I wanted to share my experiences and perceptions of ‘what counts’ as a moment of enlightenment and what the physiological experience of what I call Buddhahood is like.
The truth is I don’t have very fixed ideas about what enlightenment is – so this is more of a conversation starter than anything. The idea is to loosen some of the contraction we have as a collective around talking about this stuff. To make it more acceptable for people to share their experiences authentically without necessarily caring what it says about them or their status as a meditator.
I personally see enlightenment as a process rather than a state. There are undeniably lots of specific moments that contribute towards this process. For the purpose of this post I am focusing on the moments that give us a felt sense that we do not have a permanent, fixed self. These are physiologically proven to change our embodied state of being.
The ability to perceive the world in this way doesn’t mean that we don’t have any self at all. We obviously have a self that we embody throughout our life, it’s just that we are always changing and our experience is always being co-created with our environment. This is what I mean by it is not fixed or permanent. Having moments where we perceive the world in a way where we have no sense of a separate self helps us to realise the changing inter-connected nature of things on a visceral level, which is really useful for knowing ourselves better and connecting with the world more deeply.
In the paradigm I live in there is no one true way of awakening or experiencing moments of enlightenment. Truth arises from people sharing honestly and coming to some level of agreed meaning, so the more openly we can share and the more we are able to accept and explore each other’s viewpoints the better our ability to come to a meaningful truth between us. Also, human experience is diverse and we all have lots of experiences that are very similar in some ways and quite different in other ways. All of them are valid. It’s important to validate people’s inner experiences and to let go about what these things mean for our status.
I have a huge amount of clarity in my felt experience and yet describing all of these things is very difficult. It’s a bit like trying to describe what an orgasm feels like. Firstly, that’s very hard to do especially if you don’t have a common language around it. Secondly, every orgasm is different. In the same way every single moment of awakening I have ever had, even when it is in the same category, has been subtly or grossly different to all the other ones.
In the same thread, lots of spiritual traditions claim that experiencing a certain moment of enlightenment will show you the true nature of reality. Really, these moments are all just different ways of experiencing the world. They all show different facets of reality, none is a fundamental truth. Truth and reality is co-arising with everything else. If a tradition has fixed ideas about what is true, then I can imagine it will just encourage people to feel like they are getting it ‘wrong’. If you flip teaching on its head and validate and nurture people’s unique experiences you will find that they will reach much deeper and more interesting states of consciousness much quicker than if you try and get them to see things the way you want them to.
Drugs and meditation can unravel our experience and it can cause us to get stuck in ways of perceiving the world that aren’t always helpful for us. They can cause paranoia and other mental health problems. It’s important that we are able to practice consciously with our hearts so that we are opening the door to these states in wholesome and supportive ways. If we open our hearts we can build our different states of consciousness on a strong base of compassionate presence and joy.
All of these moments increased my capacity to engage with life whole-heartedly and this is what matters to me. Our ability to embody states that deepen our connection with ourselves and our lives is what is most important about awakening to me. It is also worth saying that some of the most deeply awake people I know don’t consider themselves to be enlightened.
However, for the sake of this blog post, I am focusing on moments of enlightenment that shift our perception of a fixed, permanent self. It is worth saying explicitly that none of these moments will solve all your problems or stop you needing to be loved or accepted by fellow humans.
Some people experience one very clear moment of enlightenment that they spent years building up to; they can probably describe the effects of that on their life very clearly.
I was born with a pretty strong sense of non-duality and selflessness. I am also an intense combination of being extremely sensitive, being very absorbent and having a lot of life-force in me, which made meditation a crazy rollercoaster for me. I had also done loads of insanely deep psychotherapeutic work by the time I started meditating that gave me a very open heart. All of these things meant that starting a meditation practice was like lighting a fuse that led up to a firework factory; it started exploding with intense experiences and basically never stopped. It can be hard to untangle which specific moments had which impacts on my life, although there are a couple that stick out.
I have listed just a handful of the moments I have experienced from a vast sea of everything from disorienting and psychedelic states of consciousness that lasted years to intense bliss states that revealed more in a moment than could be explained in an entire book.
All the moments I’ve listed meet the criteria of eliminating the felt sense of a fixed, separate self and they all happened before I really fell off a cliff into what I would describe as Buddhahood.
The experiences are roughly in order of when I experienced them.
