Practical Enlightenment: Living in the World

As must always be stated at the outset, kenshō is a stop along the path, it is not a final destination. There are shades and variegations in the hue of enlightenment, ranging from the ultimate enlightenment of a sage such as Siddhartha Guatama, that experienced by 84,000 that were enlightened in a day in one ancient Buddhist tale and the many others that are spoken of in countless parables.

There are many enlightened individuals out there today, including people such as Eckhart Tolle, Mooji, Adyashanti and others. Experiencing the state of oneness and unity and experiencing the perception of an all-encompassing love reveals the illusory aspect of material reality; it is an experience of the underlying and pervading reality upon which our daily lives are perched rather precariously, it must be said.

The popular perception of enlightenment as some unreachable goal that it takes many lifetimes to achieve is only partly accurate. It does take many lifetimes for some souls to go though the experiences of materiality. To get their fill of the love, the hate, the passion, the food, the sex and the habits. Or, it could just take one. It can happen over many lifetimes or it can happen instantly. In the greater context it might even be said that both are required in order for enlightenment to happen at all.

The search obscures the goal and yet to not search can take the Seeker even further away from it. The Seeker cannot seek after the unknown, since we cannot search for what we do not know.  A search implies a journey through time but to find enlightenment one must go deeper into the Now, or no-time. Therefore, the decision to seek after a goal sensed if not fully known must become a lived process and not an intellectual problem. The journey must end before it even begins.

That is the paradox of realization and a large part of the problem in describing the state as well as the journey to that state to others. It has been at issue for millennia. Just look at all of the different sects and systems of Buddhism. It serves institutions to hold enlightenment up as a lofty goal that is only realized by some inhuman avatar, out of the reach of normal people. And while this is generally true, enlightenment is not an unrealizable goal. It is the natural state of every BEing.

Realization, enlightenment, is both an achievement and a gift. It is the liberation of the senses. The ability to perceive the world through the thought processes and all of the senses without the filter of the ego intervening. The absolute, lived knowledge of the nature of creation and that which lies beyond all perception.

When living in a monastery or alone upon a mountain with all of nature surrounding you it is a relatively peaceful task to enjoy the state of non-BEing in tune with the silence of a worshipful space, be it a temple or natural area.  When an enlightened BEing must co-exist within the world and the influence of other BEings, certain choices must be made.

It is said that, upon enlightenment, there’s no predicting how that BEing might then act in response. Some get up and leave their lives without looking back. Others remain and seem the same. No matter the choice, the shift in the newly enlightened BEing is unmistakable to those around them.

The emotional patterns and personality template that previously defined the enlightened BEing are no longer applicable. Those patterns were dependent upon an identification with the body and its history. Once kenshō has occurred and the experience of the totality of existence has revealed the truth of lived reality the personality slate is virtually wiped clean. It then becomes the choice of the enlightened BEing regarding which aspects of her previous personality traits to retain and which to discard.

There is a danger here, though. The danger has to do with the expectations of others and the potentiality of retaining certain personality traits to please other BEings. The enlightened BEing can pretend to be unenlightened. But, since enlightenment is the core state of all incarnate BEings, once it is known it cannot then be unknown. The consciously enlightened cannot then become unenlightened.

In the teachings of Don Juan the great Yaqui Indian and Toltec Sorcerer there is the concept of Controlled Folly:

A warrior must know first that his acts are useless, and yet, he must proceed as if he didn’t know it. In other words, a warrior must know he is unimportant, but act as if he is important. That’s a shaman’s controlled folly. Nothing being more important than anything else, a warrior chooses any act, and acts it out as if it mattered to him.

In the Toltec tradition as expressed by Don Juan, enlightenment is known as seeing. Accordingly,

You think about your acts, therefore you have to believe your acts are as important as you think they are, when in reality nothing of what one does is important. Nothing! But then if nothing really matters, as you ask me, how can I go on living? It would be simple to die; that’s what you say and believe, because you’re thinking about life, just as you’re thinking now what seeing would be like. You want me to describe it to you so you can begin to think about it, the way you do with everything else. In the case of seeing, however, thinking is not the issue at all, so I cannot tell you what it is like to see. Now you want me to describe the reasons for my controlled folly and I can only tell you that controlled folly is very much like seeing; it is something you cannot think about.

Don Juan and the many enlightened sages of the Buddhist tradition are describing essentially the same process of perception and resultant actions taken in the world of humanity once a certain level of attainment has been reached by the practitioner, no matter the spiritual system.

