Enlightenment

The First Self is the enlightened self because it hasn't been endarkened. There is no knowledge in this first state; it isn't needed.

You are your true self when you are a baby. You are your full self then, you do not need to be accomplished at any skills or capabilities to make you who you truly are; you already are you. There is no knowledge for you to gain to make you be your true self. You are enlightened as a baby because you have not been fooled into being otherwise, the enlightenment in adults is only a return to this base state. Enlightenment is not something you acquire. You do not need another to make you who you are, and there is nothing to acquire before you die that will continue past you and validate your being then and now. Do not believe it is others who will return you to your true self, it is others who have led you away in the first place.

For a creature that exists always in just the base state of being, the experience of becoming aware of itself would be a state of enlightenment for it. For us, who live most of our time in this state of being aware of ourselves, it is the return to the base state and the oneness that is the transcending experience to which we like to attribute the word enlightenment.  Any state that is perpetual and the norm becomes less and less important to the point that it can become an impediment. You cannot be in a permanent state of enlightenment and retain its transcendent enlightening aspect. It is by its very nature transient as are all states of being. It is only the external views of people who are not in the same state, that elevate it to being supernatural and heap their supernatural assumptions upon it. Anything you strive for becomes no big deal when attained.

Maintaining a state of presence and being undisturbed by the activation of neural storms, and clearly seeing the reality, is what is generally regarded as being an enlightened person. The projection of them knowing everything is a fiction perpetuated by their following fanatics from whose perspective it may seem so. At its most, it is no knowing at all; at its least it is composure. In this base state it is as if we know everything because there are no questions and no muddying of the waters from the application of social rules and ingrained habitual concepts. But composure is just a restraint, a restraint from an egoic behaviour, and enlightenment isn't only that.

Those that are considered to be enlightened just possess a particular trait which is rare in the normal populace. You change the environment or situation and that person is no longer special, and instead can be rather a bumbling fool relative to those who are attuned to those circumstances.  We can all see through parts of it and are all enlightened to some extent.  It is a universal right to have this, and indeed everyone does have it, because at its heart it is nothing more than just the base attribute of our intelligence. Our core and unpolluted mind. Consciousness.

Enlightenment isn't something to acquire. You aren't missing it and then have it added to you. It isn't something to learn or practice or pretend to be. It isn’t knowledge and it isn’t a skill. You are born enlightened. Everyone is. Enlightenment is not something to be gained, it is something to be recovered; it is already there, at the root of our being. You don’t need anybody else to enlighten you; you only pretend if you quote someone else; you only pretend if you follow another’s way. Enlightenment is a very personal thing and can only come from within. We have all had these experiences, but we forget, just like we have all forgotten who we were when we were a baby.

Enlightenment is the innate intelligence that exists at the root of all human beings. Its depth is fathomless, and without the ability to measure it, seems infinite. Its knowledge is without bounds but irretrievable and inapplicable. It is boundless because it is boundary-less. It isn't anything at all. Literally it is void. It is unqualified godhood. It is untested superhuman potential.

A concept of God is enlightenment; it could even be conceived that that concept itself is God, and in this state of awareness comes the realisation: how can all of this not be the mind of God?

Time slows down the faster something goes, slower and slower until at the speed of light time has stopped. With no time there is no universe. This is God: both the void that is outside of the universe and the light that is immanent throughout it. Grasping this is an enlightenment.

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The still water is beneath the surface. It is not the superficial surface of the lake which can be disturbed, and where the winds of mental agitation can cause ripples and waves, and is only sometimes still. Storms may rage above causing a turmoil on the surface, but beneath that, within the depths of ourselves, it is always still and undisturbed. Our true centre is our absolute centre where it is still and unaffected by whatever surrounds it. What happens on the surface of the lake is inconsequential to that beneath it.

When you are in the state of absolute centre, you are a god. You are in touch with the absolute intelligence that is called enlightenment, which is but the pure unaffected intelligence that lies at the root of everyone. Everyone is ascended into this state in some aspect of their lives; the trick is to extend it into all, but no one has ever achieved that because you lose one aspect to gain another. The experience is sequential; only in the absolute of the divine whole can they all exist together at the same time, but at this level there is no time and no participation, and when not at this level you are governed by the physical laws of survival.

To be truly enlightened means such an abandonment to it, that all physical considerations are ignored and all society habits and conformities are dissolved, to the point that consequentially you are not even able to talk! You are entirely disconnected from the mundane and unable to maintain any social cohesion or decency. Any doing so would be in contradiction to the state. The state is a transcendence to the point of exit, where the normal insistences of respectability become an irrelevancy. Seriously, you would not like a truly enlightened person; they would offend all your senses of what you believe to be right behaviour and decency, as their absence of conditioning frees them to what we may perceive as decadence.

There are many actions performed by people which are considered gross or even illegal from the society viewpoint, but which are a type of enlightenment for the person who is liberated from the normal constraints and censorship. To forego your natural desires due to the opinions of others is societal subservience. To transcend these boundaries may condemn you in societies eyes instead of loft you to an esteemed enlightened countenance. It is similar to the thin line between genius and insanity; it is the opinions of others that tells the story.

So many of the assumed traits of enlightenment are the projected attributes which are beneficial to society. Compassion is a social emotion, as is caring and supporting, and these traits are absent in most of the animal world which mostly operates without ego. All the saints have been social servants, and society only respects and acknowledges those that are beneficial to it. The society's nominations to the pedestal of enlightenment are subject to its needs and wants, not the divine agenda. The divine is not always in concordance with what society thinks it should be, and hence all religions are foremost social organisations. A true holy man has no desire to share his understanding. The cultivation of compassion is a society motivated practice. Compassion is entirely natural within a true holy man because it is the recognition of sameness between living beings and the oneness that pervades through all experience. It is also paradoxically completely unimportant to the divine agenda.

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The infinite void of pure soft white light is what I call the White Room, and it is perhaps the experience of the White Room where the word enlightenment comes from. The experience of the white light exists whether the eyes are open or not, as this light exists only in the mind. En-light-en-ment: the "en" means "in", and the "ment" means "mind": in-light-in-mind. This is probably what the word is literally referring to: being in the light in the mind. 

We all have experienced these states, even if only fleeting and rarely. If you don't remember it is probably because you were a baby the last time you did, and these memories have been relegated. Most people hide their knowledge of their times of enlightenment and play the part of what others expect of them as an appeasement to society, while assuming that the great state is something different and unavailable to them.

It is no more than the base state of human existence, and we are born with it. It allows us to just ‘see’ the reality, with no effort, no expectation, and no value attached. An acceptance of what is — reality. To know what reality is, what’s really going on, we have to have no ego and be unaffected by our environment.

An awareness of your own selfness can be a moment of enlightenment just as much as an awareness of your own selflessness can, depending upon which state is the most common one for you.

I do not believe you can be in a permanent state of enlightenment, because you cannot transcend your biological functioning indefinitely, only extend it a little. Everything in the universe is by its very nature transient. The mind may touch the void but the body can't. It is only the views of people and their metaphysical fantasising that elevate it to being supernatural and load their hypothetical assumptions upon it. 

Many enlightened people have been tortured to death to test them over the millennia, and it is a fault of their own hubris. If they had truly known the reality they would have seen it coming and kept quiet!

The difference between enlightenment and non-enlightenment though, is a conceptual story. The road to losing that enlightenment, when you have it, is when a conceptual story arises to tell of it. There can be no true story. Every story fails. No story will set you free.

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