Notions of Enlightenment

A take on what modern-day Enlightenment looks like

After spiritual awakening, there are strong desires for enlightenment, freedom of the ego mind, karma, and pain. Hopes to experience "complete healing” where there is a lack of suffering, separateness, discomfort, and negative thinking and how to share this with others to alleviate the sorrows of this level of consciousness.

This very desire creates the will to seek this path of salvation but also generates egoic suffering of feeling on the outside of the gates of divinity after being immersed in moments of what feel like heavenly bliss, unity, and eternal love.

However, the time in between these sporadic occurrences we must work through the ego's despair of not being able to maintain experience in these high states. The ego's desire to achieve these enlightened states can lead to feelings of being lost, confused, unworthy, and grief stricken with a heartache for the eternal.

In this walk back to one's God nature, gentle reminders are offered through the subtle guidance of intuition to help soften the gripping of the ego that is naïve in thinking it is what achieves this spiritual freedom.

Our modern-day path of enlightenment begins when one sees that love is the truth of all existence, when one seeks to serve in love and to be served by it; to have even a moment of this divine recognition and a spark of spiritual awakening is Divine Will unlocking the gates to this path as it welcomes us to take our first steps on this inner journey of recognizing, we are already that which we seek.

In this human experience, as the path of enlightenment unfolds, a higher spiritual state is not the absence of pain, but the willingness to say yes to all parts of it.

It is the practice of forgiveness, the surrender of control, and a deep trust in the will of God. It is the courage to sit with discomfort, to become aware of our thoughts, and to gently challenge the beliefs that cause us suffering without becoming consumed by them.

It is the willingness to hold our broken hearts with love and compassion, to allow ourselves to be supported, and to receive care from others. It is to know oneself more fully, to honor the unity of all creation, and to include oneself in the love so freely given to others.

It is the softening of over-independence, and the courage to be vulnerable to ask for grace, and to receive help.

It is becoming clear that the most beautiful, vulnerable, and exalted state of growth and spiritual awakening is the willingness to be with it all; to accept it, surrender to it, and continue choosing love and compassion, again and again, even when life does not reflect it back.

This is a state of enlightened living, rooted in hope, faith, and the strengthening of one’s will to choose love. It is the devotion to seeing the Creator in all that is, transcending duality, separation, and the forgetting of our true essence.

In this path, seeking creates space for a will that does not waver in the face of temporary disillusionment of pain, fear, guilt, or shame but instead moves gently through what is ready to be healed within consciousness, until one can rest in God once more.

This is the nectar of the path; a quieting of the ego that rushes toward salvation, attempting to escape the very prison it has created.

May we find truth in this acceptance. May we make space for the work within. And may we honor both the imperfection and the perfection of this human experience.

Hand in hand may we walk with one another as we lead ourselves back to our true eternal essence.