What is Enlightenment?
This is one of those questions that is very difficult to answer because you are trying to find words that articulately describe a state. There are different terms used in different paths that mean similar things. In addition to Enlightenment, there is God Realization, Nirvana, and Being One with God. I’m sure there are others, but these are the terms I use. I think there are some differences in what they mean and they may actually be talking about different, but related, states.
In the 1700’s, Immanuel Kant stated that Enlightenment was, “Mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.” I agree that Enlightenment is about freeing us from our ignorance and our illusions. Enlightenment usually has the connotation of cleaning the mind and your mental thoughts. For people who work with the Chakra system, the focus is usually on cleaning the third eye of the 6th chakra. Many “gurus” have fallen because they cleaned their third eye, but didn’t clean their ego which is held in the lower chakras.
My guide uses the term God Realization and the focus is about cleaning the heart, or the 4th chakra. Since the heart is the bridge between the head and the body, Sidi says, if you clean the heart, it will eventually clean the rest.
Since it is very difficult to describe holy states in a way that does them any kind of justice, I usually use a metaphor to describe how I’ve experienced this process. For this first part of the description I’m going to ask you to imagine a line in front of you that goes to the left and right out to infinity. This line represents “Goodness and all that is Sacred” at the right end, and “Evil and all I deem Bad” at the left end. A continuum of good and bad, right and wrong, light and darkness. The more toward the middle of the line, the more the lines between good and bad become blurred. We live our life on about one inch of this infinite line. We only allow ourselves to be so good, before we feel we are out of our comfort zone and we have to do something “not so good” to bring us back to where we belong on this continuum. Same with evil. We will only allow ourselves to go so far to the left before we are again, uncomfortable and need to bring us back to our comfort zone. The process of enlightenment is about broadening that comfort zone. Instead of being comfortable on that one inch space, we allow a little more light and a little more darkness to be okay. The goal is to keep widening that comfort zone until we can accept everything on that continuum. After all, it’s all from God.
This doesn’t mean that I’m going to approve of somebody doing something that is really bad, like murder. It does mean that I can still see a murderer as someone who deserves love and acceptance. These things we hate, they are the parts of ourselves that we can’t accept. We hate these parts, label them as evil, and project our hatred outside of ourselves. God Realization is all about giving love and acceptance to all parts of ourselves, even those parts that we would prefer not to have. If you go back to my discussion about healings, it is never about getting rid of something. Healings are all about allowing rejected parts of ourselves to be reintegrated with love and acceptance.
The second metaphor I use to describe God Realization is a tunnel. I use this metaphor more in conjunction with the 28 stations or steps to God that Sidi describes in his book, Music of the Soul. The entrance to the tunnel is right in front of your heart. How wide that entrance is depends on how much progress you’ve made in the previous exercise of widening your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is a description of what outside circumstances have to be in place for me to still able to be in my heart and connected to my heart and not listening to or paying attention to my illusions. If you are “triggered” you are not in your comfort zone and not in your tunnel.
For this initial entrance the tunnel goes straight out in front of you. The more you’ve walked the 28 stations, the deeper your tunnel. Each station is represented by a different segment of your tunnel. How wide the tunnel is in each segment again depends on how much you’ve cleaned your heart of the illusions in that station. As I “look” at someone’s tunnel to see how far they “walked” on this path, for me it is really a feeling. I feel their tunnel, experience it as it gets wider and narrower in different parts of the tunnel. I can feel how deep the tunnel goes so I know whether they are in the stations of the Nafs, Heart, Soul, or Secret.
It is important to note that when people reach God Realization, that doesn’t usually mean they are connected with God and act out of that connection in all areas of their outside lives. Again, it goes back to the width of their tunnel. Some people reach God Realization with a very narrow tunnel. That means they are connected to their inner Divine Self when, and only, when the outside circumstances fit into that narrow tunnel. Some people do their walking by making their tunnel very wide and it may take them a long time to reach God Realization. But when they do, they are much more consistent in their outward behavior. Other people work on depth and not width. They may reach God Realization more quickly, but people on the outside will often wonder if they have truly “reached” it because most of the time their behavior doesn’t reflect that. There isn’t a right way and a wrong way to do your walking. Most of the time it is a mixture of the two. Some healings or spiritual practices will take you deeper and some with widen your path. It’s not up to us anyway. God is the Doer. How we “walk” is up to Him. This is just another example of how we have to “Tie up our camel and trust in Allah.” We tie up our camel by doing the best we can do as far as doing spiritual practices, getting healings, getting teachings from teachers who have reached God Realization, etc. We then have to trust Allah as to how we walk and how fast we walk.
