I’m going to be completely honest with you, this post on spiritual enlightenment (also known as spiritual awakening) is going to completely mind-fuck you.
By mind-fuck I mean you are going to be thinking “wooaahh where do I even go from here?” What I’m going to disclose to you will completely shock you and probably trigger a wide variety of emotions.
That is normal. If you don’t feel any emotions after I tell you the most shocking revelation you’ll ever hear, then you aren’t really grasping the significance of this truth.
You need to take this truth seriously because it is the most advanced, profound, important, and challenging concept in all of personal development.
This truth is vital if you want to self-actualize because without it your entire life is basically a lie and therefore you can’t truly self-actualize.
Understanding this truth is required if you want to discover true happiness and true love at the most profound level.
What Is Spiritual Enlightenment?
I am going to try to conceptually and rationally communicate to you what spiritual enlightenment/spiritual awakening is, as best as I possibly can.
But before I break it down rationally I need to say this, this truth is something that can’t be communicated because communication is just conceptual in nature.
This truth and insight can only be experienced through 1st person experience/phenomena.
Here is an example of what I mean, let’s say you never heard of or experienced an orange. I can explain to you in extreme detail everything that makes an orange an orange, I can explain to you it’s appearance and how it tastes until you are blue in the face, but this conceptual construction of the orange will never lead you to truly experiencing the orange. Do you get a sense of what I mean?
Stop confusing the map for the territory.
If you ever want to experience or attain spiritual enlightenment you are going to have to go through many 1000s of hours of hard work. It will be the hardest thing you ever do, no doubt about it.
Since spiritual enlightenment can’t ever be communicated what I hope to achieve with this article is to open your mind up to what is possible and how it can utterly change your life.
I hope that I can inspire you try to experience spiritual enlightenment for yourself (through practice) and eventually get a glimpse or even a tiny taste of it so that you realize that it is the Truth with a capital T.
You don’t exist! I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean you literally don’t exist!
Take a second to really take in what I just stated.
Your personal existence, the you that you believe you are, is all a big fat illusion.
What Do You Mean I Don’t Exist, How Is That Possible?
You as a perceiver of perceptions, does not exist.
You think of yourself as a perceiver that perceives things, such as these words on your screen, that is false. That is illusory.
What if I told you that only perceptions exist and that perceptions exist without perceivers? Well, that is indeed the truth.
I want you to deeply contemplate this question, what makes you fundamentally you? What makes you you at the most fundamental level?
I want you to go as deep as possible and really feel the question, what makes you, you?
If you are extremely honest with yourself you will come to the realization that there is no part of you that is extremely grounded and that you can solidly say it is what makes you essentially you.
Who you think you are is like a house of cards, it’s flimsy and you can take it apart card by card.
So what or who do you think you are?
Most of you will think about this and come to the conclusion that you are the brain. You will think Jack, I am the brain duh.
But are you? What if you fell and hit your head and a part of your personality changes? Are you really just your brain if it can be altered so easily?
How about the thoughts that arise from the brain, is that what you are fundamentally?
Ok, I’ll help you out, the you that you really think you are is just a thought.
Your entire being and identity (the you that you think you are) is a concept invented by your thoughts.
You is just a construction/conception of the mind. I am not even going to say “your” mind because in actuality there is no you to claim it.
There is no ownership to be had, thoughts arise as perceptions from pure nothingness. You can use pure consciousness to observe these thoughts and realize this truth.
Actually you can discover this truth using a variety of techniques such as meditation, self observation, and self-inquiry. When you seriously observe your own thoughts you will come to this realization.
In the near future I will explain each technique in detail so that you can actually practice spirituality and attain spiritual enlightenment, if you choose to do so.
How Am I Just An Illusion? What Am I?
We seem to think that we are experiencing nature from our point of view, but the truth is that we are nature experiencing it’s self.
Our sense of identity developed as a survival mechanism and it takesof credit for everything (including your ownership). We can call this the ego, and by ego, we mean your entire self-constructed identity.
Think of it like this, there are 2 selfs, the fake/little self and the true/ultimate self.
Your fake self is you thinking you are just this human animal perceiving life and all of it’s perceptions. 99.9999% of the population is stuck in this illusory paradigm.
The true self is 100% pure consciousness. This is hard to put into words so bear with me. Think of consciousness as pure emptiness, this pure emptiness is where everything stems from.
Existence (pure consciousness) itself arises from nothingness.
And from nothingness I don’t mean the simple nothing that we all think of. I mean PURE nothingness. It’s so nothing that it’s impossible to comprehend, it can only be experienced.
Attempting to conceptual and rationalize pure nothingness is only mental masturbation, it can’t be done.
