These days, with the spiritual wellness industry in America booming, everyone and their second cousin is marketing their path to enlightenment. When I google “spiritual enlightenment,” after the Webster dictionary and Wikipedia, the next five searches are either psychics advertising their services or spiritual authors with books for sale. For a specific dollar amount, you, too, can learn the secrets to how to become enlightened! Social media is full of content creators who claim to be enlightened, which is apparently now a very exclusive club that only certain members of society who have certain access to certain privileges and certain items can afford to be a part of. After all, if you can’t afford a trip to India, a set of crystal singing bowls, or a thousand dollars worth of chakra tattoos, are you even enlightened, bro? The "enlightened elite star seed indigo children" call the rest of humanity NPC’s (non-playable characters, like the background characters in video games who are just there as a part of the scenery). This doesn't just reek of narcissism, but dehumanizes the rest of society; the unenlightened masses aren't even real and therefore require no respect or compassion. It seems that enlightenment has been reduced to an Instagram aesthetic.
But what is enlightenment, really? Back to the Google machine, where I find a whole bunch of definitions like these:
“To live in unconditional love and have no judgments.”
“A path to connect with the supreme power or God.”
“Awakening to the reality that we essentially live in a dream state.”
“Living 24/7 in pure consciousness.”
“Discovering the purpose of life and living in contentment.”
Based on these first five, alone, it seems unattainable and completely unrealistic. If you are lucky (rich) enough to attain this, you never lose it; the state of enlightenment is permanent and you are just perfect forever. Everyone else on Earth are just mindless drudges who don’t matter, and you become godlike and live in a state of permanent bliss, I suppose? Enlightened people on Tiktok are always happy, nothing bad ever happens to them, and their lack of discernment means they love murderers as much as their own mothers, it's true!
Well, I believe that enlightenment is a little bit more human than that. I actually believe that rather than being something to acquire it’s something you already have inside of you; you were born with this wisdom and it never leaves you, and you can access it whenever you want to, even if you never step foot onto a yoga mat. I also strongly disagree with the notion that it is a “one and done” kind of thing; you don't “become” enlightened one day and then stay that way for the rest of your life. I believe that all of us experience enlightenment at some point in our lives, maybe only for fleeting moments and maybe more than once. Enlightenment is just on the other side of a thin veil, just a breath of air could bring it about, it's so close, and it may come and go as you grow and change.
I can think of two times in my life when I felt that I tapped into my enlightened self, and neither of them took place on retreat or in the yoga studio. Once was several years ago on Hampton Beach (I’ve written and talked about this previously), where for several moments I existed in a state of bliss and felt unconditional love for the press of humanity around me. More recently, about a month ago, I was driving in heavy traffic through Boston and had a similar experience. It was one of those days when you can see the heat rising off the pavement, and I was in stop-and-go traffic coming North through Boston when I noticed a man in leathers with a long, gray beard, riding a Harley in the lane next to mine. I felt in intense empathy for him, thinking about how hot he must be without the speed he needed to keep cool; I wanted to offer him water but didn’t know how to with the way traffic was moving around us.
And then I suddenly felt my compassion from outside of myself, and the feeling became very big (I don’t know how else to describe it). I started looking at the faces of the people around me, all sitting in their own little cars, all in their own little lives, and I felt with my whole body the fact that each of these people had their own intricate lives, families, loved ones, fears, dreams, wishes, secrets. The older woman in the red Subaru had a family she was eager to get home to, and the middle aged man driving the sanitation truck was missing a loved one who had passed, and the young woman with the gigantic sunglasses on in the black Nissan was angry at someone who had hurt her, and on and on…. I could almost sense the divinity in each one of them, how each stranger in the slow-moving cars around me was a whole and complete and vibrant being; more than just their physical body. Each person was a tiny piece of the universe expressing itself in human form for just a fleeting moment.
I felt insignificant and momentous at the same time; singular in my realization but also just one part of the whole, a drop of water in the ocean, a leaf on a massive tree, as I moved along in my own car, with my own thoughts and fears and wishes and dreams. And I think it is this that is true enlightenment; not being above humanity, but being humanity, with its dirt and noise and ugliness, and feeling an intense love and compassion for that humanity which you are a part of. In the midst of Boston traffic on an unbearable hot and humid day, tired and bored, that thin veil dissolved for a little while, and I was enlightened. I could feel the web of energy inside of me and its connection to the earth, to the universe, to the living beings around me, to their inner energy, to their connection with spirit, and around and around, all moving as one. I wasn’t just on the path, I became the path.
(If it makes perfect sense to you why I'd put this image here, welcome fellow millennial - you are one in a krillion.)
There are likely past moments in your life when you entered the stream, where you reached down into an inner depth or felt awe at your interconnectedness, when you experienced your own humanity in the vastness, or had a realization that changed you; a moment you cannot forget, a moment where you touched god or became divine yourself. You have likely experienced molecules of enlightenment before. Yogis and gurus practice rituals, chant mantras, meditate, and contemplate in order to widen the path, to make access to enlightenment more frequent, seeking to reside in that state always, and so they do. Monks exist more frequently in the stream as a result of their intense practice. But know that you can also enter the stream in your pajamas, in your car, in crowded airports, anywhere, because enlightenment does not happen in a particular time or place or after a particular ritual, it’s not in books or incense or crystals (those are tools not the work, itself). Enlightenment is inside of you always; you just need to allow it to arise.
Comments