There was a Buddhist book I read once called Before Enlightenment, Chop Wood Carry Water After Enlightenment Chop Wood and Carry Water. That expression is so true. Don’t get me wrong. Enlightenment is a wonderful gift, but life goes on after Enlightenment. You still have the same stuff to do and people to interact with. Some of these you’ll enjoy and some you won’t. Circumstances on the outside may not change at all. You will just see them through a different lens. Many people have the mistaken belief that once they reach “Enlightenment” then everything in their life will get all wonderful. They’ll have great relationships, make lots of money, great health, and have no worries.
I had this illusion for quite a while and I was really upset when I didn’t get all those goodies. Things did not get better in my life. In fact, most things got worse. I was really angry with God about this for several years. It wasn’t until I finally recognized that God was breaking all my addictions during those years, with me kicking and screaming all the way! He was breaking my addictions to my family. If everyone in my family was kind and loving to me all the time, I would have stopped right there in my walking. I would have been satisfied with that. Since they weren’t, I realized that emotion that I had been calling “love” all my life wasn’t love at all. It was an addiction. I tried to force those around me to “love” me in the way that I wanted. I had to keep doing my work in order to find the only source for a truly loving relationship, my relationship with God. God went on to clean many of my addictions without my cooperation. These addictions were to any outside “things” that I thought would bring me happiness. God kept bringing me back to the one true source for happiness.
I had a Sufi teacher once named Fethi Benhalim. He gave a teaching once on “Thingyness”. The gist of this teaching was that we are attracted to many things and many people. The “thing” that attracts us is actually one or more of the Qualities of God that person or that thing carries. We think if we can get that person or that thing in our life, that we can experience more of that Quality. This is because we are mistaken. We think that person or thing is the source of the Quality we seek. They aren’t. Only Allah is. I love that teaching.
“The outward form of things passes away, but the essence remains forever. How long will you be besotted with the shape of the jug? Cast aside the jug, and seek the water. If you look too closely at the form, you miss the essence. If you are wise, you will always pick out the pearl from the shell.”
– Rumi, “Mathnawi”
Eckhart Tolle discussed suffering in his book, A New Earth Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. In a section titled, “Conscious Suffering,” he starts out by talking about how parents try to keep their children from making mistakes and to prevent them from suffering from the consequences of these mistakes. Is this a good thing? Not necessarily. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could spare them from all suffering?” No, it wouldn’t. They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper. The paradox is that suffering is caused by identification with form and erodes identification with form. A lot of it is caused by the ego, although eventually suffering destroys the ego – but not until you suffer consciously.
Humanity is destined to go beyond suffering, but not in the way the ego thinks. One of the ego’s many erroneous assumptions, one of its many deluded thoughts is “I should not have to suffer.” Sometimes the thought gets transferred to someone close to you: “My child should not have to suffer.” That thought itself lies at the root of suffering. Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego. The man on the cross is an archetypal image. He is every man and every woman. As long as you resist suffering, it is a slow process because the resistance creates more ego to burn up. When you accept suffering, however, there is an acceleration of that process which is brought about by the fact that you suffer consciously. You can accept suffering for yourself, or you can accept it for someone else, such as your child or parent. In the midst of conscious suffering, there is already the transmutation.
The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness. The ego says, “I shouldn’t have to suffer,” and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it. … To create suffering without recognizing it – this is the essence of unconscious living, this is being totally in the grip of the ego. The extent of the ego’s inability to recognize itself and see what it is doing is staggering and unbelievable. It will do exactly what it condemns others for and not see it. When it is pointed out, it will use angry denial, clever arguments, and self-justifications to distort the facts. … To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment.”