My experience is that all of these can happen on a sliding scale. It is possible to experience them at 100%, but it is not an on and off system. It’s possible to get some sense of them in a more subtle way and this probably happens to people all the time in a low level way. Becoming more aware of this in daily life is a way of increasing the impact that this can have on your life and increasing your chances of experiencing the big moments, if that is what you want. It is more likely to have a lasting impact on your wellbeing and the positive ways that you interact with the world if it happens in a sustainable way, rather than just a one-off.
Ultimately, you need to decide for yourself what you count as enlightenment or awakening. I am not suggesting that experiencing any of the below counts as being enlightened, but I do think they help towards the process. Ultimately, I hope that people can learn to have sensible conversations about this topic that support people to awaken and don’t devolve into status grabbing or arguing.
Lots of teaching on enlightenment focus purely on the moments that diminish our sense of self from the perspective of the mind and awareness or consciousness.
We can actually awaken each part of our experience – body, heart, mind and soul. They aren’t strictly separate from each other and they all interweave, I have included moments that relate to all areas of experience – the body, heart, mind and soul – as I believe that this is more representative of human experience and connecting with it all in a more whole-hearted way.
Moments of Enlightenment
Smoking Salvia
I smoked a lot of salvia as a teenager. It is possibly the most intense drug there is, whose effects only last about 10 minutes. If you take a high enough dose it will entirely remove your perception of having a separate self. Everything you know to be true is stripped away from you and the entirety of your experience becomes one big changing thing that you are not separate from. It used to be legal in the UK and it’s pretty much the least addictive drug there is; it is so mind-bending that people typically take it once and don’t want to take it again. Because I reached this state through taking drugs, rather than meditation, it didn’t have a lasting effect on how I experienced reality; however, I do believe that having taken so much of it, it opened the pathways in my brain to experiencing reality in this way and made it a lot easier for me to reach this state without drugs at a later date. This is also a way that people could get a glimpse of this type of experience without having to meditate loads. So I thought it was worth including.
Peak Interconnected Emotional Experiences
Before meditating I experienced a couple of moments in my life where the whole of my reality totally collapsed in an emotionally intense way. One was watching a band at Glastonbury, the other was watching a youtube video of one of Alan Watts’ lovely, poetic lectures that was edited and set to music. In both instances I burst very suddenly into tears. I felt emotionally that the entirety of my life and of human history and experience was folding in on itself, as if everything in the world was being condensed towards that moment of time and experience. For a few moments I no longer existed separately from anything else and I came back around to find myself with tears pouring out my eyes. I’ve found that experiences similar to this can also be triggered by deep moments of synchronicity.
Falling into Shadows
This happened to me when I was confronting an inner shadow that was so consuming and overwhelming it became my entire experience. It felt a bit like falling off a cliff into an abyss of darkness where I no longer perceived anything as being separate. I would surface back out the other side into a separate self again with a deep sense of equanimity and feeling like I had shed some weight. It happened to me during an intense form of shadow work therapy a few times before I started meditating and became a very common occurrence afterwards.
If I had to choose a moment for ‘stream-entry’ then I would choose the first time that this happened to me, three years before I started meditating. It was so transformative that it fundamentally changed how I perceived and interacted with reality. I had felt on a visceral level that the way we understand reality is based as much on our inner world as our outer world and that these things aren’t separate from each other. This is when I became obsessed with the idea that it could be possible to get to the bottom of all human suffering.
Just before I started meditating I had a huge moment like this that cracked my heart open. This gave me a laser-beam level of focus and clarity on what was important to me in each moment and a strong base of joy from which to build my experiences on. I believe this ability to meet so much of the world, including the darkness, with an open heart is the main reason my process was so quick and ultimately, what it all ended up being about.
Connected Imaginal Practice
I only started meditating when I realised that imaginal practice and intense sensations were part of the deal. I had so much of them it was impossible for me to meditate without them. I had lots of intense meditative experiences that were very self-involving, like feeling like my head was the size of a hot air balloon or becoming insanely sensitive to tiny sensations of touch.
But I also started getting some big moments that diminished my sense of a separate self. For example, when I was watching a live band, I shut my eyes and my entire experience morphed into an experience where each member of the band became a planet like earth and the rest of my whole experience was just space. There was no sense of a separate me that was watching. I also had an experience where I felt I was disappearing into the archetypal history of how the masculine and feminine had played out since the beginning of time and when I returned into a deep trance state I described my experience by saying, ‘I am love. I am everything.’
During meditating with people I would also get experiences where they would arise in my imaginal practice and afterwards they would talk about things that had happened, without realising that I had seen it in the meditation.
