The Biggest Mistake I made in chasing Enlightenment and I rectified it.
One of the most fundamental spiritual conundrums is blindly looking for Enlightenment in books, in experiences, and mind-made fun fantasies. I lived in conflicting two states as I was twisted and turned by what contemporary spiritual teachers preached in their highly decorated and sacred discourses, and what I recognized in my direct experience. I couldn’t find coherence in these experiences and teachings, and it turned into perpetuating periods of extreme frustration. This is faced by many spiritual seekers of our times.
My indefatigable attitude applauded my perseverance and I tried acting clever. My mind couldn’t simply wrap its head around the fact that it simply cannot comprehend the spiritual awakening, yet I tried all the 1000 ingenious ways to understand ‘Awareness’. And did I give up? Oh Yes, but, only after putting up the best fight which reminds my mind of his well-deserved defeat.
When I was not even looking in its direction, one night, half-past ten, I stumbled upon one of Rupert Spira’s beautiful formulations which stood valid as per my experience. This was a beautiful Vedantic tradition’s metaphor of the Sun, and it serves this understanding in order to reconcile our scattered understandings of Non-Dual experience.
Sun illuminates all the objects that it shines upon.
Sun, unaware of its own attribute, is endlessly chasing the same illumination.
Innocent Sun has no idea it is the one that loans the effulgence to everything that comes in contact with its splendour.
The sun cannot move at a distance from itself to illuminate itself. Sun is too intimate with its own experience of shining that no subject-object relationship can take place. ( Dual relationship)
Sun understands only the conventionally validated subject-object relationship but that doesn’t help him realize his own eternal shine, his own abundance. This falls beyond the purview of dual conditioning.
For Sun to recognize his true nature, it has to go beyond the conventional subject-object relationship. It has to find altogether a new medium, a new way of knowing to formulate this understanding.
So what does the Sun do?
It stops chasing, doing, and becoming something at a point in time in the future.
It starts recognizing and knowing.
And it realizes its truth not by duality but by the non-dual way. By being as it is, it recognizes itself effortlessly.
Seeker is an illusory entity until the seeking gets dissolved in the direct experiencing and takes away the seeker as well!
Once the abidance as awareness takes place(enlightenment), it takes care of everything through its own way of understanding, knowledge, and recognition. It is crucial to our understanding to know that ‘Awareness’ does not have to make use of a mind to know itself, to recognize its true nature.
Mind, however, has to accept, validate and formulate this ‘new portal of seeing’ in order to realign and purify itself.
Formulations are extremely important, which is also referred to as the ‘purification of mind’ or ‘vidya’ in our Vedantic traditions.
We can also infer from Ramayana, Hanuman is the mind that purifies and devotes itself to Lord Rama which is limitless Awareness. Figuratively, Hanuman is the servant of Lord Rama, an example of the mind realigning itself to become a servant of Awareness.
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