From Whole Being Awakening by Ted Strauss

From “Whole Being Awakening” by Ted Strauss

Myths of Enlightenment

I am allergic to the word enlightenment. It carries a great number of myths, ideals, and beliefs we've held for thousands of years about how we could become free from the problems and limitations of being human. Most teachings tend to suggest that enlightenment is a single event that lands you in a permanent state of happiness; I do not agree with this view. The very word "enlightenment" suggests that "light" will suffuse your reality and banish your darkness forever. But if you understand the Basic Principles Of Whole Being Awakening, you'll understand that the dark aspects of Being could not possibly be banished any more than night could be banished in favor of eternal day.

From my perspective, most of our inherited ideas about enlightenment are myths left over from humanity's early explorations into the nature of self and existence. So, to put it a bit bluntly, most of our enlightenment stories are like the idea that the universe revolves around our planet, or that the Earth is flat. These were the best theories we could conjure up at the time, but there is such a thing as evolution, and the world of spirituality is not beyond evolution. I will use the word enlightenment in this essay to address such myths, but everywhere else in my writings I use the word awakening to refer to the endless process of blossoming into recognition and ownership of our total selves, both individually and collectively.

Now, I'm not suggesting that there are no major transitions that occur in the unfolding of our conscious awareness of self, others, and world. There are indeed enormous transitions that are utterly life-transforming and permanent. I'm just making distinctions between our conditioned ideas about "enlightenment" and the realities of what actual, ordinary, modern humans experience as they come into a deep awakening of their total nature. To understand better what I mean by the term awakening, please see What Is Enlightenment?.

In this writing, I'll address some of the more common myths I encounter when assisting seekers in their awakening process. I'm writing about these bubbles because they really need to be burst, lest they continue to distract you from recognizing your own actual truth and reality. Until you can stand back and take a fresh look at these age-old mental jails, you will be imprisoned by the hypnotic weight of all the advertising that suggests you need to practice diligently and change yourself to become eligible for awakening. My aim is to set you free from all negative self-judgment and from self-defeating comparison with "enlightened" teachers. As long as you think that awakening is about attaining some glorious, perfected, transcendent state, you are going to miss you, exactly as you currently are. Since your current self is who you are awakening as, I wouldn't suggest you miss that part.

Another danger inherent in these myths is their power to create illusions about how your awakened teachers are supposed to show up. If you believe the myths, you'll tend to feel that something is wrong or fraudulent when (not if) your teachers display flawed and limited human qualities. If you can get that awakened teachers are divinely human, then you can forgive them for their human limitations and not expect them to match your conditioned ideas of divine incarnation. This also has the side effect of letting you forgive yourself for being human and noticing that you too can awaken as a divinely human being without needing to become "perfect".

I'll divide the myths into three sections:

Part 1: What Enlightenment Was Supposed To Do For You These myths provide the basis for all the advertising about spiritual process. By offering positive-sounding goals, we were lured into assuming something was wrong with ourselves that needed to be fixed, purified, or transcended.

Part 2: How You Were Supposed To Get There While reading these, see if you can notice how each of the proposed paths to enlightenment assumes either that there is something wrong with you, or that you're not already in union with Being. If you buy the problem, you will be sold on the solution. What I'm suggesting is that There Is Nothing Wrong With You and you're already divine; the path to realization is about perception and recognition, not about changing yourself to become something else.

Part 3: Who Gets There And Who Doesn't? These myths propose to explain why some get enlightened and others don't. Some of these appear to me to be like Monday morning quarterbacking. "I guess he just didn't stay on the program", or "Well, spiritual attainment is a competitive game; only a few can actually win."

Please note that I mean absolutely no disrespect to all the teachers, teachings, and traditions through which these myths have emerged. I'm just inviting you to feel free to be as cynical about this stuff as I am. It's good therapy, and it helps break up our fixedness around these old ideas. There's plenty of baby in these bathwaters; I'm just pointing to the bathwater at the moment.

Part 1: What Enlightenment Was Supposed To Do For You

Enlightenment is about attaining the Light

Many seekers are burdened by the idea that unity is some sort of white light that outshines the universe, which you can permanently turn on in yourself if only you were willing to do hours of practice every day for years or lifetimes. This is usually associated with the notion that the white light exists somewhere in the upper regions of your chakra system (or in your heart), and if only you could get yourself up there permanently (or down into your heart), everything would be great.

