The New Enlightenment

What is enlightenment? It means there is more light coming through a human being—the light of consciousness itself. When we meet an enlightened man or woman, we experience an expansion of consciousness, a sense of self that infinitely transcends the limited dimensions of the human personality. Such an individual is a window to eternity, the only portal through which higher consciousness enters into this world.

In the traditional model, enlightenment is attained through the experience of the ground of being, the void from which we have all come. If we go very deeply into a state of meditation—beyond the mind, beyond the body, beyond the world, beyond time—we experience pure consciousness, all-pervading, formless Being. No thing exists in that pristine emptiness, and yet it is the very ground from which the whole universe emerged, and is still emerging right now, including you and me. This experience is profoundly liberating, because in that no-place we discover the deepest part of our own self, the Self Absolute, which has never entered into the stream of time. In pure consciousness, the burden of existence dissolves completely—there are no conflicts to resolve, no problems to overcome, no goals to attain. It's the experience of ultimate relief. So enlightenment, in the traditional, premodern sense, is about discovering unconditional freedom through awakening to this empty ground of limitless being, this eternal self, and abiding there constantly. And ultimately, it's not so different from the Western religious model, in which eternal salvation is found in a beatific heaven realm beyond the world. In both traditional Eastern wisdom and Western religious faith, the ultimate goal is a final state—a transcendent state of consciousness or a heavenly abode—that promises release from this world.

Now, it's important to understand that at the time when these great traditions flowered, people had a very different understanding of the context in which they were living. For example, in the East, where the concept of enlightenment was born, it was believed that history moved in continuously recurring cycles, like a merry-go-round turning round and round, eternally repeating the same process. For one who “awakened” in that context, the path to liberation and salvation would be obvious: to get off the “wheel” of incarnate existence so one could dwell in the bliss, freedom, and eternal peace of the formless realm beyond time and space—forever.

But we've moved on. We've learned a lot over the last few thousand years about who we are and about the context in which we have emerged. And one of the most important things we've discovered is that the movement of time is not cyclical, but a linear developmental process. Fourteen billion years ago, a tremendous energy burst forth from the void, and over time evolved from light to matter to life. And with the emergence of life, consciousness entered the stream of time. Life and consciousness are one, and the greater the complexity of the life form, the greater is its capacity for consciousness. What is so miraculous about human beings is that because of our highly evolved brain, we have the unique capacity to know that we know. In human awareness, consciousness has gained the capacity to know itself and everything that exists within it, including the entire evolutionary process that gave rise to that very capacity.