You Are That Which Observes

 “Whatever happens, happens to you by you, through you; you are the creator, enjoyer and destroyer of all you perceive.”

― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The trouble with most people's concept of Enlightenment is that they think it adds something to them. It doesn't. The Ego wants to add things, to become more, to be important, to have a shiny "I Am Enlightened - Look At Me!" badge, but it can't.

YOU, the Ego, is that which is awoken from.

You never existed. You were just a construct, reliant on false memories, conveniently forgetting those gaps in time when you didn't exist because you forgot to pay attention to the thoughts.

Let me make that  clear again:

The little you, the Ego, CANNOT be enlightened, because it's not real.

For anyone who is still trapped in seeking and not understanding, Enlightenment takes things away, it does not add them. The truly enlightened know very little, because we are trying to express truth and truth cannot be expressed well in language.

What you truly are exists before language.

• You do not see, seeing happens.
• You do not taste, tasting happens.
• You do not touch, touching happens.
• You do not hear, hearing happens.
• You do not smell, smelling happens.
• You do not THINK, thinking happens.

You are as real as the 'it' in the phrase "It is raining".

Post-enlightenment brings with it the realisation that there is no 'do-er'. That life just happens and that you are not the body, or the mind, but you are the totality of everything.

You no longer 'know' anything that can be expressed well in language, because language cannot express that Truth. The best we can do is 'truthy' posts, like this one.

You don't need some super-experience of one-ness, some Samadhi High, because those are experiences, and they only happen to the ego. It just becomes something you understand, that you cannot find an edge to the real 'you'. That you cannot imagine a place in the universe where 'you' do not exist, because what you actually are contains the whole universe.

You truly are the Creator and Destroyer of all you perceive.

Use Only Enlightened Teachers

In this day and age where there are thousands of so-called gurus, we have to be careful who we choose to listen to because if we make the mistake of following someone who is ego-centered in their true intentions, then we will lose time, money, and opportunity costs (among other things). -- Paul Lenda (Shift)

There are many false teachers and charlatans in spirituality. In all kinds of spirituality. The main concern in this blog is that of post-enlightenment, liberation, freedom from the ego and, even in those pursuits, there are many false teachers.

A false teacher is anyone who is trying to teach you something which they do not truly understand.

Some do it because they want money, or because they want fame, or because they want followers. All of them are lying to you. All of them are wasting your time, insofar as time exists. You need to be wise to find the true teachers and yet, until you truly understand enlightenment you are unable to separate the false from the true.

Take for an example: Buddhism.

There are many branches of Buddhism. From the Tibetan style to the Zen style and everything in between. I am sure there are many enlightened teachers in many of those styles, and yet there are more who are not. 

I have listened to teachers in Buddhism who obviously have no understanding of the enlightenment process, other than that which they have read in books, or been taught by their equally inexperienced teachers.

Enlightenment is not an experience for the ego, just to clarify that once again. 

Enlightenment involves a total absence of ego. The ego is that which is seen to be false, to never have existed, to be merely a convenient construct like all language.

If a teacher is not capable of looking at you and the world from beyond the seat of the ego, then they cannot teach you. If they want your money, or your loyalty, or your worship, or your body then you can be sure that they are not Awake.

I met a leader of a spiritual tradition a few years ago who was teaching workshops and trying to bring people to a point which we would term enlightenment, but had never discovered that they, themselves, did not exist. 

They said all the right words but they interspersed it with name-dropping and tales of their personal interactions with famous people. Some of those famous people truly are awake, but this teacher, this leader, is not.

It is easy to fool people because the people do not know they are being fooled.

Enlightenment is a paradox and only someone to whom it has occurred can understand that paradox. Much of our teaching on enlightenment is misunderstood because those hearing cannot grasp the viewpoint from which we speak.

It is not hard to wake up as long as you are willing to let go of all your baggage. 

There can be no conditions as you approach enlightenment. You cannot hold anything back. You must give up every opinion, every belief, every position, every story because only egos hang onto those.

It has been very hard to write this blog post, to try to clarify the difference between an enlightened teacher and a charlatan. I seek no followers. All my needs are met by the universe because I am the universe. I give instruction freely and I have no time for charlatans.

Truth is the most important thing in a post-enlightenment worldview. This is why the answer to many of the questions people ask me is often "I don't know.", because that is the truth.

In an ego-less world we embrace uncertainty. As a teacher of mine once said many years ago:

"You can either be right, or you can be Awake – the two are mutually exclusive."

