You will experience unending peace.
You will know true love.
You will know the true meaning of life and death.
You will stop suffering.
You will live your life like that the last moment.
You will become your true self!
This moment, this instant. Perfection arising as this.
How to describe this?
It is neither perceivable nor perceived.
Neither sound nor space.
Neither awareness nor consciousness.
It simply is, pure isness.
This very moment, you are this.
This very moment, you are home.
Fly, follow your wings and fly, like a bird.
In the infinite sky of being.
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When you watch TV and you see people walking and talking on the screen… You know that there are no real people in there, right? Just colored pixels on the screen.
Yet, even though you know it, if the movie is good, at some moment you forget and start reacting emotionally to what is going on the screen, as if it was real. You smile, you feel sad, you get frightened, your heart pounds.
So you know that it is an illusion. Yet, it still convinces you every now and then, so that you can keep enjoying watching movies.
Another example is a picture of a cube drawn on paper. You know the paper is flat, but it still does look 3D!
Enlightenment is a moment when you see that everything in your life is just “colored pixels”. That realization you can never undo. But the illusion is never fully gone. You can't undo it either.
That's why enlightened people can still function in the society and rarely end up in a mental asylum.
Hi Andrei,
That is a good observation IMO. What is being in the world and not of it. The “illusion” of movie figures you may identify with a character and cry and laugh but a part of you knows you are watching the movie with empathy with the character, but remembering you are not the character. Your identification remains with your true nature realized when you saw yourself connected, had the experience of “awareness” and from then on going forward you see the world through a bit of a different lens.
Obviously, the two metaphors are parallel to Plato’ Cave.
Then, what is “spiritual enlightening”?
I had “satori” on November 7, 1972. The effect lasted for ca. 6 months and the aftereffect for about 10 years. During this time I never spoke about it to anyone.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour … (William Blake)
HENRY VAUGHAM (1662 – 1695)
Moriendo revixi
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd.
In satori, you realize that separate individual existence (“Ego”) is an illusion. Because maintaining this illusion is an “internal conflict” (Karen Horney), it consumes an enormous amount of mental energy. Satori instantaneously releases this energy. The effect is unheard of happiness, oneness with the whole world (John Donne) and the burst of creative energy.
How to trigger satori?
Certainly not by a cognitive effort because this is “a question that cannot be asked” (Krishnamurti). Philosophically, it was Jacques Maritain in his “Preface to Metaphysics” that explained it, and of course D. Suzuki in his “Introduction to Zen Buddhism”.
The madness of modernity would be abolished then and there for you if you were to experience it. “The 21st century will be (in this sense) spiritual. Or it will not be …”
A
It is because when devotion to the supreme becomes intensified, it culminates in the highest non-dual realisation. All sense of separateness vanishes from the mind of the devotee.
This constitutes the highest form of devotion which is glorified throughout the scriptures as Parā Bhakti or Advaita Bhakti.
This is also mentioned in the Yoga Vasistha where Prahlāda says–
अविष्णुः पूजयन्विष्णुं न पूजाफलभाग्भवेत् ।
विष्णुर्भूत्वा यजेद्विष्णुमयं विष्णुरहं स्थितः ॥ ४० ॥हरिः प्रह्रादनामा यो मत्तो नान्यो हरिः पृथक् ।
इति निश्चयवानन्तर्व्यापकोऽहं च सर्वतः ॥ ४१ ॥“One who is not Vișnu does not benefit by His adoration of Vișnu. One should worship Visnu by being Visnu. Hence I am Visnu. He who is known as Prahlāda is none other than Visnu: there is no duality.”
~ Yoga Vasistha V.31.40–41
Similarly, there is mention of Narada's non-dual realisation in the Bhagavatam–
तस्मिंस्तदा लब्धरुचेर्महामुने प्रियश्रवस्यस्खलिता मतिर्मम । ययाहमेतत्सदसत्स्वमायया पश्ये मयि ब्रह्मणि कल्पितं परे।।
“When I developed an affinity for Him, O great sage, my mind got firmly established in that Lord of delightful glory; through such a mind I began to perceive the whole of this gross and subtle world as assumed in me, the Absolute by Maya.”
