Perception, Awareness, and Illusion: A Primer for Spiritual Enlightenment  

What does spiritual enlightenment mean? It means to awaken from the illusion of Organic Reality; to see, to non-conceptually understand what is real and what is illusion.  

Let me give you an example.  Many of you may have heard of something called Lucid Dreaming and many others may have experienced it.  Lucid Dreaming is when you are asleep at night and you wake-up inside your dream and realize that you are asleep in dream.  In a sense, you have become enlightened within your dream.  You realize that everything around you is an illusion and that the ferocious looking tiger cannot really hurt you, not the real you.  It may be able to put a serious hurting on your dream self, but you know that your dream self is not real. Not only do you believe this to be true, but also you know non-conceptually to be true. 

After a while in your Lucid dream you will fall back asleep and forget that you are in a dream.  It is very difficult, almost impossible, to wake up again in the same dream.  This is where the analogy is differs from enlightenment.  You will fall asleep again once enlightened, but it is very easy to snap back awake, for it is the worry, fear, and pain that will instantly remind you that you are asleep.  

So you might ask, “What is the difference between believing and non-conceptual knowing”.  The difference is that when you believe something, you have faith or hope that it will at some time in the future prove to actually be what you believed. Non-conceptual knowing is the absolute certainty that something is as you have experienced it to be.  You just don’t believe 100% you know it to be as it is. 

Let me give you an example.  If you have never been to the sea and I told you that sea water was not blue, you could choose to believe that sea water is blue or believe that it is not.  In either event you choose to believe one or the other, you would not know for sure.   

Alternatively, you could check it out for yourself and drive to the nearest beach on the sea cup your hands and retrieve some sea water and look it.  You would see that it is not blue, that it is clear.  From that point forward your belief in whether seawater is blue or not is no longer necessary.  You now non-conceptually know it is clear. Your understanding is now beyond belief. 

Back to our analogy between Enlightenment and Lucid Dreaming.   

Just as you become aware of the illusion of the dream in Lucid Dreaming, you can likewise become aware of the illusion of organic reality during your awakened state. I like to call this Lucid Wakefulness.  

Many may say I understand the concept that organic reality is an illusion and I 100% believe it to be true, so what? Then you are still asleep, because in order to wake up you must go beyond belief and conceptual understanding to non-conceptual knowingness. You could wait until you die to see if it is true, or if you know where and how to look you can experience it directly for yourself. 

What are the prerequisites for becoming enlightened? 

Before I tell you what is necessary, I will tell you what is not necessary 

          A. You do not have to have a spiritual pedigree 

You do not have to spend thirty-five years studying, meditating, and listening to gurus, teachers, or anyone of a supposedly more evolved spiritual state than yourself. That 35-year number comes from personal experience along with the rest of the list.  During the last several years I meditated twice a day, every day. 

Some of you may have heard of a spiritual guru named Adyshanti.  I read several of his books, listened to his audio books and lectures, etc. and I believe him to be genuine.  When I was studying him I quickly came to understand conceptually what he was saying was true, but I could not go to the level non-conceptual knowingness through his teachings, and others like him including Eckhardt Tolley, the Upanishads, and many others. 

It wasn’t until I had my breakthrough that I was able to non-conceptually know what they were trying to explain.  I just don’t think they were particularly good at showing others how to get there.  They are good at telling you what it is like and explaining the concepts.  After I “got it” I went back reread and re-listened to some of these teachings and I was able to easily non-conceptually know what they were talking about.  

One of the things that struck me was the back-story of Adyshanti was that he studying full-time with a Zen Master, meditating sometimes for 12 hours straight for weeks, months, and years on end.  He did this for about 15 years. The most I was ever able to do in one sitting was about 1.5 hours. He said at one point he spent days just trying to get the position of his hands and fingers just right. He laughs now when he says that none of that 15 years of meditation and discipline or anything else he did during that period is necessary for enlightenment. Although the intensity of my search was nothing close to that of Adyshanti, I would likewise say that nothing I did during my 35 years of discipline, searching and meditation was necessary either.   

B. You don’t have to spend a fortune and work on it for your entire life.  

It is actually not that hard if you choose to meet the two prerequisites that I will explain in a minute. 

Let me tell you what Jesus has said about Enlightenment: 

Jesus said, "I shall give you what eyes have not seen, what ears have not heard, what hands have not touched, what has not come upon the human heart."  