Nothing Has Ever Died

“All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.” -- Adyashanti

Since the beginning of life, nothing has ever died.

This is not some strange philosophy. This is not some weird new-age belief. This is a simple, scientific fact. It also aligns nicely with the whole process of Enlightenment. I have never seen anyone else discuss this, although it is something that I have been teaching for years.

Think about what life is. Really think about it. Take several seconds or a minute and think about what creates life. Think about the biological process. Think about DNA. Think about how things reproduce.

If you have got all that in mind before we continue then the answer is obvious as to why nothing ever dies, nor ever has.

Some time way back in the evolutionary past a soup of amino acids came about, possibly in a warm vent, a hot bubbling pool, some heated mud. Those amino acids came together to form the first life.

That first life then, as it does now, self replicated by dividing its genetic material and making a copy. 

The simplest lifeforms in our world still do the same thing. Everything from amoeba up to bacteria. Also, if you give it some thought, this still applies to humans.

Leaving aside all our ancestors on the trail to becoming Homo Sapiens, ever since the first identifiable member of our species walked upon the earth they have replicated themselves in the same way. The host body creates a copy of its DNA. A sperm or an egg exists that is part of that host, created from the same genetic material as that host, alive inside that host. So the human divides itself and makes copies from its own material, its own flesh, its own self.

In our biological method of reproduction, the sperm from the male is introduced to the egg from the female to create a new life – but is it new? Isn't it really half of the male's self and half of the female's self? So as long as this reproduced version continues, then so does the male and so does the female. They have simply procreated by dividing their own cells and then allowing those cells to combine with those of another organism to which they are related.

I'm not talking about kissing cousins here, I mean in the simple fact that at some point they shared a common ancestor who divided its genetic material and passed it on in the same way and is therefore still alive in them.

So you take it to its logical conclusion and neither of them is a separate living being. 

They are formed of the genetic material from that common ancestor who still lives because all of her cells never died. That common ancestor can be traced back in a line through various species and forms of reproduction all the way back to that primordial soup, that bubbling mud, that heated pool and those amino acids.

The original life which formed in that pool never died – it divided, it copied itself using its own material, its own flesh, its own life. That original life still exists in everything that is alive on this whole planet.

There is only One Life. One original ancestral mud pool. One life that has developed and adapted to whatever environment or situation it found itself in. One life that became you. One life that became me. One life that became the trees, the birds, the fish, the insects, the bacteria, the viruses and everything else that lives, however you understand that life to exist.

Nothing has ever died, because there is only One Thing going on.

Water Does Not Care What Is In It.

"Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil."

-- Marcus Aurelius

Fred Davis recently said "THIS has to be enough". He is of course referring to What Is.

There is only what is, as I have said before, because there is no such thing as what is not. We can only have what we have. We can only experience what we experience. So where does that leave us?

Right here. Right now.

This has to be enough. There is nothing else. As long as you have desires for something that does not exist, for something other than that which is, then you will create your own suffering.

That is what ego does; one could almost say its job is to do that.

The ego was a survival mechanism. I suspect its original design was all to do with creating circumstances in which the organism could survive, even if that meant banding together with other organisms. The problems arise when it begins to believe that it really exists.

It's like when you go to watch a movie. 

You know you're just watching a movie. You know you paid your entrance fee. You know you are sitting there with drinks and snacks and perhaps in the company of friends, but in order to enjoy the experience you deliberately forget all that. You become so involved in the story playing out on the screen before you that you forget that it is not you. You forget that it is a story. You become fully immersed in the story and, usually, quite enjoy it.

Life is the same. 

The character, the ego, the little me – whatever you want to call it – is just a story. 'What you really are' is here to experience that story. There is nothing wrong with not waking up and realising that it is a story, because that would be what is happening and there is never anything wrong with what is happening. The whole universe is perfect just the way it is. That which you truly are understands this. The ego does not.

Awakening, Enlightenment, Unity with God – whatever you want to call it – is simply what you are when you realise that it is just a story.

There is no you. There never was a you. There never will be a you. There is only this, right here, right now.

Egos spend the majority of their time living in a world that does not exist, a world of their own imagining. If only I had more money. If only I had a better job. If only I wasn't so fat. Feel free to add your own to the list. It is all just a list of things that do not exist created by ego, because it does not think that This is enough.

Enlightenment is not a state of permanent bliss, because enlightenment is not a state.

It is very nice to sit around and feel total bliss, but total bliss is just an arising in what you truly are. To what you truly are there is no difference between Hitler and Schindler.