Many enlightened Teachers utilize controlled folly in order to teach their followers. They act in outrageous ways to show their students the drawbacks of expectations and holding on tightly to preconceived notions about anything or anybody. Some enlightened BEings currently co-existing with their fellow humans do so without drawing attention to their state of spiritual realization. In this manner they travel through their lifetimes affecting the lives of others directly and indirectly without drawing too much attention to themselves.

Both paths have a heart. For the enlightened BEing of the Buddhist tradition, taking on the Bodhisattva role and forgoing one’s own transcension of the physical in order to help all other sentient BEings achieve enlightenment is a valid and laudable choice. For those, like Don Juan, who choose to follow the spiritual path to its ultimate goal, however they might define that process, the compassion of the Bodhisattva is considered to be one of the last affectations of the ego:

Warriors are incapable of feeling compassion because they no longer feel sorry for themselves. Without the driving force of self-pity, compassion is meaningless. For a warrior everything begins and ends with himself. However, his contact with the abstract causes him to overcome his feeling of self-importance. Then the self becomes abstract and impersonal.

Judgment is a foible of the ego. It is forming conclusions based upon limited input. Outside of the context of a dichotomous reality construct, within the realm of the abstract, where everything is one and differentiation is thereby meaningless in the everyday understanding of the term, good and evil are non-existent. Service-to-Self or Service-to-Others, both paths are valid. What is, is, and occurs regardless of the moral context. Awareness, energetic conservation and perpetual motion are the only true laws.

The Enlightenment Series

The Great Gathering

Practical Enlightenment: The aftermath of Kenshō

The End of Forever

Practical Enlightenment: Living in the World

Practical Enlightenment: Processing the emotions of other people

Practical Enlightenment: The vale of tears

Practical Enlightenment: Dealing with instant karma

True Awakening: The conservation of energy

The Gathering of the Rainbow Tribe: New Age delusions and rude Awakenings

There are certain realities that must be addressed in order for the world to move forward as One. These realities have been created by the super-conscious agreement of large soul-groups comprised of smaller collectivities and individuals inhabiting this planet, engaged in a mutually beneficial karmic drama drawn out over many hundreds and thousands of years. The origins of this passion play are lost in mists of time, subject to multitudinous explications and storied retellings, but the ramifications of it remain with us.

The world we live in is an end result of the diffusion of the world’s people from one location upon the planet to many, according to both scientists and mythologists. According to American Indian lore, each group was given a charge relating to the 4 directions and other esoteric correspondences. Succinctly, the yellow race was sent East and given charge of wind and so became knowledgeable about all things having to do with the body, breath and energy. The red race went West and was given charge of earth and became knowledgeable about the planet, its animals and all things growing therein. The black race sojourned South and was given charge of water, its emotional, psychic and physical properties and the white race migrated to the North, there to learn all there was to know about fire, its properties, manifestations and usages.

As the planet’s population grew, each group achieved its core aim, existing apart for millennia to consolidate and manifest these understandings in preparation for the time when they would again come together. It took an extraordinarily synchronistic coalescence of technological innovations – contributed over time by all of the races of humanity – to create the conditions necessary for this Great Return to be effected. Ostensibly, it was the “discovery” of the Americas by the Europeans and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that created the multiracial civilization which has now reached its apex upon the Western lands of this planetary body. But it took the nautical innovations of the Chinese (rudders, masts, etc.), chemical innovations by the Africans (gun-powder, steel) and the land already inhabited, cultivated and explored by the American (South and North) Indians for these Times to become fully manifest.

Another prophecy shared not only by American Indians but by people across the world, pertains to the birth of the Rainbow Tribe. Of course there are different terms for this new people upon the face of the earth, different ways of describing their coalescence, but the prophecies are similar in noting that they will gather in the Western lands, they will be comprised of people made up of the four races and they will come together to consolidate the total knowledge of humanity as one, bring back together that which was split asunder during earlier Ages of the planet.

There are many in the current New Age movement who believe that their group is the manifestation of this prophecy. However, despite their belief, in order for the prophecy to become manifest, all of the conditions of the prophecy must be fulfilled. These conditions include the following primary aspects:

1. The Gathering must occur in the West.

2. The Gathering must be comprised of all of the primary racial groups on the planet.

3. The Gathering must be based upon knowledge that leads to a new way of life based upon unity consciousness and planetary sustainability.

For these conditions to be fulfilled, it is necessary for those who aspire to or consider themselves to be a part of the Rainbow Tribe to recognize at which stage of this process of gathering they currently represent. The material conditions shared in common as expressed by multiple traditions (American Indian, Esoteric European, Egyptian/Metu Neter, Greek/Hermetic, etc.) are relatively straightforward, but the spiritual conditions are a bit less so.

