the past century. The work
of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was also
related to this.
An avatar’s job is to make possible
what hasn’t been possible before. The
world is a dream in the mind of God, and
an avatar’s job, as a divine
incarnation, is to exhibit certain
states of consciousness in order to open
up the same possibilities for the rest
of humanity. This is what Bhagavan’s
mission is. Over time, as more and more
people experience these possibilities
within their own bodies, it will lead to
a mutation within the genetic structure
of the human species. For readers
familiar with the metaphor of the
‘hundredth monkey’, this is the
potential that Bhagavan sees for
humanity as we prepare for collective
enlightenment.
All consciousness is a field. The
Mind is a field. The Enlightened State
is also a field. Rupert Sheldrake, a
British biologist, referred to these
fields of consciousness as
‘morphogenetic fields’, or
‘form-generating fields’. These are the
fields that have shaped our evolution,
shaped our memories, shaped our
biological forms. Every time one of
these morphogenetic fields gets
reinforced, it gets stronger. Every
time someone ‘unplugs’ from these
fields, it gets weaker.
What this amounts to is that every
time one more person unplugs from the
matrix of the mind, the Ancient Mind
becomes weaker. Every time another
person becomes enlightened, the
morphogenetic fields of Enlightenment
become stronger, making it easier for
everybody else to also become
enlightened. These two fields are in a
‘see-saw’ relationship with each other.
Soon will come a time when critical mass
will be reached, swinging the entire
human consciousness into the state of
enlightenment. Once this happens, a new
species of humanity will emerge.
There is a very interesting study
done by an American psychologist, David
Hawkins, who has written a fascinating
book, Power vs. Force on this
theme. Using the science of
‘kinesiology’, he devised a
‘consciousness scale’ going from 0 to
1000. On the bottom end of the scale
were highly charged emotions such as
guilt, shame, terror, and rage, and
their corresponding states of
consciousness. On the upper end of the
scale were love, joy, and various states
of enlightenment.
Hawkins discovered that one person
who was vibrating at the higher end of
this scale could offset thousands, even
millions of people, who were vibrating
at the lower end of this scale. He also
affirmed that one Avatar vibrating at
1000 could offset an entire Planetary
Mind hell-bent on extinction!
I certainly believe that Amma and
Bhagavan vibrate at 1000, or at least
very close to it. It is based on this
principle of resonant fields that
Bhagavan says mass enlightenment can
happen. When a person becomes
enlightened, their consciousness makes a
huge leap on this consciousness scale,
which directly affects all consciousness
in the surrounding area. When the
numbers of enlightened people reaches a
critical point, the morphogenetic field
of Enlightenment will counterbalance the
morphogenetic field of the Ancient Mind,
making it possible for a mass
enlightenment to take place within the
matter of a few months.
There is nothing in life I can think
of that is more exciting or meaningful
than this!
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