There is no good or bad, they are just points on the same sliding scale of okayness.

Opinions, beliefs, positions, values and stories are all the realm of the ego. They are all arisings. You, whatever you are, observe all those things and therefore are not those things.

Your true nature accepts everything just as it is. 

I do not know what it is, I just know that it is perfect.

The Ego Muddies the Waters

"Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'."

Friedrich Nietzsche

I am coming back again to the theme of surrender. To finding the true purpose of one's life by simply living it in full surrender. This may seem an alien concept to many, to most if I am honest, but it is the way that life is actually lived. As long as we pursue the desires of the little me, the ego self, then we are not fulfilling our true potential. Many great men throughout history have realised this, a fairly recent example being Albert Einstein.

So how do we live in full surrender? To paraphrase Wayne Wirs: 'you must become less so that The Source may become more.'

The less there is of you, the more there is of your true purpose.

Wayne always provided evidence for this in what he termed the Siddhis. As far as I know it is a Sanskrit word that does not translate well into English but is usually used to describe the strange effects that occur around those who have passed through the various stages of enlightenment and are living in harmony with The Source.

Things happen. I experience this myself. I tend to call them synchronicities.

Things just fall into line. Life goes more smoothly. It is not always what people would term good and happy, but the concepts of good and happy do not mean anything once you reach this stage. Good and happy are just points on a sliding scale and the whole scale is acceptable because that is how life works.

Contentment best describes the state of the truly enlightened. Everything is okay. The world is pervaded by a sense of okay-ness.

Ideas just pop into your head (feel free to see what Einstein had to say about that). You are pondering something and someone just walks up to you and says something about it that clarifies the situation, without your asking or seeking their input. You are startled by a white crow that flies across the road ahead of you, so you study it for a while. Later the same day the symbol of the white crow pops up again, but this time in a book title or a store sign or a conversation overheard and it proves beneficial to you.

There is no 'woo woo' here. There is nothing flaky about this. It just happens. The universe just lines up to let your life's purpose play itself out. You are not running the show, you never were. You (little ego you) were just getting in the way.

It is hard to explain to someone who believes their sense of free will is actual free will. Again, this is a step that is reached when you are further down the enlightenment trail, for want of a better description. We have a sense of many things, but that is all it is – a sense of. There is no true separation in the world. There are no separate organisms that live and die, there is just one life expressing itself in billions of ways. Human egos like to think otherwise.

Your ego is just an imaginary bunch of patterns that thinks it exists and does its best, out of love for itself, to create the life it thinks it desires. Mainly it just gets in the way. Those desires simply make you unhappy. There is only What Is. There is no such thing as what is not. Most desires are basically an argument with reality, seeking something that does not exist and being sure that it will create happiness as soon it does exist.

Desires are a rejection of reality.

I am sure you can see now why they are a problem, and they all come from that ego that thinks it exists. I'm sure you have read enough books on enlightenment by now and spoken to enough enlightened people to realise that there is no such thing as a single personality in the ego. Carl Jung many years ago identified basic archetypes, each one of which can become the dominant ego at a moments notice when called upon or needed. Every unenlightened human is living with multiple personalities, they just don't realise it.

Language consists of concepts, so I am doing my best to explain this but the reason I usually address myself to people who have passed through some of the process of enlightenment is because it is very difficult for those who have not to know what the hell I am talking about.

(There really is no such thing as enlightenment to those who are living it. When the Zen masters tell us that we are already enlightened, they are speaking the truth, it is just that most people don't know what the hell they are talking about either.)

If you have ever had a time when you were working on something and you lost yourself in that work and found that the work had gone very well; that you could not remember the time when you had been working on it; that you were in the flow - that is the enlightened state.

That is what it feels like when you are not running the show: you – the little ego.

When the little ego gets out of the way the great work happens.

Who is Stirring the Mud?

If you truly want to Awaken, as the Buddha and others have over the centuries, then stop quoting the 'patriarchs' and actually work on dissolving the Ego and thereby losing ALL attachments.

This includes losing attachments to 'scriptures' of any kind. All so-called scriptures have been modified , added to and subtracted from by men who could not understand the original message of their founders.

If  you are a Buddhist and sit around arguing over quotes from those long dead, you are wasting your 'precious human life'.

Someone recently suggested that 'Oneness' was not all there was and how would I feel if he dropped a rock on my foot, along with other ridiculous suggestions followed by a Cha'an quotation.

If you dropped a rock on my unit's foot, pain would arise, but it would not be MY pain. Everything is an arising. Thoughts, feelings, sensations of all kinds are simply arisings.

