Peak-Experience

Who are we before anything else ever was? Who are we permanently at our core? When we take everything that is impermanent away, who are we?

When we begin to remove things that we often consider to be the ultimate, we are left with God. However, although God may be the ultimate, our concepts of God are not. Though religion plays a beautiful role in this conceptual world of ours, it still prevents us from God, from the ultimate, because it labels God. For instance, it says, God is good, God is benevolent, or God is wrathful. Any label cannot describe God, cannot describe the ultimate. The ultimate is that which is before anything and everything else, including our concepts of God. In fact, God or the ultimate precedes any label we can use to describe them.

Our concepts are that which … Read More »

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#37 Enlightenment-The Only Obstacle to Our Happiness is Ourselves

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#36 Enlightenment-Living in the Present Moment-Pure Beingness

When looking at causation, we need to ask: What causes things? What is the ultimate cause of everything? By taking a look at the universe we can see that everything is interlinked at such a level that we can’t help but wonder if anything really can happen. We need to understand that it’s up to the universe to make things happen. The entire universe needs to conspire to cause them to happen.

There’s this wonderful saying that I like: “When I pull a blade of grass, the entire universe shakes.” Scientists and philosophers around the world will agree with and validate the fact that things are interconnected. Everything is interlinked even at microscopic level. But all this causality and interlinking occurs in space and time. When it comes to enlightenment, what we’re talking about is that which is before, beyond and … Read More »

I wrote a poem based on a Zen tradition and it describes aspects of enlightenment:

I wake up,
rain washes the trees,
smells are fresh,
spring is abounding now,
then I wake to the illusion
I’m dreaming.

Enlightenment is about waking up to the reality that life isn’t real. It’s merely an illusion, an extended dream. Our minds create a reality, saying “This is real, everything is real, I am real.” Instead of just witnessing life and being aware of it, we identify with our lives and take them on as an identity.

Enlightenment is like seeing the world through the moon and then all of a sudden, the sun arises and we see the real world through the sun. Everything that we’ve imagined to be real through the glow of the moon pales in comparison to what we see through the sun or through enlightenment.

When enlightenment occurs, … Read More »

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#35 Enlightenment-Letting Go of Everything to Discover Who We Are

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#34 Enlightenment-To Find “Peace of Mind” We Have to go Beyond the Mind

Life is a dance between two intense emotions: fear and desire. We go back and forth between these two throughout our lives. But what we’re exploring here is what precedes and pervades life before desire and fear.

Who are we, foundationally, before these two emotions that we go back and forth between? Enlightenment is about permanence – who we are at our foundation, who we are that doesn’t change, who we are that remains permanent. The only thing that we can attest to and which stays permanent from the day we’re born until the day we die is awareness. We are aware that sometimes we experience pain and sometimes we experience desire. They change and develop, but that which never changes is our awareness.

We are the awareness of what is happening right here and right now. A universe full of things … Read More »

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#33 Enlightenment-Changing the Way We See Ourselves-The World Isn’t Flat

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#32 Enlightenment-How to Love the World & Live an Enlightened Life

Some questions we need to ask ourselves when finding out who we are and how to live in the world in an enlightened way include: “What are the various states of being in which we exist?” and “What ultimately is our true, primordial, foundational state of being?”
As human beings we exist in three states. The first one is wakefulness, the second is dreaming and the third is sleep in which no dreaming occurs. These are the three states of being that we exist in throughout our lives.

Typically, what we do as we live our lives is assume that the world is real and we just perceive it as it is. What we think is that the world is tangible, factual and we just exist in it. But what if we inverted this, and asked, “Could there be a world if … Read More »

When we desire something, we first have to work for it. Often we find ourselves spending a large amount of mental energy thinking about it, wishing for it and wanting it to happen. But after working for it, we should let go and just be.

Living in a state of beingness means that we do the actions which lead to our desires and then we let go. For instance, let’s say we’re dating someone who we really desire to have as our permanent partner. At first we date them, we spend time with them, and we tell them that we love them. We might do things that help them to love us back. But when we’re not with them or doing those things to win over their hearts, we just be.

If we are washing the dishes, we’re simply washing the dishes. … Read More »

When we think about our lives, the people in our lives, the work we go to, the city we live in, the galaxy we’re a part of and the whole universe, we think of it as so real, tangible, ever present and everlasting. But because we perceive it in our minds and we can only perceive that which our minds can grasp, it’s actually a very small universe. It is also transitory – it doesn’t last. It only lasts and exists when we think about it. If we see it as a dream then we can locate truth.

There’s a song that goes, ‘Life is but a dream.’ Take this to be the truth: that life is just a dream. All that we experience is just a dream on which the dreamer is who we are trying to find. Then our … Read More »

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#31 Enlightenment-What Is The Ultimate Reality of What Is?

As we go through life, sometimes we have beautiful experiences. They are so wonderful that we are filled with a desire to hold onto them for as long as possible. But why we can’t hang onto them and why they go away is because we can only remember them in the mind.

The mind itself is not stable; it isn’t consistent. We can’t hold onto those experiences because the mind often changes. The question to ask ourselves is: “What is consistent? What is stable?” We have to go beyond the mind to find that which is stable and always is. But, how is it possible to move beyond the mind?

The key here is to reach beingness and to move into that place which is present before the mind conceptualizes and critiques things. The mind is constantly providing commentary for things that … Read More »