10/27/2015 Deepak Chopra Huff Post
Now that yoga
and meditation have become everyday experiences rather than exotic
practices reserved for a sliver of the population with an interest
in the East, the same needs to happen with enlightenment. It
remains in the old pigeon-hole that yoga and meditation have
escaped. In all the yoga classes that have sprung up over the past
decade in America, how many participants are there to pursue
enlightenment? Very few, I'd guess. As an attainment, enlightenment
feels far removed from modern life and its daily
demands.
But in the last few postings I've argued that in reality
enlightenment is a natural state of awareness--in fact, the most
natural. When you experience your own mind in terms of
self-awareness, something exists that isn't part of the steady
stream of mental events that we all identify with. There is a
ground state from which thoughts, sensations, feelings, and images
emerge, the way that matter and energy emerge from the quantum
vacuum. By viewing enlightenment as a description of how
consciousness works, how "nothing turns into something"--to use a
familiar phrase from physicists who try to explain where the cosmos
came from--, enlightenment tells us where the mind comes
from.
No one could fail to be interested in this issue,
because human beings are creatures of the mind, which presents us
with the best and worst in our lives. For many centuries in India
the appeal of enlightenment was based on either eliminating mental
suffering or increasing mental joy and bliss. There was also the
Buddhist position that pain and pleasure are intertwined;
therefore, the solution to mental suffering is to escape the cycle
that traps the mind into believing that existence can be either
pain free or pleasure filled. That's a pointed challenge to modern
life, where the mass media is all about seizing as much pleasure as
you can and supposedly eliminating all painful
experiences.
No one believes that life is a day at the beach, of
course, but there's no other credo that is so insistently drummed
into our heads, especially considering the diminished power of
religion to guide people's lives in a secular society. In place of
a credo, we should be looking to enlightenment, not as a set of
beliefs but as a kind of "inner technology" that gives us access to
so-called higher consciousness. As appealing as "higher" sounds,
it's truer to say expanded or unbounded consciousness, because by
its nature, the ground state of the mind has no constraints or
boundaries. That's what makes it unique among all possible
experiences.
If enlightenment is normal, how does it feel? Only
very recently has this become a viable question in the West.
Ordinary people are coming forth to tell us about states of
awareness not remotely advertised in mass media or discussed even
in educated circles. These experiences include a host of
similarities to traditional descriptions of enlightenment from the
East.
Let me cite just a few examples:
--The body feels lighter. The boundaries of the body
seem to expand beyond the enclosure of skin and bones.
--Active thinking decreases, particularly negative
thinking. When thoughts do occur, they tend to be practical,
pertaining to actions that need to be performed.
-- An inner sense of freedom arises, along with a
marked absence of fear. Fear of death, for example, ceases to
exist.
-- Time stops being a burden, and in some cases no
longer registers. In place of minutes, hours, and days there is a
sense of "no time" in which only the present moment
exists.
-- Old memories, wounds, and conditioning lose their
grip.
-- The sense of self, the "I," is no longer a
limited creation of the ego. Instead, the self identifies with
unbounded self-awareness, allowing for a great sense of
freedom.
As you can see, these aren't religious experiences;
they describe a different state of consciousness, and it's not hard
to accept that it's an improved state. Why are ordinary people
suddenly reporting such experiences? No one can say for sure. I'd
argue that we're seeing the mind naturally evolving. Just as being
able to read was a rare accomplishment in the ancient world while
today it's commonplace is a good analogy. Reading is about more
than opening schools everywhere that every child can attend for
free. It's about accepting that a precise mental skill should be
mastered across the board. The same could be said of enlightenment.
Instead of being a skill, however, enlightenment stands for a more
evolved self, one that doesn't accept constricted awareness as
"normal."
The fact is that we create our personal reality
based on the state of consciousness we're in. Your awareness tells
you what is real, what is possible or impossible, what to believe
in, what you deserve, and who you are. All of these things are
dynamic and flexible. There are no rules everyone must follow; we
are making reality up as we go along. The natural desire for a
better reality is what gave us modern medicine and all the
advantages of current technology. The same desire, when turned
inward, would be vastly more effective in improving daily life. In
the next post I'll argue why the enlightened life, far from
renouncing the world, is the best way to be fulfilled in the
world.