You are NOT an Ego trapped inside a bag of skin.

Stop. Just stop the seemingly incessant 'thoughts'.

Cease to identify with the bag of skin, with the 'mind', with the personality, with pleasure or with pain.

There is no 'do-er'. You are doing nothing.

Essentially, 'you' are a just walking sensory organ.

Once you truly awaken, re-read some of those quotes and you will be able to tell which were written by those who had experienced the IS and those which were not. There really is a lot of crap out there.

Don't quote rubbish you don't even understand - Sit! Find the Silence. Find out WHAT it is that is looking, hearing and sensing...

How Does the Unit's Behaviour Change After Enlightenment?

It is very simple, and more perfect than you can possibly imagine.

I only just realised this afternoon how simple it really is. There is no 'doer'. There is no 'effort'. You do not 'try to change' anything.

Hold an unskilled pattern in the light of Truth and just ask: Is it real? Is it true? To whom is it helpful? or whatever questions you think will reveal the root of this pattern. (I know some people recommend Byron Katie's 'The Work' for a system of doing this, but questions like the above will suffice.)

Let's use an example: 

Suppose that I think the woman next door, who has several children by several fathers; and claims benefits from the State; and smokes and drinks; and lets her kids run round the streets causing trouble, is a bad person.

• Is it real? No. It's an opinion.
• Is it true? No. There is no free will. She is doing exactly what she is supposed to be doing. She has always done exactly what she was supposed to do. She has no choice. She is acting from the highest spiritual understanding which she possesses.
• To whom is it helpful? Well, the ego obviously. The ego loves to compare and label and feel better than other people. It wants to be special.

Since there is no separate self, or ego, then if any action appears 'selfish' it is immediately seen to be false, because we know that separate 'self' does not actually exist. Just this one simple realization starts the Body/Mind Unit on the road to dealing with many unskilful patterns.

Once the pattern is seen for what it is, it naturally dissolves, because the New Data (created by Truth) is presented to the Body/Mind Unit which is incapable of acting against its own beliefs. That's just how it works. 

Think about it: how difficult is it to do something you don't believe in? 

You feel stupid hanging up your stockings by the fireplace in December once you know there's no Santa Claus, don't you? You don't keep looking up the chimney to make sure he's not real, do you?

Just get this: Once the Body/Mind no longer believes the pattern is True, the pattern dissolves.

It really is that simple. There is no doer. There is no effort to change. It just reprograms itself. That's its job.

Clearing, Post Enlightenment,  is just the process of noticing these patterns and shining the bright light of Truth upon them.

It really is that beautifully Simple.

There is No Enlightenment in Religions

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.

When goodness is lost, there is morality.

When morality is lost, there is ritual.

Ritual is a husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos.

– – Tao Te Ching, chapter 38

The aim of the Tao, as with all other true methods, is to enlighten the reader. You are supposed to read it and wake up. We have modern books that can achieve the same thing, through direct pointing, but that same teaching is contained within the original manuscript of the Tao.

Look at the warning which I copied from the Tao Te Ching above and you can see that process has taken place to create almost every religion in the world.

(I say almost because i) I don't know every religion in the world and ii) I am fairly sure there will be some that never had an enlightened beginning)

When people cease to try to be Awakened by the teachings they then decide to be 'good'. It makes sense to them, because the enlightened Masters were 'good'.

Eventually this practising of goodness turns into a code of morality. People are now expected to follow this code of morality if they are to be considered good and to be following the 'way' of the Masters.

The final stage is when the rituals arise around the original teachings and Masters. They take over from the morality and from the 'goodness' and from the Awakening which started it all. People then form a Religion.

The concept of a Taoist religion would horrify the author of the Tao Te Ching. 

The author was Awakened and, to other enlightened beings, his teachings make complete sense. I find great beauty in his teachings and, since becoming Liberated/Awakened/Enlightened/Annihilated, understand them completely and get so much more out of them than I ever could have previously.

I now spend this life embodying the Tao in this unit, moment by moment. I have no desire to follow any religion because, from the enlightened viewpoint, all religions are empty and pointless.

If you want to use the Tao Te Ching for anything, use it to wake up!

Everything you need to know and apply is contained within it. If you cannot understand it, that is simply because you are not looking at it the right way. It is a book about the One Thing that is going on written by someone who was abiding in it. Find someone who is Awake and ask them about it.

It is not about a religion. It was never about a religion. It was always about finding out who you really are.

Who Cares About One-ness?

