Enlightenment

I typically use the word Awakening, rather than Enlightenment, because it has a broader, more inclusive definition that doesn’t carry as much baggage or tend to attract narcissistic personalities in the same way. However, the word Enlightenment is useful for describing certain aspects of experience, and there are clearly many people and scenes throughout history that have had what can be described as enlightened realisations, so in this post I am going to talk about what it can mean.

There are at least a couple of different ways of relating to enlightenment; you can relate to enlightenment as a process that you go through or as a state that you realise or cultivate, and I’m going to start by describing these.

Enlightenment as a Process

Recognising that enlightenment is at least in part a process, feels important. One of the deepest realisations you can have is that there is isn’t really a finish line for life, except death. And even that is questionable.

Life is a process that everything is continually experiencing. Including the understanding of life as process in the way that you relate to enlightenment creates a much richer and more nuanced picture.

I would describe the process of enlightenment as one of bringing aspects of experience into the light. Things that were previously obscure or opaque due to shadows, ignorance, hatred, delusion, defensiveness, insecurity, lack of capacity or fear are given the space to emerge. Once they have emerged they are related to from a place of whole-heartedness, truth-seeking, care and openness, which leads to the development of more insight and wisdom over time.

Specifically when it comes to enlightenment, it feels like the things that you are bringing into the light are likely to relate to the fundamental qualities of experience and existence.

An example of this is seeing how limiting a self-view can be or how destructive cultivating hatred can be. A moment of enlightenment where, for example, you perceive the world in a way where you have no sense of a separate self helps you to realise the changing and interconnected nature of things on a visceral level, which helps overcome some of these more limiting views.

This process of enlightenment can be facilitated through contemplative practice, psychedelic exploration, healing modalities, relational practices or it can happen entirely spontaneously.

Human experience is diverse and we all have lots of experiences that are very similar in some ways and quite different in other ways. Lots of spiritual traditions claim that experiencing certain types of enlightenment will show you the true nature of reality. Really, these moments are all different ways of experiencing the world. They all show different facets of reality and none is the one fundamental truth. 

It’s also possible for drugs, meditation and other practices to unravel your experience in a way that’s not so helpful or to take you to a place where you get stuck. It’s important that people are able to practice consciously with their hearts so that they are opening the door to these experiences and states in wholesome and supportive ways.

Enlightenment as a State

As well as the process of enlightenment, there are clearly ways of being in the world that are more enlightened than others and people will have cultivated these to different depths.

There are at least a few different axis that someone can be enlightened on:

• The emotional and relational axis
• The axis of wisdom and seeing true nature
• Being able to teach, inspire and awaken others
• Wielding power skilfully
• Embodying spiritual qualities

To me, an important part of enlightenment is being able to perceive the inherent imperfection in life including in yourself and find skilful ways to work with this. Any claims of perfection tend to be narcissistic and unhealthy. Wholeness is a much healthier indication of someone’s depth of awakening or enlightenment than any kind of capacity to be in connection with pure light.

There are almost infinite ways that an enlightenment can manifest in someone, but I want to just give one example of an enlightened perspective.

While working with someone one-to-one we were exploring the fullness of their realisation and the image that came up for them was zooming out into space until they were able to see the Earth. From this perspective, they were able to see the entirety of their life from start to finish as a small thread that was woven through the fabric of the Universe. In the image, they also saw threads of other people who had had a similar realisation throughout human history and into the future, weaving through the fabric. This opened up things like deeper compassion, self-love and spaciousness.

The point wasn’t that in this moment the person suddenly realised these things, it was a somatic-imaginal expression of a deep realisation that it had taken many years to cultivate through a multi-dimensional practice and a lot of hard work. But the experience was still meaningful and impactful.

Being in the energy of an experience like this and feeling it imprint in your being, makes an impact on how you are able to carry these things through to your wider life.

With enlightened states, these sorts of perspectives and ways of being infuse your being. You can carry them with you through experience, from the most esoteric and beautiful moments of being in touch with the divine nature of the Universe to the most mundane and frustrating moments of every day life.

Different people will be able to hold different realisations at different depths and in different circumstances.

It is worth recognising that much like everything in this world, enlightenment is a mixed bag. It can be wonderful to have integrated deep states of peace, love and wisdom. It can also be incredibly lonely and come with a great degree of responsibility.

I hope that people are able to relate to the state of enlightenment with a degree of open-mindedness, humility, care and nuance.

Moments of Enlightenment

One of the most glamourised and exciting parts of enlightenment are the big explosive moments and sudden realisations.

These aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of enlightenment, but they do clearly play an important role.

