Enlightenment – Awakening to our true nature.

We are all seekers, in one way or another. Some of us aim for physical strengthening, some want to become more “aware”, some of us try to master our minds and instincts. Most of us reading blogs like this one, are continually committing ourselves to a path of everyday meditation, or to a yoga routine, spurred on by one or other self-defining goal. Eventually all these pursuits are tributaries flowing into a great ocean – one ultimate goal. This goal is sometimes called self-actualization, sometimes the Universal  Truth,  and many times, quite simply, Enlightenment.

Enlightenment as we’re trying to discuss and decipher today, does not refer to just achieving the most we can, being the best of ourselves, entering the Flow, being fully aware of the Now, finding bliss, or attaining complete peace, although it does involve each of this in some measure. No, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the enlightenment we speak of is realizing the essential nature of ourselves, of the universe, and irrevocably crossing the threshold of awareness to a state of awakened conscious from which there is no returning, no lapses, no regressions.

Great enlightened masters have described this transition into an enlightened state as an awakening, describing the actual experience as  a state of timelessness where entire hours or even days pass by, as if in a few seconds. When they emerge from this timelessness, they remember to breathe once again, but life is never the same anymore. They no longer identify with their former selves, not the trials or tribulations, not any of the dilemmas nor chatter of the mind. It is said that for many, that final moment of enlightenment merges with the moment when life on this earth ends, and the cycle of birth and rebirth ceases, once and for all. Whatever the individual variations, enlightenment comes as that one experience of divine bliss, which is so great in its magnitude and impresses itself upon us so deeply, that every change it causes within  us is irrefutable, immutable, eternal.