So at its most basic level, what exactly is Enlightenment?

You will find that a lot of teachers of enlightenment insist on it encompassing more than the basic experience. There are plenty who insist that unless one has a huge, immediate awakening to the oneness of everything then one is not enlightened. Fortunately, that is an opinion.

Opinions are the realm of the ego. It could also be considered to be a belief and once again that is the realm of the ego. So, if these highly enlightened teachers are holding opinions and beliefs about what constitutes full enlightenment, should we care?

As far as I can see, the origins of the ideas of enlightenment date back thousands of years and the one with which most people are familiar is that of the Buddha (who Did Not Want to start a religion!).

Buddha gave a teaching called The Four Noble Truths which, when taken on their own, teach us that suffering is caused by attachment to (desire for) things of the world and that freedom from suffering is achieved by no longer being attached to those things. (Yes, I am deliberately simplifying it.)

So, if someone becomes free from egoic suffering, they must be Enlightened.

I don't see any mention in there of coming to realise that everything in the universe is just one thing, or "not two" as the main adherents of these views name it (Advaita).

(Eventually, every Enlightened Being will come to realise that everything is just one thing because everything is arising within Aware, therefore everything is Aware, but don't worry about that if it means nothing to you right now. Really. Don't! Let it come on it's own.)

In order to be enlightened you simply have to cease suffering. 

Suffering is caused by attachment to external things by the ego ("little me"). By coming to the realisation that the ego does not exist and is simply a series of thought patterns that arise and fall within the mind, one breaks free of its desires. 

Once one realises that one is actually not the ego, not the body, not the mind, not the personality and so forth, then all that is left is the Awakeness, the Aware. It doesn't matter if you are experiencing this as 'The Witness', 'The Vastness' or 'The One-ness'.

At that moment, suffering through attachments and desires ceases. One is 'Enlightened'.

The part of the mind that worries about understanding One-ness, Advaita, Non-Duality is the ego. The ego will latch onto those ideas and try to make you suffer by questioning whether you really are enlightened. This is just another way for the ego to try to regain control.

You do not need to understand it, because only the "little me", the ego, needs to understand things. 

You Are Awakeness. 

Awakeness knows its own true nature and does not think about it, because it exists before thought.

If you know who you are, Awakeness, but you don't know what you are – everything is fine, just relax and enjoy the Freedom from Suffering.

The Lights are On but Nobody is Home

"If you take a moment to look for yourself, you discover that there is no individual self, only an idea of a self. The “I” is just an idea. So in this sense, it is accurate to say that there is no self and no doer." 

-- Nirmala

Actions and patterns happen, then some thoughts arise and then the ego pops up and lays claim to the actions by making a story from the thoughts. This is actually easy to prove to yourself.

We have probably covered this before, but an action happens before thought and before language. The simple act of raising your arm can seem like it is happening at your command, but if you examine the process carefully you can see that the arm is simply raised. Arm raising happens. You cannot trace a thought that is making the arm rise because it does not exist until after the arm raising has happened.

The thought reports that the arm has risen. Note we are now in the past tense, the realm of the unreal, the dream and the false self or ego. The ego will then pop up as I stated earlier and claim that it performed this action, when actual self examination proves that the ego does not exist and therefore there is no doer.

Life just happens.

This does not mean that the personality of the ego does not affect the actions of the ego body unit. The body unit performs based upon patterns and those patterns are at the root of the ego. Some of those patterns are skilful, such as the way that it can drive the car without you needing to pay actual attention to what it is doing. Some of those patterns are un-skilful, such as the way the ego bangs on the horn and swears at other drivers who, in its opinion, are performing at a suboptimal level.

Patterns exist, but no one is doing those patterns. Like life, the patterns just happen, until they don't.

Part of the post awakening process involves examining those patterns in the light of their unreality and allowing those which are not skilful to dissolve.

Awakening does not mean that you suddenly become the perfect human being, because you are not a human being. Awakening allows us to see that there is no separate identity to become perfect. There is only life.

Awakening allows us to surrender to life, to reality, to freedom.

Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.” 

-- Eckhart Tolle

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...

Poking a Stick Into the Mud

She is detached from all things; that is why she is one with them.

Because she has let go of herself, she is perfectly fulfilled.

– – Lao Tzu

Today my ego decided to argue with reality. Seriously.

The ego mind, which can never grasp Liberation, decided to argue about non-duality.

In most discussions about enlightenment, non-duality is the core of the realisation. There is no separation. Individuation exists only in language. It should therefore be easy to persuade an ego that it is wrong.