There are types of energy or realisation that aren’t really possible to connect to in a slow trickle way, because they are so overwhelmingly different to your current way of understanding the world, something has to give in order for them to be experienced.

There are almost endless dimensions that can open up in this way and I’ve listed a handful of types of moments that you can experience on the path. They all include an aspect of non-duality, where you are opening to something bigger than you, but that’s not the central focus of all of them.

All of these types of moments 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 a more subtle sense of them and this probably happens to people all the time in a low key way.

These experiences are more likely to have a lasting impact on both your wellbeing and the positive ways that you interact with the world if they happens in a sustainable way and from a sustained practice, rather than just as a one-off.

Psychedelic Drugs

Psychedelics and other mind-altering drugs are a quick way to connect to radically different states of consciousness.

Some of the psychedelic and mind-altering drugs that can open interesting portals are things like MDMA, LSD, Magic Mushrooms, DMT, 5MEO-DMT, Ayahuasca, Ketamine, Marijuana or Salvia.

Normally, your mind and being has a very solid template that parses reality in a very predictable way. Psychedelic drugs have the capacity to blow this apart temporarily and show you completely different perceptions and experiences of reality.

Drugs can open the door into a wide-range of spiritual experiences, like non-self, Universal love, cosmic intelligence, the Divine, the void, other realms, energy, mythos, emptiness, peace, unity and more.

The underlying nature of reality is much more psychedelic than one would typically think and being open to experiencing this psychedelic nature is important for being able to relate to the emptiness of experience. You don’t necessarily have to take psychedelics to experience these things, but you will get there a lot faster if you do.

People are doing lots of research around psychedelics and spiritual experiences. Things like what the dangers and benefits are, what are the patterns in people’s experiences of them, how they can be used to heal trauma, as well as how to optimise for meaningful experiences. Simple things like setting intentions can make a huge difference in the quality of a trip.

I believe that it’s important that we come into a mature relationship with psychedelics. They aren’t a panacea that solves everything – like some people believed in the 60s and 70s – but they do hold a very important piece of the puzzle. They reveal important aspects of reality that are beyond people’s usual ability to feel and perceive. They open the door to something vaster and deeper than most people can begin to imagine from their usual state of consciousness.

A meaningful psychedelic trip is the first step on the spiritual path for a lot of people or it acts as a way for more experienced practitioners to dive into deeper waters.

I’d recommend caution with taking psychedelics, but also there are huge riches to be discovered here. This is still being researched, but my experience is that the more of a solid contemplative practice you have, the more likely trips will make a meaningful, lasting difference to your experience.

Peak Interconnected Emotional Experiences

One of the biggest differences between normal peak experiences and moments of enlightenment is that they have a much more interconnected feel to them. Rather than the experience being something that is purely happening to you, you lose the boundary between self and world in some way.

Peak interconnected emotional experiences can be triggered by anything that feels transcendental.

An example of some of the ways they can be triggered are: through synchronicities; being in a large crowd and being moved by something like live music or a religious ceremony; or being impacted by someone talking about transcendental themes.

Before my spiritual path really kicked off, I was watching a youtube video of one of Alan Watts’ lovely, poetic lectures. Suddenly I was hit by a huge wave of emotion and felt that the entirety of my life, 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 crying. 

It had opened the door into something so deep that it felt much bigger than anything that could be contained inside me.

Shadow Work

Shadow work, when done correctly, can be one of the most enlightening processes there is. Shadow work can be a deeply personal journey of facing your most challenging stuff, but some of the deepest shadows are relational and in the collective.

For shadow work to be effective, the shadow needs to be met with sincere love that allows the underlying energy to be released from whatever is keeping it in shadow.

Shadow work is done from a place of fundamental goodness. Fundamental goodness is a way of describing how there is no categorically bad energy in underlying experience. It could also be described as a kind of Buddha Nature.

There are obviously ways in which things can be expressed or experienced destructively or harmfully but it’s possible with the right intent, skill and purpose to unravel all of these knots to get to the underlying goodness that lays beneath. This unravelling process can become very non-dual in its nature.

My experience of stream-entry was during a shadow work therapy retreat. I opened to a shadow that was so deep that it overwhelmed my entire experience. I dissolved into the archetypal realm and had a cessation-like experience – it felt a bit like falling off a cliff into an abyss of darkness where I no longer perceived anything as being separate. It was so transformative that it fundamentally changed how I perceived and interacted with reality.

Emerging from this process I felt on a visceral level that the way that people understand reality is based as much on their inner world and how much love they have received, as it is on their 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. My practice became being dedicated to repeating this process with every piece of pain and challenge I could find. Each time I did it I would surface back out the other side of this dissolution process into a separate self again with a deep sense of equanimity and feeling like I had shed some weight.

