This is a simple course on enlightenment. It’s free with a money back guarantee that something will happen. No telling what that something may be, and it’s not what you expect. So get started right away.
First… there are two very distinct things that enlightened people talk about and it’s important to understand the difference between the two. Because otherwise it’s really easy to get mixed up.
Well maybe actually, there’s three things.
- Enlightenment Teachings
The first thing is when they are talking about enlightenment. They are answering the question of how to become enlightened. How to wake up? How to be illuminated? What’s it like?
These are the most important so it’s good to know how to sort tham out.
2. Philosophy
The second thing is that – being awakened makes a person wiser because they have a greater depth of vision. They can see things with a greater vision because they know themselves better. Knowing yourself you can better understand people. And so the second type of teaching is just really good philosophy.
It’s like: I understand my own anger, and I understand that you are very much like me. So let me tell you about anger. Or let me tell you how society could be better if we only knew how to manage our anger. Things like that.
For instance, an enlightened person will learn something like how the mind works, math, or history, and have a different perspective on it and be able to relay it to the rest of us differently. These teachings are often profound. These teachings can also easily be mostly understood, and repeated, by those who haven’t enlightened their being yet.
This is the majority of spiritual teachings we see.
3. Wrong stuff
And then there is the third thing. It is sometimes just straight out bullshit. The enlightened person is a person. Sometimes they are just talking about something or other. Shooting the breeze. It might be trite or silly.
Sometimes… They are just straight out wrong. Maybe they read a book and misinterpreted it. Osho was a great example of this. The guy was brilliant. He read tons of books. But you know, he was alive during the time when science was really getting a lot of things wrong, or science was just starting to understand how things work, and when Osho would learn things wrong he would then talk about things wrong.
Things like evolution for example. Back in the 60’s and 70’s so few fossils of human beings had been found that evolutionary stories were stupid. Few people had had the opportunity to research data objectively. There was a lot of stuff published about what it means to be human being from an archaeological perspective. And a lot of that science was just straight out wrong.
So if a person, even as brilliant as Osho, read this information they would very likely get the same wrong ideas. For instance: survival of the fittest. Particularly that belief that men are not monogamous and need to go around having sex with everybody. In fact, Osho’s ideas on sex were not grounded in reality. Granted, there was a lot of repression in the time that he grew up. And people needed to bust free from that, that’s for sure. But the overall take he had on it was confusing and not helpful.
So that’s one, two, three… When you’re talking about enlightenment.
One: Actual teachings about becoming enlightened.
Two: Wisdom teachings/Philosophy.
Three: Straight out bullshit
Enlightenment Teaching
It is really important not to get these things mixed up. The teachings about enlightenment itself are fairly straightforward. Yes, they are mysterious sounding, but straightforward in the long run.
Here’s a quote from Osho where he is talking about a step to enlightement.
So the first thing is, stop judging yourself. Instead of judging, start accepting yourself with all your imperfections, all your frailties, all your mistakes, all your failures. Don’t ask yourself to be perfect. That is simply asking for something impossible, and then you will feel frustrated. You are a human being after all.
Transmission of the Lamp. May 1986
Osho’s quote sounds like advice for daily living, but really it’s an important step towards enlightenment. If we are constantly trying to improve ourselves we cannot find who we truly are.
Here’s an enlightenment teaching about stopping the mind:
Make sure you know when you are listening to an actual enlightenment teaching. Teachings about awakening and enlightenment have become complicated and convoluted because there’s been so much written about it now. So at the very least don’t mix it up with philosophy.
Wisdom Teachings
This is usually the bulk of what we hear. Any sort of wisdom that comes from being enlightened however is still philosophy. It has the same difficulties as any kind of philosophy because philosophy itself has a lot of gray areas. Philosophy is based on assumptions which are based on assumptions. Philosophy is based on experiences. Very often the experiences need to be explained first before the philosophy. So we can get very long-winded.
And it’s all intertwined. Some things seem simple and knowable, like love is better than hate. Start looking though and there is a lot of nuance to be explored.
Very often an enlightened person will have wisdom insights that can really knock us out of our habitual patterns. These are very helpful. Particularly when you are listening to a contemporary person, and a live person. A person who is sharing your immediate cultural experience.
But don’t get confused. Philosophy from an enlightened person is still philosophy. It is from a very wise and brilliant person. It should be given a lot of credence. But it is still philosophy. It is still interpretation, there are grey areas.
Actual enlightenment teachings are single pointed.
Here’s some philosophy:
Tricky Number 3
And then there’s that tricky category number three. Everybody goes crazy over this. We believe that enlightened people should be omnicient and omnipotent so we freak out when we hear a mistake out of the Guru.
On the other hand we tend to fiercly believe everything they say and fall into terrible traps.
That’s kind of insane. That expectation of enlightenment came from from centuries ago. Buddha was 800 years before Christ when the body of knowledge available to any human being was so limited that getting a handle on the majority of it would’ve been easy enough for a high status person such as Buddha. He started out brilliant and once he dropped his belief in the lies of his culture then he became really really wise. He probably appeared omnipotent.
But today there’s just too much information. You know… any average microbiologist would be a hundred times smarter than Buddha ever was, as long as he was limited to his subject. He’d be able to talk circles around Buddha in any science-based discussion. But that does not in any way detract from whether Buddha was enlightened or not. So if an enlightened person gets some facts, some details, wrong it’s really no big deal. Don’t freak out.
On the other hand, if they are presenting themselves as a teacher, and get the basics about enlightenment wrong… drop them like a hot potato.
Don’t believe anything blindly. If an enlightened person says something that’s really stupid … Don’t believe it. Don’t follow it. Shrg and move on.
If an unenlightened person says something that sounds wonderful and beautiful be very cautious. That’s where the real danger lies.
Here’s some imperfection for you today:
So listen for these three different things. Learn to determine what is going on. The teaching of enlightenment itself, wisdom teachings, and straight out cornyness or bullshit.
For instance. This article itself is number two. It’s not really giving any information about enlightenment itself. It’s just talking about stuff that I’ve learned in the hopes that it will be useful for you. It has twinklings of number three in it, but hey, that’s for future generations to decide.
Smile