It isn't.

The ego has a memory of the enlightenment experience. In the ego's memory of the enlightenment experience, the ego was sitting on a chair in a medical centre not thinking, just looking around. In this memory the ego is obviously thinking as it is inventing what it was doing by piecing together glimpses of what was stored in memory at the time.

In every memory, the ego sees itself as being the central actor. Therefore, as far as the ego is concerned, there was always a duality. The ego was looking. The ego was noticing that it wasn't thinking. The ego is feeling pleased with itself because it became enlightened at that moment.

Only, it didn't.

Egos cannot be enlightened since they are a fictitious construct, a character, something that does not exist until after the events in which it believes it took part are over. In order for ego to exist, language and thoughts have to happen first. It is easy to prove to yourself, your real self, that language and thoughts do not occur until after the moment has passed.

For example, you are looking around and you see a cat. That is it, seeing has happened and microseconds later a thought arises and labels the thing you saw as a cat. Another thought may then arise about what kind of cat it was and memory will be consulted, colours will be assigned, comparisons will be made. All of this is happening after the seeing took place and did not exist at the time of the seeing, when Awakeness Is.

The ego has no input into the Now. The ego inserts itself later, when it uses thoughts and language and memory to create a story. To the ego, there will always be a duality.

Enlightenment involves complete non-attachment, including non-attachment to language and labelling. Without labels there is no other, there is just What Is.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

– – Lao Tzu

Tao Te Ching: An Illustrated Journey translated by Stephen Mitchell

As the Mud Settles - Stay Awake!

But so long as you are separate from things, you need everything. To exist as a separate individual constitutes the entire problem. – Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

In the biographies and Writings by the greats of Enlightenment it can seem that they are perfect and live in constant bliss, but in actuality that is not true.

Enlightenment brings contentment. This is not because all of your problems go away. Nothing in your external life changes. Whatever is, remains. The change comes about in your shift of perspective.

Problems simply become situations. – Adyashanti

Even though you are now awake, your ego still exists. An ego is a collection of beliefs, opinions, stories and so forth – all of which are fictitious. As long as the body unit continues to exist, the ego will continue to exist and it will try to drag you back into the dream. That is its function. The ego was created to deal with the dream, by the dream, for the dream.

Watch a newborn infant. They have not yet developed an ego. They have not yet learned about the imaginary separation which they will be taught later. They have no language, they only have Actual Experience. Seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling, sensing is their whole world. They are Awakeness.

Later they will learn their name and the names of those around them and those labels will lead them to believe that they are separate from the world, and thus their ego will be born. The ego's job is to ensure that the particular unit in question, the body and personality which it now believes in, get what it thinks they need.

The process of awakening is the process of seeing that the ego is a fictitious character which we believed was us. Once it is seen for a fiction then the separation that it believes in is also seen as a fiction. The power of the ego is broken but in order for that power to stay broken for the rest of the life of that unit, Awakeness must be continually experienced.

Any thought patterns that arise which contain beliefs or opinions or stories are coming from the ego. Particular warning signs to look out for are the existence of words such as "could, would, should". Feelings will arise and some of these will be the result of the ego's machinations.

If Awakeness perceives a raging flood approaching, the unit's defence mechanism will fire up and a quick appraisal will show that the body-mind unit seems to be in physical danger so a physical response is appropriate. The ego will come up with suggestions for the best way to avoid the danger. Safeguarding the body unit makes sense to Awakeness also, so a response will be selected and action will be taken.

If someone in an email is taunting/mocking the unit, the body-mind unit will fire up a defence mechanism and a quick appraisal by Awakeness will show that the body unit is in no physical danger. The ego on the other hand will see this as a threat and will try to amplify the unit's defence mechanism and will begin to plan its response. Thoughts will start to fly. The ego will desire to chew on those thoughts to produce more thoughts and 'bad feelings'.

If you are fooled by the ego, you will drop back into the dream and you will respond as the ego wants to. You will feel the ego's anger that someone would dare to criticise a being as perfect as you obviously are.

Yes, it will even claim your awakeness as a status symbol for itself, even though the ego can never be awake. You know that is ridiculous, but that is how the ego works. It will come out with sentences like: "You can't say that about me. I am an Enlightened Being. You know nothing. I bet you don't even sit and do zazen!" (Laughing again - I've actually had that one appear)

You will create your own suffering.

You learn to recognise the ego's responses and when you detect one, you do not fight it. If you fight the ego you are giving it the recognition it desires – you are treating it as though it exists. All internal language is the ego talking to the ego.