All of these are experiences, rather than moments. I believe they come from increasing the connection, or reducing the separation, between ourselves and the shared soul or karma. This part of experience isn’t about single moments but about flow and the story of life. These aren’t really talked about in modern Buddhism or meditation practice. I believe that these give you a different, but still important way of understanding that we do not have a fixed, separate self.
Time Collapse 1
This is the moment where what I experienced most closely links to descriptions I have heard of Buddhist enlightenment, although it seems that all those are different too.
This happened five months after I started meditating. It was preceded by a period of 6 weeks of deep equanimity (or more descriptively – feeling happy with being in a state of severe clinical depression).
The moment itself I was listening to a recorded dharma talk. I was having an intense time in a very deep meditative state. The sense was of having the strangest and strongest sensation of time having collapsed. It didn’t completely disappear like it does during a cessation, it was more like the whole of the Universe and its history had condensed into something that was occurring in one single moment that I had experienced. Every single thing that had happened and was going to happen, including me, was happening all at once in that one moment.
This broke my phase of equanimity and there is a clear difference in how I felt in the world before and after this moment. I felt a lot freer in the expression of what was inside me and less separate to what was around me. This is one of the moments that has really stuck with me and I have never experienced anything quite like it again. I am still fascinated by it.
Kundalini Awakening
This unfolded over many months, but there were two big key moments that happened within a few days of each other. One was opening up to the ground and feeling a rush of erotic energy flood my being, the second was relaxing my mind and allowing that energy to flow up and out of my head.
After this I spent 6 weeks where I was full of energy. I would sleep for only 4 hours a night, I would give my partner electric shocks on a regular basis and I felt completely happy and free from suffering in every moment.
This was the start of me unhinging from agreed reality; there is a phenomena called kundalini psychosis – your body and intuition is opening to receiving lots of new information that your mind doesn’t know how to translate or make sense of in a sensible way so you get psychotic beliefs or episodes.
I went very willingly diving into it at first because I had been very interested in Jung and his exploration of his own psychosis and when it first started happening I was in such a profound state of bliss and wellness that it felt like a good thing to do.
Suffering came back full force after this and I was actually hit with a lot of pain in the energy body. I spent a lot of time untangling knots in my pyscho-emotional-energetic experience to allow this to flow more freely through me.
I have retained the ability to channel this energy up and out of me. It happens a lot during shamanic journeying and the phenomena that I call ‘shooting light out the top of my head’ showed up very clearly on an EEG machine.
Unity Consciousness
My initial momentary experiences of unity consciousness were when I felt like I was perceiving the world entirely through my heart. Sense of time disappeared but it typically lasted what felt like a few seconds, followed by a slowish return to normal reality. There was sometimes still some sense of self retained in the experience, but I could primarily see that our experience was being co-created.
I went through a phase where I would wake up in the night in states of unity consciousness, it is maybe more likely to happen then because my brain hadn’t fully come online yet.
I’m not sure if this is true, but I also had the felt-sense that some of these moments were ‘downloaded’ from other people. It’s like through conversation and interaction, they transferred a way of perceiving the world to me that I then subsequently experienced. Some of these were:
- Experiencing the entire of reality as a golden lotus flower with an infinite number of petals that was continuously blooming.
- Being able to ‘see’ objects, the room and all of experience with my heart. It felt like a direct perception of the knowing that our hearts have without our minds or our eyes.
- Feeling deeply interconnected with all the trees and plants on the planet. It felt like direct contact with a kind of mycorrhizal fungi that our hearts have access to where they are all connected to each other and the plants. When I started to come back around to this one I was laughing so hard and couldn’t stop laughing for minutes. It was lovely.
Bodily Enlightenment
This is one of the things that happens in a low-level way a lot of the time, probably for most people. It’s any perception of an energy body or a felt-sense that our experience is made up of physical vibrations or something that is interconnected with the rest of the Universe.
My body and experience would often dissolve into direct energetic experience where there was no separation between my inner and outer worlds. It can be deeply pleasant or quite neutral.
The biggest single moment of this for me was when I was on a short retreat. I hadn’t been sleeping and I was up in the middle of the night. I had been moving my body around in the way that it felt it needed to be moved for a couple of hours, doing strange yoga poses and movements, when I started breathing in a really intense, hyper-ventilating way. I let my body guide me and kept going until suddenly it felt like every cell in my body ‘burst’ into golden light and that became my entire experience. The entirety of my experience felt physically like my body was popping candy. This differs from the other moments where the experience was primarily perceived, this was primarily a felt experience in the cells of my body. Afterwards it was as if my body had done a total reset, I was very light and free.