From my perspective, this is a terribly misleading myth. I say the entire attempt to move energy or attention up, down, or sideways has nothing to do with actual awakening (unless you need to do that to find out how useless it is so you can get on with the real stuff). Awakening isn't about energy, manipulation of attention, or about having high spiritual experiences. Awakening is about growing into the ownership of the unique being called YOU.

Most attempts to reach for The Light in the name of spirituality are really just desperate, unconscious attempts to avoid The Dark. Light and dark, pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness are all just opposite qualities in our naturally polarized perception of Being. You can't escape life and all its opposites, either by trying to stay positive or by diving into the Absolute. Why? Because You Are Life, and Life is All of it. Being Is One Thing; the Absolute is not separate from the Relative. You can't hang onto one pole of Being (such as the Absolute) for long before the rest of your Being (the Relative) starts screaming for your attention. If you run for the positive, it won't be long before you find yourself landing in the negative. If you dive into the Absolute, you'll soon find yourself swimming in the Relative. You can try to rise above yourself and the world for as long as possible, but sooner or later your body will pay the price for all that effort.

Enlightenment makes you happy or gives you a feeling of bliss

What does "happy" mean? Does that mean feeling good and uplifted all the time? I suggest that's impossible, since life is relative, and therefore everything that is part of life is endlessly fluctuating. Perhaps you were thinking that identification with the Transcendent would make you happy or bring you bliss-consciousness. But I say the Transcendent is not "happy" – it simply is. And besides, it's just an aspect of what is; it's not a separate thing or a travel destination. Yes, attaining exclusive identification with consciousness will, for a little while, bring a sense of relief from the endless problems of mortal existence. And it can bring temporary feelings of bliss. But ultimately, trying to stay in that disembodied cul-de-sac will make you feel numb, removed, and alienated from life (Death By Advaita).

The transition we call "second birth" doesn't make you happy exactly, but those who have been through that transition tend to agree that the term Fundamental Wellness Of Being is descriptive of the second life condition. It is a form of contentment that is willing to be discontent. It is a form of helpless Surrender into life as it is, and into you as you are. It's neither a passive nor an active surrender, but a spontaneous, unwilled surrender that is forever engaging you in your own further growth and in the world process for the sake of the collective self of all Beings.

Enlightenment gives you inner peace or peace of mind

There are forms of inner peace that come with recognizing your whole Being self. And there are forms of peace that come with healing your inner wounds and integrating your shadow issues (a long-term benefit of awakening, if you cooperate with the post-awakening purification – see Nightmare In A Dirty Room). But none of those forms of peace are in any way perfect. As long as you are part of Being (it'll be a long time – like forever), you will experience the fluctuations of happiness and sadness, pleasure and pain. The deeper you go in your awakening process, the more OK you are with that. So there is a deep inner peace that goes with being deeply awakened, but I guarantee you, it's not what you had in mind (Awakening Is Not What You Think). Enlightenment spells relief from all the problems, pain, suffering, and messiness of embodied existence

No. Awakening means relief from the unnecessary pain of trying to escape from the necessary pain and messiness of embodied existence.

Enlightenment is Freedom

Enlightenment was supposed to give us Freedom... but what does that mean, exactly? In my observation, that word had a range of assumed meanings that pretty much came down to freedom from everything that felt limiting. The hope for that brand of freedom naturally peaks toward the end of what I call Stage 2 awareness (ordinary awareness in which self appears to be fundamentally separate from others and objects). After you've spend years living in and exploring the world of manifest reality, there comes a real need to follow your intuition to discover the limitless aspect of Being. The mind-blowing awakening into the realization that subjective self is infinite consciousness (Stage 3) brings an enormous sense of freedom relative to having awareness simply immersed in (and apparently limited by) Relative existence. Such realizers of transcendent consciousness must be forgiven for assuming they've realized "the ultimate", since that is how it often subjectively feels. But the feeling of freedom doesn't last, because the Absolute dimension of Being is not actually separate from the Relative dimension. Any "enlightenment" that tries to hold onto identification with the infinite is eventually doomed to crash and burn. And the longer you try to hold onto such freedom, the more intense the fall.