It is easy enough for individuals to gather together in a group, to look around and see people who look like them and think like them and, ostensibly, speak of unity consciousness. These people may also speak of shared knowledge, the divine feminine and indigenous wisdom. They may also seem to act in a manner that embraces a sustainable future and decries a continuation of the current death-culture. But words are easy. It is when actions are called for that the determination must be made as to whether Truth is present or not. The type of truth that is often most subjective and relevant in this land of contradiction has to do with that which has kept the People divided for so long. The political, economic and social echos of prejudice, xenophobia and institutional racism.

No one in this movement called the New Age ever wants to talk about it. It is the elephant in the room, the uncomfortable truth that remains relevant and stymies all calls for unity and reconciliation. Whenever such a discussion is begun, it is often the case that those who feel as if guilt is being as signed to them personally react in a negative and toxic manner and the supposed goodwill implicit in spiritual gatherings is immediately nullified. The victim-consciousness template that actively challenges the oppressor modality shares culpability in the continuation of the drama, with the inability to come to any real resolution between the two sides due to the sheer emotionality and primarily subconscious nature of the problem, the raison d’etre comprising the entirety of this karmic structure’s dark yet evolutionary purpose.

It is precisely because of this almost subliminal and visceral response that discussions of race elicit that it is important to call it to the forefront of the discussion, in order to draw forth the collective demons that it awakens. In this manner, it is possible to take on the segregative facilities of the Control System and actively and energetically combat the prevailing compartmentalization that relies upon divide and conquer methodologies to keep humanity in a state of low energetic flux and limited potential transformational capacity. While there is often some token representation of diversity amongst the different ideological components comprising New Age movement, a yellow, red or black face if not in the room then at least in the organization, the continued relevance of cultural racial discrimination is the karmic time bomb that threatens the very foundations of any spiritual movement that considers itself truly concerned with unity consciousness.

The uncomfortable truth is that, while individual racism has certainly subsided in the last 40 plus years since the post WWII freedom movements and the end of legal segregation in the United States, many individuals still harbor conscious and unconscious prejudices or stereotypes against those of other racial groups. Not only that, but institutional racism – the structural codification of segregative behaviors, i.e. public and private sector discrimination – remains implicit in all of the continuing inherent discriminatory practices in job hiring, the criminal justice system, housing and recreation. As individuals engage in these areas of people activity without a conscious awareness of the prevalence of institutionalized racism, they are actively promoting and endorsing it by their very participation in these modes of societal production. By the neighborhoods we live in, by the stores we shop in, by the social organizations we belong to, we advertise to the world what we believe and who we are, whether we realize it or not.

A more apt and spiritually relevant description of the different typologies of humanity seems more accurately divided between those who possess the capacity to experience empathy and those who do not, but the more visually deterministic difference is, of course, skin color. I use the term race advisedly and converse to the scientific pronouncement that there is no such thing as race, only ethnicity, since we are all one human race. Perhaps that is so on the purely scientific level, but colloquially, the term remains widely employed and relevant.  Subsequently, the continued existence of the Global White Supremacy System is not only still a relevant factor in the explanation of social and economic disparaties the world across, it explains the essential contradiction of a New Age movement that possesses, highlights and continues to harbor many xenophobic and supremacy-oriented ideologies that have their origin in segregative and racist philosophies from earlier and more discriminant eras.

These racist philosophies have morphed in the New Age to take on more universal aspects, as streams of supposedly ancestral genetic superiority are said to have originated upon other planets and within distant star systems. These belief systems are typified by the glaring omission of representatives of all of the races of humanity throughout the rest of the cosmos, but also state that genetics are the currency of the galaxy – an obvious and glaringly xenophobic paradox – thereby subliminally justifying similar threads of ideological dominance and suppression here upon the earth. By so doing, they tend toward the justification of all of the ills of discrimination, segregation, enslavement and superiority complexes that have bedeviled humanity for so many millennia, indicating that these things exist beyond the earth and so they must be, if not positive realities, then at least they are pervasive wherever 3rd Density consciousness exists. Whether or not these realities exist is not the point. The point of our current existences here upon the earth is spiritual evolution, the importance of which should necessitate our elevation beyond all discriminatory practices and systems of knowledge, no matter who else in the galaxy or universe practices them for whatever reason.

