The Buddha in his Enlightenment
The Enlightenment I’m going to speak about in this blog is much more than the Enlightenment that the great French philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire wrote about in the so-called Age of Enlightenment that helped create the idealism and egalitarianism that led to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. These two documents helped inspire a more enlightened way of looking at government throughout the world for decades and centuries to come. They still do.
The Enlightenment I’m going to speak about in this blog is also more than the understanding of the Law of Attraction and Creative Thought that’s become so popular with the best-selling book and video, The Secret. It’s also more than the understanding of New Age principles. It’s the realization of living truths that were recorded more than 40 centuries ago.
The Enlightenment I’m going to speak about in this blog is more than the Cosmic Consciousness flashes depicted in the revolutionary book, Cosmic Consciousness, written slightly over a century ago by the Canadian psychiatrist R.M. Bucke. In this seminal classic, a desert island read for me if I was limited to even just a handful of books, the Walt Whitman biographer voluminously revered the mystical glimpses of great seers, sages, philosophers, poets and the like throughout history. The book is so important in the history of consciousness because the spiritual experiences that it celebrates are given greater importance than the ritual performance that takes place a couple of hours every weekend in America.
As important as all these different versions of Enlightenment are, Enlightenment is much, much more. It’s only fitting in this age of 24/7 that Enlightenment becomes widely known as the all-time 24/7 state that it is, rather than an occasional glimpse or fleeting experience that it isn’t. You may visit Paris as a tourist for a vacation: a Parisian on the other hand, is French. And so it is with Enlightenment: a perpetual condition of transformed consciousness as much as it is of purified physiology. Because it takes the transformation of the nervous system to consciously reflect for all times—all the time—the timelessness of the Transcendent that’s your essential nature, the ground of your inner Being, your true higher Self.