At the apex of Stage 3, the loss of the feeling of ultimate freedom from limits brings the final blow to your hopes for a perfect life or any kind of ultimate realization. This is the beginning of The Dawning Of Hopelessness, and is a symptom of what I call The Reversal. It is the beginning of Transcending Transcendence, and it forces you into a dark night of your whole being. At the other end of that passage is the beginning of a new life; a life of freedom to be both divine and human at the same time. At the beginning of this new life is Your Second Birth; (Stage 4), a transition that completely reshapes your perspective on self and world. This newfound embodied freedom keeps on growing while you discover freedom in relationships (Stage 5) and real Trust In Being (Stage 6). As far as I'm concerned, when you are just as free to feel trapped as you are to feel unlimited, when you can discover freedom in the ups and downs of relationships and Everything, I call that real freedom (Freedom From Vs. Freedom As).

Enlightenment will bring you into union with God or Divine Being

Not exactly; awakening will make it obvious to you not that you are "in union" with the Divine, but that you ARE Divine Being Itself. This is a deeply important distinction. As long as you assume you're fundamentally separate from the Divine, and searching for a lasting connection with it as if it was something other than you, you're holding yourself separate. Discovering the unity of all things is the same as discovering the truth of yourself; that's why it's so important to get who you really are, vs. who you wish you were if only you were enlightened. Enlightenment means you live with an open heart, always loving all beings with perfect compassion

Wrong. The heart was designed with the capacity to shut down as needed to protect itself. And it does so quite spontaneously as needed, such as when you are being dishonored. If awakening meant your heart was always wide open, you'd be constantly subjected to inappropriate and unnecessary pain. You don't need your heart to always be wide open any more than you need to have surgical wounds left wide open.

Should we always love all beings? To me, that's like suggesting we should always love all foods. But we don't love all foods, and we're not supposed to. Some foods nourish some people; the same foods are poisonous for others. Like that, we're not supposed to love all Beings. Most of us feel a special love for a few specific beings (like friends, lovers, and family), a more generalized love for certain groups (like work associates, sports teams or whole nations), and sometimes we feel various levels of universal love (all humans, all beings). But the more deeply you wake down into your personal incarnation, the less you'll idealize universal love and the more you'll be OK with your own and others' specific loves and hates.

As long as you compare yourself negatively to ideals of perfect saintly love, you are missing your own truth. Whatever your truth is, is God's truth as you. Your ideas About God and enlightenment keep you imprisoned in your mind. Any hope to realize a truth that is different than your own is a violation of yourself and everyone around you. You would do well to forget about universal love and start by greenlighting yourself exactly as you actually are, warts and all.

Enlightenment turns you into a superhuman version of yourself

Think again. I'm assuming this refers to possessing at least a few amazing powers, like yogic flying, the ability to walk through walls, or outright omniscience. Perhaps you were hoping you’ll have cosmic visions, be able to manifest anything at will, or know any fact on demand. Or perhaps you were hoping you could heal people or bring them back from the dead. I suppose that would make you pretty popular (especially if you were the only one on your block with such glorious powers), but after all, even if you had such powers, what if none of that were to change The Feeling Of Being You?

It's true that awakening into what I call Stage 4 awareness unleashes a process of spontaneous, rapid unfoldment into the self you were born to be. But that self is not likely one you would have chosen based on your hopes (The Self You Didn't Want To Realize). Instead of turning you into some kind of spiritual Superman or Superwoman, awakening just drops you into being more and more of you. This may sound pretty disappointing at first, but it turns out to be quite a relief compared with trying to be someone else, no matter how glorious that someone else was in your mind.

Enlightenment makes you and all of your actions perfect and in perfect accord with Nature I don't think so. What does "perfect" mean, anyway? And how could any relative body be "perfect"? I would argue that being alive (no matter how much you could possibly perfect your bodymind) necessarily confines us to the realm of endless imperfection. So "perfect" is not really an attainable state.

The notion of attaining a future state in which you are in perfect accord with Nature actually reinforces the perception of a present split between you and Nature that just isn't so. The idea that you are out of whack with Nature because you're not enlightened reveals a blindness to the fact that you already are Nature. The communication that Nature is perfect and you are not is just another variation on the idea that God is perfect and you are not. And if you would only just practice this simple technique twice a day for the rest of eternity, perhaps someday you'll solve the problem of being human. As if that was a problem.

As Saniel has so beautifully pointed out, it's not only true that You Don't Have To Fix Or Perfect Yourself To Awaken, but you can't. Recognizing that brings a great relief to all your previous self-perfecting efforts. See if you can begin to relax into radical acceptance of who you are right now. From my perspective, who you are right now is what's perfect, even if you don't like it.