Just a heads up, on your path to spiritual enlightenment you will come across a wide variety of different terms that are synonymous and interchangeable with nothingness.
- Nothingness
- Pure Nothingness
- Awareness
- Pure Awareness
- Consciousness
- Pure Consciousness
- Infinity
- Infinite
- Absolute Infinity
- Being
- Pure Being
- “I Am”
- Sunyata
- God
Remember that phrase from Alan Watts “you the universe experiencing itself?” A more accurate phrase is “you are nothing experiencing everything.”
Does Spiritual Enlightenment Reveal Other Truths?
When you experience or attain spiritual enlightenment you will understand your true nature and the true nature of existence/consciousness.
You will experience many deep insights depending on how deep your enlightenment experience is.
Some people have enlightenment experiences so profound that they experience various mind blowing insights simultaneously, while others might discover these truths at a much slower rate and perhaps individually.
Here are some other shocking insights that are attained through spiritual enlightenment:
- You currently believe that existence is materialistic/physical, that is illusory and in fact this can be proven through quantum mechanics. Think of existence pure consciousness.
- Existence is mystical, it cant be any other way. The big bang, an infinite universe, or consciousness being all that exists, all these perspectives on existence (whether correct or incorrect) are epistemologically mystical.
- The past and the future are just constructs of your mind. The only thing that exists is the present moment.
- Existence is infinitely intelligent. Think of existence as an entire chess board, it controls all of the chess pieces (and we are the chess pieces and we think we have free will and separate identities). It knows every move and every future move, this is because everything is conducted by and takes place in existence. We mistakenly believe that intelligence evolves over time but that is because the human mind can only think linearly.
- Free will is an illusion, everything is already determined by consciousness. We falsely believe that free will exists because we believe we exist as an entity/perceiver that is in control of itself. Our thoughts evolved to trick us that we are self aware by claiming ownership and responsibility for everything.
- Existence is not rational. Rationality is a construct of the human mind.
- Morality doesn’t exist, it’s a construct of the human mind.
- Evil doesn’t exist, it’s a construct of the human mind.
- Paradoxes are a construct of the human mind. There are no paradoxes that can be found in reality, go out and try to actually spot and directly experience a paradox.
- Meaning/purpose are constructs of the human mind.
- Everything happens perfectly, should and could don’t exist.
- Objectivity is an illusion. Existence/reality is subjective, it is objectively subjective.
- Death and life don’t exist, they are just constructs of the human mind. There is only pure consciousness, which is eternal.
- There is only imagination and it has absorbed you so completely that you just cannot grasp how far from reality you have wandered. Imagination is richly creative, universe upon universe are built on it. Yet they are all in space and time, past and future, which just don’t exist.
- The universe is spawned by consciousness, consciousness is not spawned from the universe. With consciousness there is everything, without consciousness there is nothing.
- Your conviction that you are conscious of a existence is existence. The existence you perceive is made of consciousness; what you call matter is consciousness itself.
- “I am” is an ever present fact, while “I am created” is an idea. Neither God nor the universe have come to tell you that they have created you. The mind, obsessed by the idea of causality, invents creation and then wonders “who is the creator?” The mind itself is the creator. Even this is not quite true, for the created and its creator are one. The mind and existence are not separate. Do understand that what you think of to be existence is your own mind. All space and time are in the mind.
You can experience all of these profound and powerful truths/insights by experiencing or attaining spiritual enlightenment.
Also, I want to note that I only briefly mentioned these insights so that you are aware of them and aware of whats possible.
I am going to break down every insight individually in extreme detail in the next couple weeks, so I recommend you subscribe and stay tuned to the blog!
Should I Practice Spirituality & What Are The Benefits Of Spiritual Enlightenment?
You can experience all of the insights that I mentioned earlier and don’t you wan’t to know the Truth with a capital T? This reason alone should be enough to inspire you to practice spirituality.
If you don’t value truth and curiosity super highly there are still a laundry list of benefits that you can experience from practicing spirituality and attaining spiritual enlightenment.
Benefits of attaining spiritual enlightenment:
- Experience true happiness and joy.
- End all your suffering.
- End all your fears.
- Cure all or any addictions.
- Experience true love.
- Cure neurotic behaviors.
- Master and control your emotions.
- Cure hedonistic tendencies.
- Vastly improve your creativity.
- Improve ability to tap into infinite intelligence.
- Vastly improve your mental strength.
- Vastly improve your mental clarity.
- Be much more humble and grateful.
- You will be selfless instead of selfish.
- Vastly improve critical thinking.
- You will be harder to manipulate.
- Often be in a state of bliss.
- You will live an extraordinary life.
How about now, feeling more inspired? I should ask you this, why would you not strive for spiritual enlightenment?
