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.
(To be cont.)
DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. Super Genes co-authored with Rudi Tanzi, PhD will be available on November 10, 2015 www.deepakchopra.com