One of the aspects of shadows is that they can create huge blind-spots in your experience. As you release more and more of experience that is knotted up in shadows, you will have less and less ignorance, fear and avoidance in your system and be more open to receiving experience as it is.

Imaginal Practice, Shamanic Experiences & The Archetypal Realm

Imaginal practice can open the door to a deeper and fuller range of experience in your practice and life. You can start to feel how life and experience is much more metaphorical and nebulous in nature and this gives you permission, capacity and desire to feel more broadly and fully.

In practice, things like the size and shape of your body or the colour and landscape of your inner world can feel completely different to a more materialist idea of reality. 

When it starts to become non-dual, the imaginal can open out into the archetypal realm and shamanic experiences. You can become attuned to the underlying symbolic, metaphorical and energetic nature of collective experience.

An early example of this for me are was when I was watching a live band. I closed my eyes and everything dissolved into an experience where each member of the band became a planet that looked like Earth and everything else was just space. There was no sense of a separate me that was watching, it was just an eco-system of sound, resonance, meaning and experience unfolding.

A more shamanic experience I had was disappearing into the archetypal history of how the masculine and feminine had played out since the beginning of time. When I returned into normal experience I was in a deep trance state and I described my experience by saying, ‘I am love. I am everything.’

While meditating with other people I have always had experiences of symbolic and imaginal content arising. Often after the meditation, people would describe something that happened in their experience that I was seeing during the sit. I now use this in my coaching to do shamanic journeying with people.

These experiences come from increasing the connection, or reducing the separation, between yourself and the archetypal or soulful realm. This part of experience isn’t about single moments but about flow and the story of life, so in opening to this you’re more likely to experience a series of events that feels deeply meaningful, than one single moment. 

Jhanas

The Jhanas are eight states of refined meditative absorption. They are essentially different forms of deep, stable meditative states with more or less perception of your body and your separate consciousness.

The first jhana is associated with strong feelings of often overwhelming bliss and this develops all the way up to being in formless realms of nothingness and neither perpection nor non-perception.

Depending on the way you practice and the depth to which you want to experience these states, it can take people months and years to develop access.

I also believe it’s not entirely uncommon for people to get access to them spontaneously, particularly in spiritual and contemplative settings. I was born with the capacity to be in something of a jhana and remember as a kid spending long car journeys being in deep, blissful meditative absorption states.

Cessation

Cessation occurs when experience entirely blinks out. It’s possible to get here by moving up through the eight jhanas, or for it to occur through other types of meditation, such as Vipassana.

A lot of the value of cessation is that it gives you a direct experience of the constructed nature of experience. Everything blinks out and then as you come back around it’s like watching your entire system reboot itself from nothing. This return to experience is often, though not always, accompanied with really blissful or peaceful feelings. The full process gives you a strong taste of both the non-dual nature of experience and the void that is as present as the fullness that people are usually entirely entangled in.

An interesting version of this happened to me when I was shamanic journeying with another person. I felt deeply connected to the other person’s consciousness and then the meditation deepened first into the high jhanas and then a cessation. 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.

Cessations are liberating because they cut through the mental constructs that can seem so solid and true from a normal perspective.

Open Awareness

This one is incredibly simple one you’ve experienced it but you can’t see it until you can see it. Experience isn’t a thing that you are, it’s more like an open flow of content that moves through an awareness that is bigger than you. From this more open awareness, you can see thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions and body sensations as body sensations, for example.

You can experience this open awareness by unhooking from the content of experience and seeing that everything is happening in a more spacious and open place. To experience this, try allowing the room to be aware of itself around you.

Opening to awareness can be a gradual process or it can suddenly click into place.

In a way this one is a bit like cessation, in that it can be an antidote to the intensity of all the other types of experiences that are listed here. It allows experience to just be a constant flow that never arrives anywhere that you don’t need to be so deeply involved in.

It’s important to balance this realisation with the capacity to connect with what matters and allow things to be meaningful, to move you and to impact you. If you’re always checked out into an open, spacious awareness that can be a sign of spiritual bypassing, but having it as a base for how you perceive and understand the world creates a lot more space and capacity to meet the fullness of experience and to retain a balanced perspective.

It takes practice to unhook awareness from different types of content and going through the other processes will help deepen this.

Bodily Enlightenment

You can awaken the physical way in which your body connects with experience to be more open and non-dual in its nature.

This is related to jhana practice and being able to experience your energy or subtle body. It also includes getting a felt-sense of the way that all experience is in part made up of energetics and resonance in a way that is interconnected with the whole of the Universe.