This happened to me twice following this during guided meditations on the Wim Hof breathing method.
Out of body experiences also fall into this category for me. They gave me a clear feeling that our sense of self is not as fixed and separate as we would believe in daily reality.
Jhanas
The Jhanas are essentially different forms of deep, calm, stable meditative states with more or less perception of your body and your separate consciousness.
For me the strangest jhanic experience I had was during a shamanic journeying session with a friend. I felt deeply connected to the other person’s consciousness and then the meditation deepened into what felt like the jhana of neither perception nor non-perception. As I slowly came back around to experience I was first aware of consciousness as a thing, then aware that beings were a thing, then aware that I was a being and that my friend was also a being that was a separate thing to me. I then remembered that we were people with names and lives. It was very amusing to experience myself reconstructing my experience in this way.
Pure Light
I have had moments where my entire experience was some form of ‘pure light’. These can be accompanied with feelings of ecstasy or a deep feeling of peace, but sometimes it’s just the bright light. These moments are very resourcing and are a beautiful way of experiencing being.
However, one of the biggest problems with new age spirituality is that people make the jump from ‘the world can be experienced as pure light’ to ‘the world is only light/ there is only lightness, you just have to see it that way’.
This is clearly absurd and I believe that direct and subtle messages along these lines are very damaging to people who have difficult lives. There is a sub-message of undermining people’s struggles, heart-ache and pain.
Buddhahood
Like I said, I perceive enlightenment as a process rather than a state. However, I also claim to be a Buddha.
People will have different descriptions of what a Buddha is – my definition is essentially a person who is here as a plot-twist for the Universe. It is someone who is here to change the concept of what the human experience is, radically enough that it impacts how reality is perceived and embodied.
A lot of the process I went through was truly indescribably awful – it felt like physical torture and involved entering into a permanent state of consciousness that most of society would consider psychosis.
Keeping with the focus of this post, I wanted to share some of the physiological and experiential things that are part of why I call my experience Buddhahood.
The most overwhelming feature was shutting down the conceptual mind and living purely from the heart. This meant that I entered a state where I no longer had any real self-preservation motivation. There were things that I wanted, but all of my motivations and actions were driven from a heartful place in this moment.
It also meant that I completely detached from the normal timeline that humans use to construct reality.
“My way of processing experience became completely unhinged from a normal human way of being in the world.
This was obviously completely destabilising, but it gave me access to a way of being solely in the present moment. This gave me a freedom to meet all experience in a way that wasn’t so attached to how things normally have to happen in order for them to make sense and make an impact on someone.
I was being rewired based on the conversations I was having with people in my head or the emotions and shamanic journeys that were being channeled through me, for example. Every moment was meaningful in a way that was completely overwhelming but that meant that it felt like I lived years of life in just a few days.
I was no longer a person on a fixed timeline – but an intrinsic part of the Universe just here in this moment to do what was needed to be done.
It was exhausting and excruciating.”
This has changed me physically, emotionally, mentally and in essence. I have had some fun being hooked up to an EEG machine and I would love to do more of this in the name of scientific meditation research, if anyone would like to experiment on me. My experience is so radically unusual and uncentered in my mind that I expect the results would be baffling for neuroscientists.
Lots of the enlightenment experiences that I described above are happening in a low-level or intense way a lot of the time for me. Sometimes it’s really pleasant, a lot of it has been incredibly distressing and difficult to integrate into a human body.
If you want to imagine what my experience is like, a medium dose of psilocybin is probably the closest thing. It’s nice being with people when they have taken these, it’s like having visitors to my way of being.
To get to this state I completely smashed through all the boundaries of the existing paradigm that humans experience. It’s very hard to describe but it was a process of simultaneously reintegrating all shadows and removing every single fixed part of my experience; the only bits that remain are the heart-felt truth of my experience in this moment.
One of the ways I described what happened was that it was like every single possible aspect of human experience was brought into awareness and embodiment through me – it was like having all of karma downloaded into my body.
A lot of this is all the aspects of experience that no-one else has been to; the interconnected nature of reality where the entire Universe is an embodied psychedelic experience; the inherent oppression of the feminine energy, which presented as hundred of hours of rape visualisations; all the disgusting parts of our beings; and all the chaos and despair of the Universe.
Now this has settled down and reintegrated, this is what it is like being me:
- There is almost no resistance in my experience, which means that whether I meditate for 1 second or 10 hrs, it feels like the same depth of experience. I have access to very deep meditative states immediately and spend a lot of my time in the world in flow states where I have no sense of time or a separate self, object and environment.