This is what David R. Hawkins, who wrote Power vs Force, says about Enlightenment: “To seriously seek enlightenment is a very strict discipline that therefore eschews the attraction of involvement in supposed spiritual movements that are actually intrinsically political in nature and factional. The attraction of ‘changing the world’ (for the presumed better, of course) appeals to the naive idealism of the inner spiritual adolescent and is transcended with maturity. The nature of human life is the automatic consequence of the overall level of human consciousness itself. Therefore, to benefit the world, it is necessary to change not the world but oneself – for what one becomes is influential by virtue of its essence (nonlinear) and not its actions (limited and linear).” – Dissolving the Ego, Realizing the Self by David R. Hawkins
The Sufi Poet, Jalal id-Din Rumi wrote: Your task is not to seek for Love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
There is no end to Enlightenment by the way. The walking never stops. Even Enlightened masters continue to walk until they leave human form. David Hawkins in his book Truth vs Falsehood describes a system where he gives a numerical assignment as to how spiritually developed people are. His system ranges from 0 to 1000. Enlightenment in his system starts at 540 and goes up from there. It is an exponential number system so even a few points equates to a really big shift in consciousness. He says most of the planet is below 200. 200 is the lowest point a person can be before they can discern the difference between truth and falsehood. Because people who are higher on the scale carry so much more power, one spiritually enlightened person can raise the collective unconscious of many people lower on the scale. He has said that when he has checked the overall average of a group of people before he talks to them, and then again after his workshop, the average for the group has gone up 5 points. He said most people only move 5 points in a whole lifetime, yet he is able to help them to do that in just a few hours from the transmission he emits during his teaching. That’s why it is so important to do your work and continue your walking. One person can help to change the whole world!
“The light of God is an ornament of wisdom. That is the meaning of ‘light upon light.’ The light of reason draws toward the earth. The light of God carries you aloft. Things of reason are of the lower world. The light of God is an ocean, reason merely a dewdrop.”– Rumi, “Mathnawi”
I’ll conclude this discussion with a chapter from Music of the Soul titled, “Anwar al-‘Arif B’llah,” The Lights of the Knowers of God. Sidi transmits the truth so much better than me.
Anwar al-‘Arif B’llah The Lights of the Knowers of God
bismi’llah ir-rahman ir-rahim In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate
Let there be no uncertainty, and know, my beloved that if your heart shines with light, free of the attachments of this world, then the sun of the truth of God reveals itself through your heart and opens everything to His truth within it. Then you see all the attributes of this existence as the manifestation of the essence of the unlimited divine truth, and you arrive in the station of the illuminated free slaves of God; the knowers of God, to whom Muhammad, may Allah’s blessings and peace be upon him, reveals his original wisdom completely, and the reality of the heavens and the earth become the throne upon which you sit. Your heart, one with the divine truth, becomes the abode of God and the heart of divine illumination, and you realize the speech of your Lord, “Neither My heavens nor My earth contain Me, but the heart of My illuminated slave contains Me.” Your heart becomes the heart of the knowers, through which the truth shines, which turns with Allah, as He turns all the creation around His throne. The heart of the illumined free slave is the throne of Allah around which all the universe turns. From here, one is absorbed in the work of creation and all his action is inspired by his Beloved.
The knower of Allah who carries this trust is the holy child of the seed of the essence of the truth, and with the eye of the essence within him, he sees how all existence is the emanation of the existence of Allah. He hears the order of Allah in pre-eternity, “Be!” And directly from the order, he is. As with all the lovers of Allah, from the moment of their awakening, when they are face to face with their Day of Judgment (Yawn-ad-Din), they realize what they were in pre-eternity. He becomes now, always, what he was in pre-eternity, perfect in the image of his Creator.
Please know, my beloved, that the heart has two doors. Through the first gate, the knowing of God travels, and through the second gate, the knowledge of everything else other than Him. If you can, seal the gate outwardly to the dunya, ash-shaitan, and an-nafs, and open the gate inwardly which leads directly to the heart of God. Then know that the intelligence (al-‘aql) does not have the capacity to touch God because it is bound and imprisoned by the limitations and mental constructs of the finite world, which it has self-created. But the truth of Allah has no limits or boundaries or definitions, and therefore cannot be contained by human intelligence. Intelligence sees everything from different points of view and explains this according to its limited understanding. But know that the heart of the knowers emanates from the perfection of Allah. It is the manifestation of His boundless truth appearing in discreet form, but in reality, the form of the knower is a pretext and his being is as unlimited as the presence of Allah. He appears to be a human being, like other human beings, but in reality, he is al-Haqq, the Truth. And all of his heart is the spring of the mercy of God, and this mercy contains all of existence within it.
The heart of the knower is the throne of al-Haqq. There are no thoughts in this heart but the truth. Every action of the knower (al-‘arif), the perfected person (al-insan al-kamil), is moved by his heart and in his heart there is no action – only prayer. Whatever he appears to be doing, in reality he is praying through this action. Maybe you see him sleeping or walking but when you look behind, you see the real truth behind him. By this truth, I mean Allah. In every moment he lives in the essence of the unity (at-tawhid).