Because of this reality, spirituality as expressed during this current era is divided, even in the “melting pot”-like Western countries. Reds have their prophetic traditions, ceremonies and earth-centered systems of sorcery and magical practices, while Blacks have cobbled together a disparate collection of ideologies and beliefs centered upon ideals of melanated spiritual ascendancy grounded by their emotional and empathic inter-connectedness. Yellows have long traditions of esoteric beliefs pertaining to energy and physical movement existing within multiple energetic dimensionalities and Whites have incorporated many of these traditions into pre-existing indigenous European belief systems, resulting in a New Age tradition comprised of combinations of all of the above, made unique to them by the infusion of what seems to be an unconscious trend towards continued racial separation and a new and supposedly inclusive form of ethnocentric supremacy.

In this context, indigenous knowledge becomes an owned commodity, available for procurement and appropriation, the ceremonies of Reds, Blacks and Yellows become common spiritual property for all – i.e. the New Age movement – to change, modify and employ, regardless of the inherent dangers of practicing foreign systems with a limited understanding of the cultural and historical context and methodological particulars. The spiritual traditions of the Ages, perfected as practiced over many millennia of experimentation within the geographic crucibles inhabited by each of the different racial groups, become the fodder for instant egoistic gratification masked as potential spiritual ascendancy. This is of course a relic of the commodity-based and consumption-oriented nature of Western society and, therefore, contains as a key aspect of its expression an often unconscious desire to materially consume, even in the context of spirituality, in order to fill the gaping emotional and spiritual void that currently exists within so many yearning for something more.

The purifying quality of fire has been the purview of the Whites and is the driving mechanism behind the current technological and social revolution that has overtaken the world in these times of multiversal change. This evolution of communicative processes has led to a world-wide discourse resulting in the further clarification and condensation of belief into the clarity of purified knowledge sieved through the crucible of collective experience. Fire cleanses and burns away the dross, transforming the essence of materials in preparation for the Rebirth. The ability of fire to clear away the underbrush of ancient and unnecessary belief systems to make way for the relevant and the new, to bridge the gap between what was and what will be is the manifestation of the Northern imperative, as the other directions contribute their unique essences to the collaboration of the People in the reawakening of our collective self and the recognition of one race, one greater soul group comprised of four smaller groups, each unique, each absolutely necessary for the collective awakening of All.

These times could not have come into being without each of the four directions, without each of the four races. But now, it is the task of each individual of conscience to become overtly aware of the remaining aspects of separation-consciousness that seek to continue the trends of division. It is time for us to actively make the effort to bridge the gaps not only between different racial groups but between different aspects of ourselves and between our conscious and unconscious awareness. We must become awakened to who we are, or, as the Ancients prescribed so vociferously, man, woman, Know Thyself.  We must seek out those aspects of ourselves where we unconsciously comply with segregative institutional norms, where we take on aspects of victim consciousness, where we agree with oppressor or oppressed viewpoints, where we partake in inherently separative activities.

The hatreds of the past must be transcended in order for the prophecies to be fulfilled. Those who do not manifest the fullness of Unity Consciousness, those who do not deal with their own learned behaviors of separation, are not those who will participate in the manifestation of the Rainbow Tribe. The evolution of consciousness is just that and requires a death of the Self in order to truly become a part of one’s lived reality. This death of the Self means that all learned behaviors, all stereotypical thought processes, all segregative desires must be exorcised from one’s consciousness and recognized for what they are; fear and separation-based adaptations to conditions that represented the Old World and that are inimical to participation in the creation of the New World. The Rainbow Tribe will be comprised of individuals from all races, equally, not just one, with a few representatives of the others.

People must choose to come together despite their differences in service to humanity as a whole. This is possible, despite the weight of history which separates us. As we come together as one tribe in order to manifest planetary knowledge individually we will find that the light information collected and codified over millennia is accessible to us all for the purpose of contiguous spiritual enlightenment and evolution. The Afrocentric Kemetian must find common cause with the Celtic Druid, the Qi Gong Practitioner must find resonance with the Navajo Shaman. It is not too difficult: it only requires the release of the old, familiar baggage, which first requires the admittance of culpability and the ownership of said baggage. When you are able to look around yourself and see yourself as one component yet integral aspect of the whole, equal with all of those surrounding you, then you are existing within the conditions necessary for the manifestation of that reality that the prophecies herald as the quintessential sign of the times. Then and only then, will the Rainbow Tribe exist as a microcosmic resonance to our macrocosmic vibratory existence as an integral expression of Unity Consciousness and Oneness manifest within the Realms of Duality.