What you then do instead is experience Awakeness once more.

Take a deep breath and look around without labelling, without language, just seeing What Is. Seeing that there is no separation. There is no other. That the illusion of all the other units is just an illusion and that every one of them is perfect just the way it is, and is acting perfectly from the highest spiritual knowledge which it possesses.

When you view the world as Awakeness, the ego naturally fades.

If you find a situation still exists then, as Awakeness, sit.

Examine it. Ask if it is Real. Ask if it is True. Ask WHO is having the issue. It is always the ego/character – not You.

Vigilance, Constant-Awake-Vigilance is the way forward.

Enlightenment is NOT Religion

“The Buddha talked about saving all beings from delusion, not converting them to a new religion.” – Buddhism Now

I thought it would be good to clear this up: Religion has nothing to do with enlightenment. Period.

Enlightenment is the realisation that we are already awake and already experiencing Reality.

Throughout history, beings have become enlightened and tried to teach others how to do the same. I suspect many of those others do not understand what is being offered to them and so, years (or generations)  later, they write down what everyone can remember of the words of their now dead teacher and turn it into a book.

They remember some of the practices of their leader and they try to follow them, no longer understanding their purpose. Before you know it a new religion has been born, with beliefs and opinions and rules. The new religion will separate itself from the other religions and play the game of "we are right and you are wrong."

The Enlightenment preceded the religion.

In later years some adherents of the new religion will attain enlightenment and will express their new view of Reality to other members of their religion, realising that they have gone astray. Usually this results in their own death.

Religions do not want truth. Religions want followers.

If you are holding back from investigating enlightenment because you think it is a religious thing, be assured that it is not.

Enlightenment (or Liberation) is a Reality thing. It is a shift in perception. It is an experiential realisation that the ego self does not exist. An enlightened being becomes the Awakeness.

If you are in a religion and you experience enlightenment, be warned that your beliefs and opinions will fall away.

Beliefs and opinions belong to the ego self. The Awakeness exists before language.

Muddy Waters - a Brief History

(At some point I will write a full history of my Seeking and the mess of the life I led, but for today this will have to do.)

Early in 2016 I hit a huge depression, again. I suffered with depression since my teenage years, so this was nothing new, but this time something was different. I was totally dissatisfied with 'life' as I knew it. Nothing interested me any more.

This came about after an illness hit me in late 2015. I had been going to the gym, working out and losing weight, and was in pretty good shape. I was 'sitting' daily for at least twenty minutes and watching the thoughts rise and fall.

The illness lasted about six weeks and that was long enough for my mind to spin me right down the rabbit hole of listlessness, despair and pointlessness. If I'd had an off switch, I'd have seriously considered hitting it and ending it all right there, but I had one responsibility that I could not reject and that was to my wife. I promised her that I would not leave her to struggle on her own as she became ill twenty years ago and has needed care since then.

My only reason to live was to provide for her. It was not much of a life, as anyone trapped in depression can tell you. I had to keep going, so I turned once again to my 'spiritual quest', or Seeking, as I had so many times in the past.

I was originally destined for the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1975, but the Seminary and I parted company after my young ego caused enough problems for them to expel me. I turned my back on the church after that and began Seeking in earnest. I investigated and tried everything from Witchcraft and Kabbalah to Rosicrucianism and Spiritualism. My parents threw me out when I was around 18 (that ego again) and I ended up living in a squat in London for 6 months, eating in soup kitchens and having my first real run-in with the Law.

After time that included several years in the British Army, and a failed marriage, I tried to settle down with my new, wonderfully sensitive wife, but my ego caused more trouble and I nearly blew that on more than one occasion.

Still Seeking, in the 1990s I discovered Buddhism and learned to sit and to focus my mind in a small NKT house in Cheshire. I attended some weekend courses and progressed well, even getting taught by their small Tibetan leader, Kelsang Gyatso. People now tell me that they are a 'cult', but back then they gave me a good grounding in training my mind.

I never liked the bowing and scraping to statues and pictures, it felt like 'Catholic Buddhism', but they set me on the path to enlightenment. I left them after a couple of years, read several Zen books and then sat on my own for almost two decades, through depression after depression. Until that last one.

I realised I had to sort this out. I had to fix 'me' somehow. That's how a lot of Seekers feel, I suppose. We had moved house and the only meditation groups up here were NKT and Naqshbandi Sufis. I opted to try the Sufis, and I am glad I did.