Gospel of Saint Thomas 

C. No one is more spiritually evolved than anyone else.  

It is only a matter of whether or not you have become self-aware, enlightened or not.  This does not make you any better, or more spiritual. You could be the worst human being on earth and your state of worthiness would not prevent you from becoming enlightened.  It is probably very highly unlikely that you would until you changed your ways, but everyone is worthy; everyone! 

What are the two prerequisites? 

1.    You must have a true burning desire to become enlightened.  This cannot be faked.  If your desire is not true you will not be able to overcome the illusion. 

          There is a story of a Zen master and his student sitting by the river’s edge and the student ask the master what he needed to do in order to become enlightened. The Master turned to his student, grabbed him by the nap of his neck and forced the student’s head underwater.  The student began to thrash violently grabbing the master’s hands but he could not shake him off.  After a few minutes when the student was still fighting furiously the Master pulled him out of the water.  After the student stopped coughing and gasping for air he asked the master why he did this to him.  What did you most desire when your head was underwater? “To breath,” answered the student.  The Master asks, “Did you desire anything else at anytime while your head was under water?”  No I did not.  “Was Your Desire Strong?” Yes, my life depended on it. “When you desire enlightenment that much you will find it,” said the Master. 

The good news is that your desire does not need to be that intense using the direct path to enlightenment, but it does need to be strong.  I do think that attaining enlightenment via the Zen path may require pretty much that strong of a desire.  Just ask Adyshanti. 

2.    You must be willing to give up your limiting beliefs that prevent you from non-conceptually grasping your true reality .

This falls into the category of, be careful what you ask for.  What I mean by this is that most people are comfortable with the beliefs they have developed over the years.  The more effort you have invested in your beliefs the harder it is to let go of them.  Enlightenment is probably the most difficult for people of strong “Religious” or “Spiritual” Beliefs not practices.  It is the beliefs that can keep you locked out. Not all beliefs just those that prevent you from non-conceptually grasping your true self awareness. 

For example Mother Theresa was arguably one of the most saintly people who lived during our lifetime. The church recently decided to canonize her and I feel it is richly deserved. She devoted her entire being to those in need.  

Her diaries were released about the same time and they revealed that for about the last 25 years of her life she was in a crises-of-faith.  She believed that there was only blackness after death because she saw no evidence of an afterlife among many teachings of the church that she had believed in for her entire life. She had invested so much her life, probably too much, to the belief structure of the church that she could not see any other way, except to continue on the path she had been on for her entire life.  She saw no other possibility except through her belief system and if that was wrong, there could be nothing else that was true. She was too invested in her faith and could not see or know beyond it. 

If you are comfortable with what you believe and/or not willing to let your beliefs go in the face of evidenced to the contrary, you cannot attain enlightenment. That is ok; just don’t expect it to happen, because it will not without your complete surrender. 

Enlightenment is not about belief it is beyond belief.  You do not need to swap your old beliefs for new ones.  You just need to drop those, which are limiting your perception. 

Here is a Taste 

This is what Sri Poonja (also known as Papaji) had to say: 

You are ripe for enlightenment when you want nothing else. In order to be born you have to spend nine months getting bigger and bigger. For enlightenment, you have to get smaller and smaller until you disappear completely. 

Sri Poonja (Papaji) [1] 

These quote, like all quotes are conceptual in nature but give us clues where to find the o-so-small tears in the fabric of the illusion. 

Look at Your Hand 

What do you see? You may say, “I see a hand” or “I see an old hand” or “I see a hand with wrinkles and freckles.”  Or you may say, “I see light waves reflecting off my hand into my eye.”  You all do see this don’t you? Normally you don’t think about seeing things this way, but you do it every waking moment.  You see light reflecting off things. 

What else do you see?  You see tissue, skin, hairs etc. Now let’s bring in some science.  There are many things we know from science that have been proven beyond any reasonable doubt?  We know that the skin, the tissues, the bone are all made up of individual cells. So you are seeing cells.  We also know from science that the cells have an internal structure of things like a nucleus, mitochondria etc.  You are looking at these things as well, but you can’t discern them because they are too small.  Using microscopes we can see them.  If we look even closer we will see independent little organisms there as well, like nematodes, bacteria, fungi, virus, etc.  So we are also looking at a collection of individual cells that make up what you call me. 

You may be thinking what does this have to do with enlightenment.  This is probably not what you expected is it? This is not about new beliefs this is more like show and tell.  This is about perception, which is creating illusion that prevents you from knowing reality. Don’t believe anything I or anyone else tells you about truth, enlightenment, reality, etc., investigate for yourself.  Let’s go a bit further.  