I mean what the fuck is so important or more important than experiencing all of the benefits I listed and living an extraordinary life?
What the fuck is more important than living an indescribably profound life and experiencing the ultimate TRUTH?
But Is Spiritual Enlightenment Really Possible For Me?
Yes, unless you are suffering from a severe mental condition spiritual enlightenment is possible for pretty much anyone who truly wants it and puts in the work.
Now are you going to attain spiritual enlightenment? I would confidently bet that you are not going to attain spiritual enlightenment.
Here is the thing, spiritual enlightenment is so difficult to achieve because you have to dissolve your ego (identity).
Do you understand the significance of this? You literally have to kill yourself, or rather your fake self and the you that you falsely think you are.
You are probably going to be to scared and too selfish to start practicing spirituality with the goal to kill your ego, otherwise known as ego death.
If you don’t start practicing spirituality because you don’t want to reach spiritual enlightenment, I don’t blame you. It is so rare that I would guess the number of fully enlightened humans on planet earth is probably anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand at most.
Nevertheless, it is possible to attain if you want it strongly enough.
How Long Will It Take Me?
Spiritual enlightenment is spiritual awakening, you have to wake up from many many years of of being asleep.
Unwiring your entire framework is no easy task. Even when you think you are finally experiencing spiritual awakening, you will experience a strong ego backlash.
Your ego is like the villain in all the horror films, just when you think you killed it, it comes back stronger than ever. You will experience this many times, until one day you killed your ego for good.
To achieve permanent enlightenment it will probably take you a couple decades…if you are lucky. Probably more like 30 to 40 years, if you achieve it at all.
Don’t get freaked out by how long it takes to attain spiritual enlightenment!
You don’t have to attain it permanently, you can actually experience multiple temporary yet powerful enlightenment experiences that will benefit you tremendously and completely transform your life.
You can achieve a temporary enlightenment experience and temporarily experience ego death, relatively quickly. Anywhere between 3 months to 2 years, depending on how hard you work for it.
Also, there is a quick hack that can give you an enlightenment experience almost instantly. This can be achieved with powerful psychedelic substances, however I don’t recommend using psychedelics unless you already have been seriously practicing spirituality and in the right state of mind to use psychedelics as a tool to speed up your progress.
I will talk about psychedelics in great dept in a future post.
Why Isn’t Spiritual Enlightenment More Mainstream?
I have an interesting fact for you, did you know that just about all mainstream religions were created because of a few enlightened individuals attempted to teach and spread spirituality and spiritual enlightenment to the masses?
Many of the founders and important figures of mainstream religions were simply enlightened human beings with the intention of spreading the profound truths and insights that come with spiritual enlightenment.
For example, Jesus Christ was a very enlightened person and his quotes demonstrate this, lets check some of them out.
“I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus was saying that worldly possessions distract us from reaching spiritual enlightenment as it only feeds the ego and strengthens it. Spiritual enlightenment leads to heaven due to no more suffering. Heaven is symbolic for a blissful life, which is attained once suffering is eradicated through spirituality.
“But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
Jesus is enlightened and therefore he is the son of the father (consciousness), and with this quote he is saying that you can reach his level of enlightenment, but in order to do so you must treat everyone/everything equally.
“Little children, you are from God, and have conquered them; for the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in this world.”
Do you understand the profundity of this quote? He clearly stated that there are 2 yous. The fake self and the one your currently believe you are, a human brain in a physical reality, and the true you which is consciousness from which the world (existence) stems from.
“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
This statement is Jesus stating that he has reached the truth therefore he became the truth, and that the only way you can reach spiritual awakening is by
The quotes above are just a small sample of insights from 1 enlightened sage. Do some research and you will find many thousands of examples from many sages throughout history.
You see, the problem is that it is so difficult to communicate the incommunicable (spiritual enlightenment), that the masses formed religions out of these teachings, wrongly spreading dogma and therefore corrupting the teachings and insights from sages/mystics of the past.
Also, note that was even harder to communicate spirituality in ancient times as society was much less nuanced.
Remember when I said the map is not the territory? What went wrong with just about every mainstream religion is that they are claiming that the map is the territory.
Words are the map and religions expect you to experience the truth that is “God” or “Consciousness” simply by accepting the map as the truth.
I saw a video on spiritual enlightenment where this guy summed it up beautifully with a statement that went like this, “Atheists don’t believe in the OH MY GOD, religious folks believe in the OH MY GOD, and spiritually enlightened folks actually experienced the OH MY GOD.”
The same goes for everything that I am telling you here, don’t take my words as truth! I am just trying to get you inspired enough to practice spirituality so that you eventually experience the OH MY GOD.
Also, another reason that spiritual enlightenment isn’t mainstream is that when people become enlightened/awake they don’t tend to have the motivation to teach, which tends to dissolve once the ego dissolves.
