Tagged with Enlightenment

The heroic journey usually entails a quest for an object of highest value. In spiritual language, the object is enlightenment. In alchemical terms, enlightenment is the recovery of our true "stellar" nature, the real gold, an "undivided mind." It is more than just a poetic metaphor that the unearthed gold which completes this transformation is sourced primordially in the cataclysmic union of stars. (more)

[RS Singles] • Let's face it: of all the people that you and I know who have spent a good deal of their lives sitting on meditation cushions, chanting in Sanskrit, gulping psychedelics like M & Ms, and subscribing to The Yoga Journal, how many have achieved the pinnacle of human possibility that all of the great spiritual teachings insist is available to anyone? (more)

The ego has dethroned the soul, and enlightenment is only possible when the slimy usurper has been outed and slain, and the soul can re-animate the body again. A spiritual teacher is not a philosopher, prophet, healer, or sage. He is a hitman, an assassin. (more)

If you're still hoping for nonduality to cohere, to make your life better, to make you happier, you're still clinging to spiritual materialism.  Better for it all to be for nought.  Surrender even the hope of progress, and progress will happen on its own. (more)

Our reasoning abilities are not enough to create a more habitable, peaceful, and sustainable world. To experience enlightenment and learn to interact with the cosmic web, we must begin by healing that part of our bodies that allows us to dream a new world into being: our prefrontal cortex. (more)

The effort to direct life energy at goals unworthy of our knowledge is exhausting. Eventually, our reservoirs of health and luck depleted, we enter a state of crisis. This is a special state, the threshold between worlds. Many of us are there right now, individually; the collective human body is approaching it as well. (more)

The "near-death experience" that U.G. Krishnamurti had during a lecture in Madras in 1953 was to lead him up to the "final death" and awakening into the Natural State in 1967. It seems, the near-death experience is, almost as a rule, a necessary prelude to enlightenment. (more)

Our True Nature is who we already are, not something we can become or attain in the future. We somehow don't recognize this fact and spend years searching for something that was never lost, and if we're fortunate, we'll run into a teacher along the way who will simply point out what is perfectly obvious. (more)

The journey to enlightenment and unitary consciousness is a long one. Why is the road so uninviting and fraught with obstacles where so few seem to have reached the other side, much less have attained an illuminated body? Might we be holding out because the other side does not quite live up to our idea of enlightenment? (more)

Western religion can be so focused on God that it forgets the world, and it criticizes those who love it as "pagan," as too entranced by the world of appearances. But I like the world and its pleasures.  I am convinced that God is dancing right now, and not to take Her up on it is a little bit offensive. (more)

Chakaruna -- bridgers -- weave between the sacred realm and complex realities of global organizations, working as “servant-leaders.” From Buddhism, to punk, to corporate boardrooms, servant-leaders are necessary catalysts of the emerging evolution. (more)

Our awakening is always a mutual and reciprocally shared co-awakening due to our infinite interconnectedness. Moved by something greater than our imagined self, we become an instrument of something much vaster than our own limited version of ourselves. (more)