The Myth Of Enlightenment
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When I was a spiritual seeker, I was seeking something I called enlightenment.
What is enlightenment? Sometimes during meditation I felt an immense sense of peace and joy. I figured out that enlightenment was being like this all the time.
I visited self-proclaimed teachers of enlightenment. They promised to be my guide on the road to enlightenment. But when I asked their students who amongst them was enlightened, I discovered that I could find nobody who was enlightened. The enlightenment teachers are poor at what they do as they do not seem to be able to get their students to the enlightened state.
I asked my Buddhist friend about enlightenment. She told me that it is something that you attain after many, many lifetimes of spiritual practice. This sounded a bit depressing as I did not want to wait a few hundred years to be enlightened.
It all seemed pretty fruitless. If enlightenment exists then I seemed to be no nearer attaining it. I had failed to meet anyone was enlightened. Maybe Buddha or Jesus had made it, but there did not seem much chance of me getting there.
I came to the realization that enlightenment is a myth. Read more
Embracing The Unknown
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One component of identity is belief. Beliefs form and shape the personality. Many beliefs are fixed and strongly held including:
- Religious beliefs
- Political beliefs
- Patriotic beliefs
- Cultural beliefs
Some of your beliefs may be so strong that you are prepared to die for them.The suicide bomber dies because of his belief that what he is doing is just and right. The military plane pilot bombs and kills people below him because he believes that what he is doing is just and right. The early Christians were stoned to death because of they refused to reject belief in Christ.
The non dual state contains no beliefs.
Seeing The Extraordinary in the Ordinary
There was a substantial part of my life when I identified myself as a spiritual seeker. In this role I experienced many special events including:
- Hanging out for three months in Rishikesh, India listening to my teacher Shantimayi
- Travelling to Miami to be soaked in coloured water by Guru Maharaji at the Holi festival
- Shaking hands with the Dali Lama
- Boiling inside a sweat lodge
- Feeling at one with the universe after taking LSD
- Leaving my body and traveling to another planet (or so I thought!)
- Staying in a Tibetan monastery
- Dancing with Shri Ravi Shankar
- Throwing snowballs in the Himalayas with fellow seekers
- Laughing at clouds whilst walking next to the River Ganges
Then a few years ago seeking stopped. I no longer identified myself as a spiritual seeker. The special spiritual events stopped also.
Welcome to After Non Duality
This is the second generation of After Non Duality. The first one was lost when I changed the server that hosts this blog. Which is fine as my perspective on life has changed and shifted .
Why the title After Non Duality? For a while I was interested in non duality, read many books on the subject, listened to speakers. What they told me was that the separate self that is our day to day experience is not true. There is no separate self, there is no duality, there is only oneness and non-duality. This seemed to contradict my every day experience. I felt separate. I encountered other people and they seemed different from me. They were ‘over there’. I was ‘in here’.
Then one day the sense of separation went and for a while there was only oneness. Read more