Their root teaching is about dissolving the ego in 'Allah' or 'The Beloved' and attaining Union with the Divine Essence. I tried to sit and relax and feel the 'transmission', but my mind wandered so I went back to watching my breath to rein it back in. I 'opened my heart' in the way they advised and found I was starting to benefit, so I stepped up my practice from 45 minutes a day to two hour long sessions a day. Just sitting.

Over a period of almost three months I worked hard and gradually chipped away at my ego, allowing it less and less control over my life. Things I had studied in Zen for years started to make more sense. Sufi books also made sense. Their idea of Enlightenment includes this overwhelming Love in Union with the Ultimate and I was ready to go for that, if it happened, but I was impatient and years of building up my egoic defences had left my root personality quite sociopathic. I had now started to feel 'emotional things' and knew that it was cracking. I could almost taste the breakthrough.

I remembered the Zen teachings about 'not pursuing states' so I began to reject the 'desire' for them and to concentrate on pure, burning personal inquiry.

“Who am I?” was the focus of my meditation. The answers came and were discarded when disproved.

I am not this body. I am not in this body. I am not my personality. I am not my desires. I am not my thoughts. The fire of inquiry burned hot. My body temperature stayed elevated too, some kind of side effect of the meditation, but I did not sweat. My wife started calling me her big hot water bottle.

One day, I had mailed a package, listening to the birds calling, and returned to the medical centre to wait for her. I sat down and just looked out the skylight window and waited. Just sat. That's all.

After around five or six minutes I realised I had not had a single thought. I looked around me at What Is and just Seeing was happening. I had no desires. I had no further thoughts, and when one eventually arose it was just “I Am.”

No mystical bells, whistles, Angels or waves of Love. Just This. Just What Is.

That night I told my wife what had happened. She asked if I was sure this was 'Enlightenment' since it didn't match our expectations. (She was Seeking too). I agreed to take further enquiry and check.

I grabbed three books off the Kindle Store and spent that night and the next morning working through “Gateless Gatecrashers”, “Awaken Now: The Living Method of Spiritual Liberation” and “Liberation Is: The End of Seeking”.

When she came down at lunchtime, I just leaned close to her and whispered: "I Am Awake".

Watching the Mud Settle

There is no easy way to say this other than to come straight out with it.

I am awake.

Apparently, those were the words that Buddha uttered when a man on the road asked him what he was. I have been told that the word 'Buddha' actually means one who is awake. I guess that makes me a Buddha. (Laughing here)

I would like to point out here and now that the uses of the words like I, me and mine can cause all kinds of problems in the awakened state, but language is its own limitation. I will try to differentiate between the awakened view and the ego view where I feel it is necessary, but on the whole such writing can become very clumsy.

I woke up from the dream state on 1 April 2016. The people over at the website called 'Liberation Unleashed' refer to Awakening, or Liberation, as the 'cosmic joke'.[1] It seems appropriate that it happened for me on the date that it did.

The whole reason I am writing this is to also try to address the post-liberation state, not to become yet another unit that is solely dedicated to teaching the process of becoming enlightened, but that may change. I have no idea what the Universe might have planned for this unit and the awake-ness that uses it.

You see, that right there is an example of the language that comes about when you try to be precise about the distinction between the ego, the body and consciousness.

I am awake. I have always been awake. I am not a body. I am not an ego. I am not thoughts. I am not beliefs. I am not opinions. I am not stories.

The ego personality was not awake. It is not awake. It can never be awake, because it is an illusion.

All those texts that I read for years about attaining enlightenment suddenly make sense. I suspect that people have failed to become enlightened over the years because they did not realise that the texts and the teachings were presenting two different views.

People think that they are an ego. They believe their ego is real. They identify themselves as their ego. Their ego maintains control and hides reality from them. Reality is always there. Awake-ness is always there.

This is why so much of the training that is undertaken by mystics such as the Sufis, the cloistered monks of Christianity, those seeking Advaita, practitioners of Zen, Chan and other forms of Buddhism and a myriad of other seekers is focused on dissolving the ego, even if they don't call it that.

Once you are awake, the ego is seen to be fiction. The ego is seen to be a character that you have played for your life so far. All the separation is an illusion. As Fred Davis from South Carolina would say, 'there is a sense of Fred-ness, but there is no Fred.' [2]

I think that is enough for today. It took 41 years to get here, so I guess 'my' ego was particularly pigheaded. Now the real work begins.

Chop wood, carry water.

[1] http://liberationunleashed.com/
[2] http://awakeningclaritynow.com/