If you look at the parts of the cell constituents closer you will see molecules and then atoms.  So no matter what part of your body you are examining, you are looking at atoms, you are looking at what you believe to be yourself. We need to go one more layer down to get the heart of this understanding.   

Atoms are made up subatomic particles of electrons, neutrons, and protons.  We could go down further in resolution, but this is far enough.  All matter, this podium, the floor, a blade of grass, a grain of sand are all made up of atoms. You are made of atoms. 

There is one more thing beside the subatomic particles. That is empty space. How much empty space?  Well if used a basketball to represent the proton in a hydrogen-atom and the head of pin as the size of the electron, about 1/100,000 the size of the proton and we placed them the relative distance apart from one another, they would be eleven miles apart. This non-coincidentally is about the same spatial relationship between the heavenly bodies and the empty space where they reside.  So what you are really looking at when you look at any matter is mostly empty space and an intelligent organization of sub-atomic particles, but none-the-less 99.99% empty space.  In fact all matter in the universe is one humongous sea of mostly empty space and intelligence energy. 

If you look at the analogy of the ocean and you think about a wave in the ocean, when it temporarily swells up and seems to have a life of its own, it eventually recedes back into the ocean.  Really it never was separate from the ocean.  It is just one big ocean; there are not independent waves.  Likewise in the universe there is just one big ocean of mostly empty space and intelligence energy. 

Advaita or Non-Duality 

This brings to non-duality. About 35 years ago when I first began my quest for enlightenment and I enrolled in a course @ Purdue University called “The Philosophy of Eastern Religions.” We studied many different concepts and ancient writings. A lot of our source material came from the Upanishads and I still have those original textbooks.  Within the 5000-year-old Upanishads was something called Advaita, which means not-two.  This means there is not a me and you. Not a you and the table. There is just the ONE, the one homogenous ocean of empty space and intelligence energy.  This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “we are all one.” This is inclusive of everything in the universe. So I am no better, or no worse than a grasshopper, blade grass or grain sand.  We are all the same. 

Up until a couple of years ago when I was reading about Advaita or non-duality, it more or less made sense conceptually. There was a lot that seemed contradictory.  Non-the-less it is a pretty tough read. It wasn’t until a few years ago that it made perfect sense even the contradictions.  It must have been extremely difficult to non-conceptually understand it without the benefit of modern science even 100 years ago, let alone 5000. 

What about me is Real and What is illusion 

I want you to re-read the quote from Papaji one more time and you will see where this fits in: 

You are ripe for enlightenment when you want nothing else. In order to be born you have to spend nine months getting bigger and bigger. For enlightenment, you have to get smaller and smaller until you disappear completely. 

There is a rule of thumb about reality and illusion.  It goes something like this: Anything that is temporary or changing is illusion.  Only that which does not change or permanent is real. There are both temporary and permanent aspects within everything in the material world. If we look at ourselves we can make an assessment as Papaji has suggested.  For enlightenment, you have to get smaller and smaller until you disappear completely. 

Let us first establish that when we speak about you; we are speaking about different definitions of you.  One definition is about what is real and the other is about what is illusion. If you think back as far as you can to your childhood you may be able to remember the sense of yourself, that which was aware of your body, mind and ego. Your body, mind, and ego have all changed substantially since you were child.  In fact about every 2-3 weeks every cell in your body is replaced with new ones.  So were the old cells you or the new ones you.  Is your little finger you or is your entire body you?  Are those little independent organisms that live within in you, you?  

Your mind changes continually and over a lifetime and it changes dramatically.  How about your ego, your sense of your personality the thing that resides within your mind that thinks it owns the mind and body? Hasn’t it changed quite a bit? The ego is not the same thing as the sense of you that has an ego, mind, and body.  The real you is that sense of you that is experiencing or having awareness of the ego mind and body and it never changes.  It doesn’t change, it doesn’t evolve, it doesn’t grow old, and it can’t be hurt, it can’t be destroyed. It is invincible and eternal. This sounds eerily like something we have heard before. 

Awareness 

If you strip away that which is not real, layer-by-layer; the ego, the mind, and the body, you will have left the only thing about you that is truly real.  You can call it your soul your spirit or simply your Awareness. That is the true everlasting, untouchable, invincible and infinite you. 

For enlightenment, you have to get smaller and smaller until you disappear completely. 

This was just a small taste of what you will need to be able to awaken within this lifetime. There are several more aspects and pieces to the puzzle to get you to the completion of your journey. If you have the desire and are willing to give up your limiting beliefs, you can turn your destination into your journey.