Even Teachers Can Muddy the Waters

I created my own suffering yesterday.

For around 12 hours yesterday I was dealing with an ego issue, not reality. This was caused by a belief. Beliefs are never true, yet this one allowed me to cause my own suffering.

I was reading a book by an enlightened teacher yesterday wherein he mentioned what enlightenment is. Now, quite how this statement of his got into a book that was written by such an enlightened teacher surprises me. At the time, ego was looking over my shoulder reading the book and latched onto the description of enlightenment and the definition given by this enlightened teacher.

"Wait a minute! Mine wasn't like that! That must mean that I am not fully enlightened! I'm a fake!" Said the ego.

That's what ego does. Ego is not real, it only exists as beliefs, opinions, positions and stories. The problem is, we don't always realise that it is ego causing the issue.

I know I didn't.

I am still very new at this. I am still clearing stuff out and trying to get rid of old ego patterns as they arise. Everyone who is newly enlightened goes through this process. The teacher I was reading presented his enlightenment experience as being total and immediate Oneness with the Universe and seeing that nothing was other than him. Period.

I watched a video by Fred Davis where he didn't exactly call out some of these teachers on this claimed experience, but he didn't exactly not call them out either. He said that he was not saying their claims were BS, but neither was he saying that their claims were not BS.

My problem arose because the teacher's description of enlightenment and how it 'should' happen is just his belief. Whenever the word should appears in the sentence, that is an ego belief. I did not immediately realise this at the time. I was reading a work by an enlightened master, so my defences were down. My ego believes that Enlightened Masters know what they are talking about. There's the second belief. You put those two beliefs together and my ego immediately believes that we have just got it all wrong.

I sat with a group last night and during that sitting I finally broke completely free once again of the hold of the ego and saw reality. I became Awakeness. I Am Always Awakeness. Awakeness has no beliefs.

So what I am saying here, to any others in post-enlightenment who experience a similar situation, is that it doesn't matter what their enlightenment was like or what their claims might be about what enlightenment should be like because beliefs and comparisons are the realm of the ego and the ego is not real.

I am not going to define what enlightenment is yet again, because it has to be experiential. If your enlightenment is not like his (or my) enlightenment, who cares?

That is not just a flippant remark at the end there – ask yourself honestly, who is it that cares? I think you will find, as I did, that it is the false self, the ego, the fake character that you have played for the better part of your life.

Nobody said that shaking it off would be easy...