What is Enlightenment?

I have a very simple answer for you. Enlightenment is AWARENESS. Being aware is they key and the result. How do you and I become aware? Being aware of who you really are and what reality is without all the bias and conditioning and beliefs that most of us have around those topics. Being aware means having an understanding that reality is always our perception of reality and that who we really are is coloured and covered by that perception. Have you seen the Matrix? This is a movie that can be used to explain so much about what we perceive as real. I'm not talking about buying into the cover story of machines gone mad, but the idea that reality is almost like a program that is running in your head of what you expect to see, hear, feel and experience. Imagine for a moment that you could stop a bullet just by thinking about it, you could leap over tall buildings just by knowing that you can and you could fly just by imagining that you can. Well why not? How do you know you cannot until you have truly tried, I don't mean go jump off a tall building, but I do mean fly at least in your imagination and fly with life. Go ahead make goals and reach for them, you can you know, as long as you know you can.

It's the awareness of our limitless potential and the shedding of old beliefs and patterns of thought, the awareness that they do not serve you anymore and the willingness to see them for what they are. Just simply survival techniques, it can be easier to feel the ability to survive a situation if we can latch onto a belief about it, but then we can get stuck holding onto that belief long past the need. Did you know our physical bodies mimic this, and we end up with what is called an 'autoimmune disease', this is when the bodies own defense mechanisms attack it's own cells. It happens when the body uses it immune system in the right way and defends the body against invaders and then forgets to stop and so it goes on attacking healthy cells and treats them like invaders. Beliefs and old patterns are like this in that they can limit our lives in so many ways, attacking from the inside our very own lives instead of helping us to survive. Such is a story I would like to share with you. There was this young woman who grew up in a family of fearful people. Her father was an angry, paranoid man, who loved his family as long as he didn't feel threatened by them. His feeling threatened by them was a regular occurance and led to there being situation that could only be called physically abusive. Any time something happened that the father did not feel able to handle it would be the child or the mothers fault and they were doing it on purpose to upset him. This young woman developed an ulcer in her stomach at 12 years of age just from living in this environment and when her father saw her throwing up every morning before school he accused her of doing it to upset him. So she formed a belief that it is better to say nothing and just let the man of the house have his way, it was safer and she was conditioned by living like this to believe that her survival depended on this belief. Years later this young woman got married to someone who seemed very unlike her father, yet a few years later she suddenly realised that she was married to someone just like him after all and this young woman spent years tiptoeing around trying not to upset him. It took her over 20 years, but she left.

Back to awareness. Is it possible that her beliefs about how marraige works encouraged that side of her husband to come out to the fore in order to teach her that she has a right to be respected and she has a right to have boundaries? It would be nice to put all the blame onto the men (father and husband) who treated her so badly, but that would not be awareness would it? Awareness means that she now realises that she played the victim and so she was treated like one, her ex-husband on the other hand has other beliefs and thought patterns to learn about and he will go on to do that somewhere else as he has his own journey to take and is own lessons to learn. Awareness means that we take responsibility for understanding that our world is what we make it, we create it every moment we are alive, every time we think a pattern of thoughts or go on believing a certain thing is true. This is just one small example with a lot of the learning left out to avoid confusion. But, do you get the picture? Awareness means that you know that thoughts and beliefs arr choices that we make and can be changed without notice :)

Enlightenment is about awareness, awareness is the ability to take a step back from where you have been and where you are going and see what is creating your reality and the realisation that you are. When you reach a state of true awareness and live your life from this, you never get lost in the details, you are in a state of infinite peace with yourself and life. Awareness knows that it is all perfect just as it is, as if it was any other way you would not be learning what you came here to learn. So join me, just sit here, right now and close your eyes, breathe gently in and out and just become aware of being aware, it's so simple just be - here - now - aware and nothing else...