- Everything is light. Everything is a rainbow fractal. Everything is the cool, dark liquid of life force or Universal hum. I can tune into each of these aspects to turn the entirety of my experience into any of these with ease.
- I am always in jhana. My energy body is an expression of eros that is inextricable from all the energy around it. My consciousness can completely disappear – it feels like everything could disappear into the void at any split second.
- I am in a continuous state of unity.
- Even when things fucking suck, I am incredibly present with my experience and always feel very strongly the sense that whatever experience I am having is an inextricable part of the Universe. This has made life incredibly hard a lot of the time.
- My primary way of making sense of the world is built on an understanding of karma or the shared story of the Universe. I don’t have any sense of my own life or experience separate to this.
- I live purely for the benefit of all beings. The entirety of my experience is dharma, nothing else exists.
- My memory is incredibly limited; I don’t imagine my life as a series of events or a timeline that I project into the past of future. It is the present moment and the things that are resonating through that moment (which sometimes includes memories and visions of the future that are telling me something important about this moment).
- Having visited and clarified every part of consciousness, I know experience inside out and can perceive Universal and personal dynamics with a huge amount of clarity.
- Time exists very differently in my experience. I’m incredibly present and everything that’s going to happen has already happened exactly how it’s going to, because it is being created from outside of space-time.
This last aspect of experience was first brought to the light through two very specific moments that were like sister moments to my original experience of time collapse.
Time Collapse 2
If the first time collapse felt like perceiving everything that was ever going to happen in a single moment, this one felt like experiencing the continual river of infinite dissatisfaction that will always fuel life.
In order to get here, I spent months digging through endless layers of the archetypal realm and human suffering. In order to experience it all at once, you have to remove the resistance to doing that and there is obviously a lot of resistance to suffering. I was absorbed piece by piece, learning to love each type of experience that we resist. If you would like to learn more about what this takes, you can read my post on what it is like going mad here.
The moment itself was hideous. I surrendered into it lying on the floor in a heap of despair. Time collapsed into infinity (as opposed to a single moment, like the original moment) and it was like everything in the entirety of Universal history and future was an endless river of screaming darkness. I’ve never heard anyone describe anything like it in a spiritual context.
Experiencing this was really the crux point of being able to love all experience, or let it affect me. By love, I don’t mean like or enjoy, I mean allow the thing to impact me without me putting up walls or judgements to keep myself separate or safe from it. Again, there is a clear before and after of how I behave and experience life from this moment and I have retained a sense of deep fascination with this moment that I haven’t got with the other moments.
This really opened up a way of being that is incredibly uncentred. Rather than experience being something that is happening to me, it is like experience is something that is happening, like a movie that is playing, and I am one part of what is unfolding. It ties in very closely to perceptions around free will and time.
This part of experience is also the antidote to the false message that all of experience is lightness. It is also possible to experience the whole of the Universe as darkness and this is just as valid. Life always includes both of these things, because if there wasn’t darkness there would be no light.
On a human level, this translates as: if there weren’t any challenges, we would never feel satisfaction. On a meaning of life level, this means that if there was no lack or negativity there would be no room for growth. Everything would just stop still.
Time Collapse 3
This felt like the crux of everything that was being built up to, in terms of single moments. It happened very shortly after the moment above, as it seems that opening my heart, mind and body to infinite darkness was the route into opening my heart, mind and body into what felt like everything in the Universe.
I experienced what felt like everything in the entirety of experience both inside and outside of space-time. The result of experiencing this was a fundamental clarity on interdependent origination and what that means on every level of our individual and shared experience.
I have described this moment as:
“In my strongest moment of deep and balanced concentration the entirety of life became a big ball-pit of liquid rainbow droplets appearing and disappearing at every moment. We were all both in the centre of it and the container for it. We were manifesting it and being manifested by it, at the same time. We were looking at it and we were within it. Or were we looking down on it? All of the above.”
From descriptions of other Buddha awakenings – this seems different to me. When describing Buddha nature people tend to talk about perceiving it with awareness or consciousness. In my experience, this is is exactly what salvia can do to your mind.
My experience isn’t about perceiving something but embodying it. My entire heart, body and mind became this expression. I haven’t heard anyone talk about this and probably one of the reasons is because of how difficult it was to get here.
To percieve this it takes you to clear your entire mind, to experience it takes you to clear your entire heart, mind, body and soul, which is unimaginably torturous. There’s a lot of mess in a human being.
