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