Your body and experience can dissolve into direct energetic experience where there is no separation between your inner and the outer world. It can be deeply pleasant, painful, incredibly intense, very peaceful, or quite neutral, depending what you are connecting to. And there are two directions that the process can go in: becoming more immersed in material reality or connecting exclusively with immaterial reality.

Becoming more deeply connected to material reality through this energetic way of connecting feels like you are getting immersed deeper and deeper into connection with everything around you. Things tend to take on a very vibrant and alive quality, like everything has a transmission that you are in connection with.

Connecting exclusively with immaterial reality through the energetic body allows you to leave the physical behind. Things like out of body experiences and the feeling of visiting other realms while still being connecting to some kind of energetic body would fit in this category.

My experience of getting into these states or having moments of bodily enlightenment early on was that they were always preceded by some kind of physical practice. Things like yoga, exercise and breathwork can open up and awaken the body in a way that a more still practice can’t reach.

One of these moments was in the middle of the night during a retreat. I was full of energy and couldn’t sleep. I was in the library and had been moving my body around in the way that it felt it needed to be moved for a couple of hours, doing lots of yoga poses and movements.  My body started breathing in a really intense way that was a bit like hyper-ventilating or the Wim Hof breathing method.

I let my body guide me and kept going until suddenly every cell in my body burst into a thousand tiny golden explosions and that became my entire experience. My entire experience was the physical sensation of my body turning into popping candy. Afterwards it was as if my body had done a total reset, I was very light and free.

The thing that makes the difference between bodily enlightenment and more mental experiences is that the experience is entirely or primarily felt through the direct sensation, rather than perceived. It’s something that happens on the level of your being that, for example, gets cold when you are outside in Winter, rather than on the level of your being that has ideas about what reality is.

Kundalini Awakening

Kundalini awakening is a specific type of bodily enlightenment. While the energetic system of the body is generally quite nebulous, there are clearly some patterns that reoccur in many people’s experience across different cultures.

Kundalini, which translates from Sanskrit as ‘coiled snake,’ describes the energy that usually rests dormant at the base of the spine. When you awaken it, it opens a freer flow of energy throughout the body.

Kundalini yoga is specifically designed to unblock specific parts of the system, allow the free-flow of energy and increase the chances of experiencing a  kundalini awakening. My experience of doing kundalini yoga before I was sincerely on the spiritual path was that it would often unblock deep emotions or energetic experiences that I didn’t really have a frame of reference for at the time.

There is also a phenomena called Kundalini psychosis. Kundalini awakenings can be very fast and very intense. Your body is suddenly open to 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. Your energetic experience becomes louder or feels more real than your logical experience and you start to sense-make from this place. It can take a lot of skill to hold this and navigate a healthy integration.

Spiritual psychosis can be triggered by any type of intense emergent experience, but I think Kundalini awakenings are one of the most common. If you would like to learn more about spiritual psychosis, I have a written a guide about holding, healing and integrating spiritual psychosis here. 

My experience of a Kundalini awakening was incredibly transformative. It was built up to over many months, but there were two big key moments that happened within a few days of each other. The first moment was opening up to the ground and feeling an intensely overwhelming rush of erotic energy flood upwards through my being. This created a huge amount of pressure in my system where there was way too much energy moving around inside me, in particular causing huge pressure headaches. The second moment was a few days later, I relaxed my mind and allowed all the energy to flow up and out of the top of my head. This created a free-flow of energy through my system.

After this I spent an entire six weeks only full of blissful energy. I would sleep for just four hours a night and had so much energy in my system that I would regularly give my partner at the time electric shocks. I felt completely happy and free from suffering in every moment.

I was already in the process of exploring the archetypal realm at the time and experiences that would be considered psychosis. During this six weeks of bliss I went much deeper into this. I was in such a profound state of wellness that it felt like an unquestionably good thing to do.

After the six weeks, pain came back full force and I was suddenly hit with all the emotional-energetic knots in the individual and collective experience. Because I had removed so many barriers to the flow of energy, I had to process everything that emerged and I dedicated an unimaginable amount of energy to untangle this and eventually open my system to a very free flow.

Unity Consciousness

Unity consciousness is the experience of feeling at one with the world. Unity consciousness can be experienced in an infinite number of ways, because there are infinite dimensions of experience.

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. 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 hearts have without the mind or the eyes.
• Feeling deeply interconnected with all the trees and plants on the planet. It felt like direct contact with a kind of mycorrhizal network that 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.

Pure Light, Pure Dark

It’s very common for spiritual teachers or traditions to focus on experiences of some kind of pure light, radiance or luminosity.