~ Bhāgavatam 1.5.27
The Gopis of Vrindavana also attained this highest realisation as described by Sri Krishna in the Uddhava Gita–
tās tāḥ kṣapāḥ preṣṭhatamena nītā
mayaiva vṛndāvana-gocareṇa
kṣaṇārdha-vat tāḥ punar aṅga tāsāṁ
hīnā mayā kalpa-samā babhūvuḥ“Those very nights, my friend, which, with Me their Beloved in their midst at Vrindâvana, they had passed like moments, became in My absence like ages to them.
tā nāvidan mayy anuṣaṅga-baddha-
dhiyaḥ svam ātmānam adas tathedam
yathā samādhau munayo ’bdhi-toye
nadyaḥ praviṣṭā iva nāma-rūpe“With their minds fixed on Me through attachment, they knew neither their kinsmen, nor their bodies, nor things far or near—as sages in the superconscious state know not name and form—like unto rivers merging in the waters of the ocean.
mat-kāmā ramaṇaṁ jāram
asvarūpa-vido ’balāḥ
brahma māṁ paramaṁ prāpuḥ
saṅgāc chata-sahasraśaḥ“Not knowing My real nature, the Gopis, who were ignorant women, desired Me as their beloved sweetheart, yet they attained Me, the Supreme Brahman, by hundreds and thousands, through the power of holy association.
~ Bhāgavatam 11.12.11–13
In His Magnum Opus, Sri Ramakrishna–The Great Master, Swami Saradananda writes:
“..We find that with the final development of each one of the five moods, the aspirant becomes absorbed in the thought of his or her Object of love and, united and identified with Him under the strong impulse of love, realizes the non-dual state of consciousness. Sri Ramakrishna’s unique life of spiritual striving has thrown wonderful light on this matter. He practised each of the five spiritual loving moods and in each of them he became merged in the Object of his love and absolutely forgetting his own existence, realized the non-dual Reality.
How, it may be asked, can the human mind experience, with the help of these moods, the Reality of non-duality, which is beyond all moods? For no mood can ever rise, exist or develop in the human mind without the consciousness of two persons.
10. The objection and answer regarding the attainment of the non-dual Reality with the help of the five moods
Quite true. But, the more a mood develops the more does it spread its own influence and remove gradually from the aspirant’s mind all contrary ideas. Again, when it is fully developed, the concentrated mind of the aspirant sometimes in meditation forgets I (the servant) and Thou (the Master) and the relation between them and remains perfectly identified through love with the Reality denoted by the word Thou. The human mind, the eminent teachers of India say, is not simultaneously conscious of I and Thou, and the loving relation between them. It knows the entity denoted by the word Thou one moment and that denoted by the word I the next moment and, because the mind oscillates quickly between the ideas of those two entities, there develops in it an idea of a relation between them. It then seems to be simultaneously conscious of those two entities and the relation between them. But when the restlessness of the mind is destroyed by the influence of the matured mood of love, it gradually becomes able to detect what has been said above. The more the functioning of the mind is stilled at the time of meditation, the more does it understand by degrees that it saw the one non-dual Reality from two angles of vision and mistook it for two independent entities.
Objection– Be it so, however Vishnu Purana denounces the teaching of Advaita Vedanta in the following verse–
परमात्मात्मनोर्योगः परमार्थ इतीर्य्यते । मिथ्यैतदन्यद् द्रव्यं हि नैति तद्रव्यतां यतः ||
Union of self with supreme spirit is said to be the great end of all; but this is false; for one substance cannot become substantially another.
~ Vishnu Purana 2.14.27
Reply: The above quotation from the Vishnu Purana has nothing to contradict the teachings of Advaita. Infact, it is talking about Ajativada as the context here is deliberation upon Paramārtha. Advaita, in the first place, doesn't teaches that Atman merges with the Paramatman. According to Advaita, Atman and Brahman are identical i.e. synonymous. Therefore, no merger is possible as nothing exists apart from Atman (with which it can merge).
Just as there is no day and night in Sun, similarly there is no bondage and liberation for Atman. Just as the space inside a jar is not separate from the space outside, similarly Jiva is not separate from Brahman. The notion of separation is only on account of ignorance of the true nature of Jiva which is Atman/Brahman. This is revealed in the very next passage.
The same teaching of Paramārtha is also present in Vishnu Purana 2.16—
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