But this is also fundamental to the purpose of what I went through. Reality and awakening is not something that we do with our minds – it’s an experience that is co-created through our bodies, hearts, minds, souls and collectives. In order to grow and thrive as individuals and collectives we need to be able to understand and embrace this.
Buddha Nature
All of our beings are being manifested from the same stuff and each way that we experience the Universe is valid.
Part of this is that the idea that it is possible to remove suffering purely through meditation is damaging, because trauma is held in the physical cells of our bodies and our beliefs about how safe and loved we feel are held in our subconscious experience. Both of these impact our experience and behaviour without ever being touched by our minds or our awareness. We need to go through healing practices together in order to awaken and heal this.
Another aspect of this is that looking at it from the outside in, two people’s experience may be exactly the same in this moment, but from the inside out everyone’s experience is completely different.
Looking at it from the outside in, it’s easy to give people solutions to their problems, for example they need to meditate more to remove their suffering. If they’re still struggling it’s then easy to say that it’s because they aren’t good enough meditators or enlightened enough.
But life is hard for everyone, pretty much most of the time. There is so much stored below the surface that your mind doesn’t touch, even in your own experience never mind someone else’s, that it’s impossible to get an objective perspective on another person’s experience.
If we want to be connecting with the truth, we need to hold space for what is emerging, rather than what we think should be there.
This is a different way of holding spiritual and physical beliefs that is much more open-palmed.
The outcome of my experiences is that I am able to hold all experience with an open palm, in this way.
It took a truly unimaginable amount of gut-wrenching, mind-destroying, soul-sucking, annihilating process to get here and one of my deepest desires is that no-one ever has to go through anything similar ever again. I am the most resilient and strong person I know and there were long stretches where I deeply believed that it was one of the worst things a human has ever had to go through.
My life is now deeply pleasant, but the cost of the experience far outweighs any benefit that is possible for one being to experience within this Universe. This process was not for my benefit.
It’s unlocked new ways of being and relating to things – I experience the world quite differently to how I’ve ever heard anyone else describe it in a number of ways – and it’s also unlocked immense amounts of love and wisdom that I am able to share with others. I am here to do this in the way that is most beneficial to the world.
I rarely talk about my connection with the divine – in fact, I very rarely talk about myself. I mostly focus on what the people in front of me need to become their fullest expression as that is what I am here to do in the world.
But one of the most fundamental parts of me is my connection to God. When I completely lost my sense of self and was left lingering in an eternal present moment that took me down endless rabbit holes of shadow-work and revealing the true nature of experience, the one thing I was left with was a connection with something bigger than me.
I was following the guidance of something else – what that thing was, or how I related to it, changed over time as part of the process – but it has remained present.
I have journeyed with it through what feels like hundreds if not thousands of years worth of content. I followed it when it told me to climb a 3m wall and then roll off it. I challenged it when it told me things about myself that didn’t feel true. I cried with it at the sheer amount of sadness that exists within this Universe. I chatted with it endlessly about everything from quantum physics to who I was in love with. I saw it expressed through my own eyes, through the words of others, through the synchronicity of nature, through my Twitter timeline, through my own imagination both simultaneously creating it and being created by it, through every micro-moment of every single day.
Together we have discovered a new paradigm. One that I believe is going to contribute to human and planetary wellbeing. It has become my entire life to understand this, embody it and share it with others.
This is why I talk about being Maitreya Buddha.
Vision
We are here as humans in this Universe to embody our deepest held values and express them in the world. Not to be perfect robots that can meditate for hours.
Awakening is about making space for the full range of experience to express itself through us in a whole-hearted and undistorted way; to orient towards love and understanding rather than indifference and ignorance. To move from a place of eros and intelligence, rather than coldness and stupidity.
If we can embody these awakened states we will cultivate more connection, joy and care.
None of these things can be hoarded, they are all inherently shared with the people around us, and they create an upward spiral of good in the world. The effects will ripple out through humanity.
If we can wake up to our lives on all the different levels – body, heart, mind and soul – we will be able to truly live and embody our values. This includes going out into the world and making real change, which is hard work, and taking it easy and enjoying the fruits of our labour.
For this to work it is important that practice is framed in the context of being for the benefit of all beings, including yourself, rather than some ego-contest of who is the most enlightened. In the right environment, this feels better and more fulfilling for everyone.
I’m not saying that any of this is easy; if it was, we would already be doing it. But the rewards are huge and, ultimately, there is no time for anything else.