These are incredibly resourcing experiences to have and can help you develop embodied faith in the enormous amount of underlying goodness that is present in the world. These experiences are often accompanied with feelings of ecstasy or deep peace.

However, one of the biggest problems with spirituality is that people make the jump from ‘the world can be experienced as pure light’ to ‘everything is light’.

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 in life.

It feels just as rich for me to have experienced the pure darkness of the world, despite the depths of pain it took to get there. Having a balanced openness to the full range of experience creates a much more whole and grounded realisation.

‘Pure light is good’ and ‘pure dark is bad’ is also a very one dimensional way of looking at the world. I’ve had experiences of the darkness that have felt incredibly rich, meaningful and beautiful despite the pain and challenge they come with and experiences of pure light that felt somewhat psychopathic in their detachment from suffering.

I would extend this to any kind of ‘pure’ experience. Pure awareness, pure goodness, pure silence, pure void. All of these require filtering out large parts of experience. It’s not that they don’t exist – they do and it’s beautiful and meaningful to experience them – it’s that it is ignorant to claim that they are somehow the fundamental or only truth of reality. Experience, life and the Universe is messy, complicated and multi-dimensional. It arises from a number of different sources all at once and it’s generally not that helpful to pick one experience and make it the ultimate source.

It feels important that Enlightenment and Awakening ultimately include opening to the full spectrum of being.

Time

Time changing shape is a rich and profound experience that can happen a number of ways. I’ve written about the different aspects of time and some key inital moments I experienced around time changing shape.

Powers

Deep practice can lead to siddhis or powers opening up – ways of being that seem to go beyond normal human capacities. I have written about some of the powers that can open up through practice, and the way that I hold this.

An Abiding Enlightened State

All of these types of moments and more can have a wide range of disruptive or beneficial impacts on someone’s life.

None of these moments are going to show you the ultimate truth and to cultivate these types of experience into an abiding enlightened state takes time, wisdom, skill, resource, patience, love and care. It requires a solid practice and being devoted to things like faith, truth and love, even in the face of adversity. It often requires a good teacher who can help show you the way.

Different types of experience will accumulate into different types of enlightened state. Jesus, the historical Buddha, Christian Saints and Rumi are just a few examples of people who had very different experiences that were all deeply connected to the true nature of experience.

Everything in this post has focused on the individual experience of Enlightenment and the moments you can have through your own personal practice. There are also profound and important moments of Enlightenment that can only happen through relational experiences or practices. I also think there are certain things that can only awaken once you have the experience of being a teacher and guiding others through their journey.

Maturity

Holding a nuanced and mature understanding of enlightenment can help support and inspire deep and meaningful practice that makes a lasting difference to the way that people experience their lives on an individual and collective level.

It’s worth noticing that what someone considers enlightenment to be will be impacted by the spiritual values they hold. A lot of what is realised is incredibly subtle and impossible to put into words.

If you’re curious about someone else’s realisation, my advice would be to watch how they behave and notice what values they embody, as much as to listen to what they have to say.

It’s also worth saying that the people who can cultivate an abiding state of enlightenment most deeply are often born with a lot of the qualities that are necessary for this.

I’ve heard a story of how Adyashanti as a child was watching his neighbours argue and had the realisation, ‘they don’t realise that their thoughts are only thoughts and aren’t reality’.

I personally never had a very strong sense of a self. I was very aware that my human experience was constructed interdependently with the relationships and environment around me and to meet that with love was the most important thing. I used to wonder as a child about whether the Universe was a thing that was designed to experience itself and the first time I took MDMA I thought, ‘oh, this is the experience I spend a lot of the time repressing’.

But in order to realise and actualise the depths of what wanted to come through me in a mature way I had to first go through the experience of living a normal life with quite a high dose of challenge. Then I was taken on an immensely huge spiritual journey that was much more painful than I could have even possibly begun to imagine. The moments I describe above were just the start of that journey and it has led to a very unimaginable outcome.

Ultimately, what it means to be enlightened is a nebulous thing. It will be different in every age and through each person. In one way of seeing, this is the purpose of the entire process: for the unique node that is an enlightened person to actualise themselves in deep connection with both their true nature and the true nature of the Universe, in order to embody their full potential and share this perspective with the world.

If we zoom out from the perspective of individuals and look at the entire world through the eyes of Buddha nature, it’s possible to see the whole thing’s underlying enlightened nature.

In this paradigm, everyone is an expression of their own perfectly unique way of being that they can deepen in an almost infinite number of ways. Yet it’s not possible to arrive anywhere that is fundamentally separate to the process of the Universe unfolding.