Just because spiritual enlightenment isn’t taken seriously in modern society doesn’t mean it won’t in the future.
While civilization is still in the dark ages consciously, I believe that we as a civilization will awake in the future.
My beliefs aside, there are two ultimate fates for civilization. We either will become collectively enlightened and live a happy and prosperous existence, or we never reach enlightenment which will lead to more suffering and eventually civilization perishing from existence.
Why Should I Take You Seriously & What Are Your Credentials?
I can only hope that you take me seriously because I want you to take your personal development seriously.
You should take living an extraordinary and profound life seriously.
To reach the highest levels of life you are going to have to self-actualize and to do that you have to seek and learn life’s deepest truths and insights, which is done not through dogmatic thinking and scientific thinking. It is done through increasing your consciousness, duh consciousness is all there is!
I feel like I can really help you out if you decide to embark on this journey.
I have been actively practicing consciousness work/spirituality for the last 3 years.
There is an important point I need to make clear, I have not attained spiritual enlightenment, however I have experienced it twice, briefly.
My temporary enlightenment experiences only lasted about 10 hours combined, but those where the 10 most shockingly beautiful, blissful, and profound hours I have ever experienced. Words can never and will never explain the beauty of these mystical experiences.
There is no doubt in my mind that I will one day attain spiritual enlightenment due to the sheer amount of work I put into it.
I meditate and practice self-inquiry daily. I also participate in long solo retreats, which in my opinion are the best for growth.
Not to long ago I went on a solo retreat where I sat in silence and stillness for 7 days straight (only breaking my stillness to eat once a day and sleep for about 4 hours every night).
On my solo retreats I grow more in a week than I do in 3 normal months, they are incredible.
Anyways I will talk about the best practices for spiritual growth in another post.
As I mentioned before, I don’t want you to take my words as 100% truth. I can only hope my words will inspire you to start investigating spirituality and consciousness for yourself.
It is staggering how much one’s awareness can be increased. I am talking about by a magnitude of millions of times more.
I have been doing serious consciousness work for 3 years and I feel I have just scratched the surface.
Are you guys ready to go on this journey with me? I feel like I can be of great help to anyone who wants to start getting involved in spirituality.
I can warn and educate you on all the traps and pitfalls that I stumble across and how to maneuver past them.
If you have any questions or want to share your experiences with spiritual enlightenment or spirituality in general feel free to post it in the comment section below.
Stayed tuned as I am going to go much deeper with this topic and similar topics.
Until next time,
-Jack Freeman
PS – Click here to learn the most direct and practical methods to attain spiritual enlightenment.
Ashley says
Hi matey, nice to meet you.
I’m hearing a lot of Alan Watts in this 🙂 Watts is a legend!
I’ve been trying to get my head around consciousness/infinite awareness (which is how I ended up here) but I’m still not really getting it lol. Anyway, no worries. I’ll defo take a look around the site and read this again at a later date.
Cheers
Ashley
Sanjay Bose says
Even if i do self inquiry, i personally feel it is very difficult to do. The reason behind this is the interference of the people around me. Everytime people living around me change, i personally feel change in my behaviour. For example, a new tenant came in our building lead to increase in anxiety which ultimately increases my appetite. Moreover, i have one question why no. of enlightened being is less compared to large population of human beings?
Jack Freeman says
Hi Sanjay, you have to do your self inquiry when no one is around and also do more of it. I recommended getting away from everyone for a solo 1 week retreat and see where that takes you. The reason why there are so few enlightened people is because of what you stated. Society doesn’t want to wake up because waking up literally means killing yourself (Your ego) and dissolving your identity. Society and culture helps us do the opposite and strengthen the ego.
Micant says
Hi!!
In my personal experience is also about being able to tolerate your surroundings not by really ¨tolerating¨ them… but by being able to see and feel the bliss in them.
Also, its about being able to experience emotions and feelings without running away from them. If i have anxiety i allow myself to feel it… but i don´t do anything about it… I get still (body and mind) and just feel it.. suddenly it transforms into an intense joy.
It is more possible to attain permanent enlightment when you are living your normal life… because is right there where the ego tests you.
Solo retreats are a great way of training yourself for being rooted in your true self and to train yourself to experience feelings without thinking about them or wanting to change them. But you only know if your ego has died when you have this tests…
Every trigger is a way of getting to know your ego. Every trigger leads you to an old belief based in an old wound-experience. Every trigger It´s not about anyone else but ourselves…
Eric says
Ta, very helpful & powerful blog. Would like 2 share my experienes which r similar 2 yours. How?
Jack Freeman says
Hi Eric thanks. You can share your experiences by commenting or sending me an email.