The knower (al-‘arif), the perfect one (al-insan al-kamil), is the person of his time. He has realized all the qualities of his existence (al-wujud) within himself, and his heart he has become a clear mirror. In this mirror, you see the real existence, al-wujud illahi, the existence of God. In him you can see the complete picture, the real picture and not the shadow as you see reflected in the heart of the human being. The human heart sees a war between things of the gross and the subtle worlds, and for this reason feels troubled and tired. In order for the heart truly to rest, to walk, and to know, it is necessary to send all of these things out; to seal the heart’s gate outward, to surrender and to trust the real knowing which comes from the heart of God within the human heart; not to listen to the voice of the shaitan, but to open the inner ear of the heart; once it has been cleaned, to listen to the voice of the perfected one.
If you want to live in peace and safety and to keep your body well, and you feel you cannot travel all the way in the path of the perfected one, then follow a clear person in the path of the shari’a. But if you can travel, it is best to search about these special people whose hearts are filled with the lights of the knowing (al-anwar al-‘arif b’llah). Only these people know how to help you completely, to bring you from the darkness to the real life, the life with God. If you follow people who carry only mind and speak only from the mind, you will not find what you truly seek because the mind is limited and stops with sides. Life with these people is very difficult and dense, because their religion is filled with differences and numbers. There is no unity (at-tawhid) in a religion in which everybody hits his brother with his hands, his tongue, and his heart. I mean those who follow the Prophet with the outside religion, stopping with the shari’a only. They cannot find rest and cannot find real peace because the witnessing of these people is only a shadow.
Know beloved, that I want to speak to you now about the Muhammadan soul. She is the self of the truth and she is very sensitive. In everything that moves, in every shadow, in every created being, she is the source of the movement, although the shadow is ignorant of its origin. I mean about this soul, the essence of the presence of the wine of pre-eternity, the secret of the life of the truth of Adam (al-qudsia). From this first truth came everything and she is in everything. When anyone asks me to speak about the wine of al-qudsia, I say, “Yes, I can.” She is deep like an ocean but cleaner than a mirror. She is more subtle than the deep love (al-‘ishq) or the light behind the fire and the spirit. She has no names. She is before everything and behind everything, and she is nothing. She is within you. She is more than ancient. She has no color and no body. Everything needs her because there is no life without her. She is not self, not heart, not mind, but behind every word, while no word can contain her. Only when you live with your existence in her existence can you know her well. What I mean by her is the secret of the truth of God, the soul of God. She lives inside of you and you carry her, but the self, heart, and soul of the human being are veils to the inner wine of the secret. Burn these veils to come to be free; then you will see what you are. In this moment, you become the holy rock and this rock has no sides. You must let go of everything that you have carried before because God takes all of the coverings from His face, to show you His face in your face, to make you a special slave for Him, and to be Beloved for you.
Now in this moment, your sun is rising to fill all that you have, and you haven’t anything. She (your sun) has eaten everything. This sun is the real sun, not like the sun you knew before. It is stronger and more sensitive, and no tongue can explain about her unless it becomes her tongue, and no eye can see her unless it comes to be her eye. This sun is the presence of al-itlaq, the holy freedom. From what I say, understand what you are my beloved, and realize that the self, mind, heart, soul, and secret of Allah are one in this moment. Even the self of the presence of Allah, and the heart of the presence of Allah, and the soul of the presence of Allah are veils to your ultimate reality, and in this moment, when your sun rises, she consumes every veil.
This is what I mean when I say go behind and behind and behind and behind, to see what is behind your presence and behind the presence of your Beloved, and to see what you are, my beloved because there is only you in the presence of Allah. In this moment you begin to fly, but this flying is different than any flying that you have known before. As you rise up in the mi’raj, you leave everything that you knew and you come at last to sleep, the deel sleeping in the arms of your Beloved Allah because there is no separation between you and Allah. When you look in my direction, you see what you have now – the unity (at-tawhid). You are one with Him. This is the deep meaning of why Allah made you al-khalifa, because you carry all His secrets, and He wants you to know His secret well, to carry His secret and to be the Bride of His secret.
In this moment, you return to the land of your origin, to your first country, and you find everything that you have been searching for in your origin. He wants you to know yourself now, not after you die, and that is why He created you. In this country, you cannot stop, but continue to travel (holy traveling) because you go deeper and deeper into the secret, and no voice can reach you, except your own voice which is the voice of your Beloved. You leave the earth of your self and the earth of your mind to be with your beloved God all the time; and there is no time. You travel from this existence to Who made this existence. And this is what I mean, you are absent about your self, heart, soul, and mind, to see the great lights of your Beloved.
Allah