Enlightenment means all your actions spontaneously benefit all beings

That's what "enlightened" teachers said to defend themselves from facing responsibility when they hurt "unenlightened" students. The assumption was that since they've realize some aspect of their own divinity, and since divinity is perfection, then they must have become perfect. Therefore, whatever they did must have been for your own good.

But what if that entire premise was off? What if Your Ideas About God have little to do with what God is? What if God is not "perfect" in the way you think? In that case, realizing that You Are God would have entirely different implications than anyone previously imagined. Including that perhaps just because you've had some kind of awakening doesn't mean you're suddenly the God's greatest gift to humankind. If you can see awakened beings as limited and flawed, you can begin to permit your own actual awakening. Awakening (at least at the beginning) is not a change in who you are; it's a shift in your perception of who you are and what everything is.

Enlightenment will give you perfect health and might even make you immortal All the great saints, sages, and mystics either died of something horrible or took themselves out before it happened. Death is a certainty; it's simply part of life. Avoiding unnecessary risk is natural; fixating on resisting death is futile and will probably make you sick. Cultivating good health is natural; attempting to attain perfect health will stress you out and drain your resources. And besides, neither perfect health nor immortality has anything to do with awakening.

True awakening is an arrival into your total self, which is simultaneously universal and personal. It is an integration of self and other that reveals that others are part of you and you are part of everything – including life, death, sickness, and health. If you permit yourself to undergo the heroic journey of mutual conscious embodiment, you will necessarily encounter all the ways in which you have been conditioned both consciously and unconsciously to negate your actual, mortal, limited reality through beliefs, practices, and purifications that you assumed would prepare you to meet the Divine – as if you aren't already being that. Sooner or later, when The Reversal kicks in (and if you decided to cooperate with it), you will find yourself relaxing out of all such self-negation. This spontaneously liberates the energy and attention that was previously being used to fix yourself, transcend yourself, or stop yourself from being who you are. Permitting your own Whole Being Awakening will almost certainly bring you better health... but nothing is perfect.

Enlightenment instantly turns you into a great guru, gives you the capacity to read minds, and makes you know what's good for others better than they can know for themselves

None of the above. In fact, awakening usually begins by dismantling you, piece by piece, until you find yourself in pieces on the floor. This is, of course, a good thing, because you must be disassembled first before you can be reassembled in the form you were designed to be (The Jigsaw Puzzle Analogy).

After your Stage 4 awakening, you will discover gifts you'd previously only glimpsed. As time passes (assuming you are cooperating with The Wakedown Shakedown), you see yourself more clearly than ever. This increases your capacity for Seeing Beyond Your Own Reality, which renders you more and more capable of seeing others. This is what Saniel means by the term Other Realization; it is a natural result of the clearing of wounding and static from your own system, which thereby enables you to see everything more clearly, not just people.

Still, seeing others more clearly than you were previously capable of does not automatically qualify you as a great teacher. At least in our school, teachers develop over time, with the help of plenty of study, experience, and supervised training. And one of the main points in the training is a major warning against pretending to know what's best for another human being.

Enlightenment turns you into a really good person

What does "really good person" mean? A saint? Not likely. At least, you're not likely to be recognized by the Catholic church. Transformed into a perfect boy or girl scout? Sounds like Pleasantville. Regarded by millions as a beacon of enlightenment? Probably not. Does that matter? Why did you want to be a "good person" in the first place? This is a worthy investigation.

My point is that you don't have to become somebody or something else. You probably wanted that because you didn't feel you were accepted while growing up, so you were left feeling a lack of belonging. When you find real belonging, you'll be able to notice that your attempts to improve yourself were hampering your awakening process (The Square Peg Analogy). Even if you're convinced you're a "bad person," you can still awaken. I mean that.

After enlightenment, everyone will recognize your divinity This is a common dream, based on the desire to get even with everybody who didn't see you when you were growing up. Perhaps you imagine walking into the supermarket and seeing everyone dazed at encountering your divine presence, with some landing face down at your feet in devotional gratitude for your very existence.

Needless to say, this is not at all likely. There will be some who find themselves drawn to you for mysterious reasons, but most people won't have a clue who you are. But after all, you didn't have a clue about who you were for decades; why should others get you in an instant?