Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from the author’s book, Create Reality with Morphic Robots: A No-Nonsense Scientific Basis (Sufi George Books, 2007)
The experience of enlightenment is simple to state. It is the experience of awareness only, awareness that is aware of nothing at all except the existence of awareness itself.
During the experience of awareness, the thought-processing mind is quiet, body awareness is forgotten, and all reality disappears. There is nothing in the imagination; there is nothing anywhere. It is an experience of nothing, of the void.
The key understanding that results from this experience of pure nothing is that one is still alive even when everything is gone. One realizes that one’s existence does not depend on anything except awareness itself. One realizes that awareness is the primal reality, the permanent core of ourselves.
This brings relief and liberation. It is clear that life is awareness, and not what awareness experiences. So the body, the mind, the physical universe, as well as dream universes, feelings and knowledge, are all non-essential to being alive. Fear and guilt vanish, because awareness is beyond harm and experience is not part of one’s being.
It is clear that all experience comes from outside of oneself, that experience merely flows through awareness, and that one is not responsible for the helpless act of experiencing one’s experience. In short, this state of freedom solves every problem by eliminating it-and provides a completely unburdened peace.
Before the enlightenment experience, one has no idea of life without content. Rather, one’s awareness is flooded with content, with all of its concerns and hang-ups.
Enlightenment is an experience that changes the way we understand who and where we are. Although in the past it has been cloaked in mystery, symbolism, ritual, fantasy and so on, today enlightenment is within the reach of any serious student.
Enlightenment no longer needs adjectives like cosmic or supreme. We do not need God to experience it. The result of enlightenment is the certainty that we are fundamentally nothing more (and nothing less) than awareness, awareness that has the ability to process experience wavefields.
Today, enlightenment can be achieved by following a modern path that satisfies the rational mind and produces the enlightenment experience. The search for enlightenment now has a clear, uncluttered path. There is nothing to believe in, there is no mystery about it, and just about anyone can do it. This is a great time to be alive!
Rational understanding is one thing, but actual first-hand experience of that understanding is needed to quench the desire for positive assurance. The combination of understanding and experience, of understanding the experience and experiencing the understanding so that they support each other, is the final quest.
Lucid dreaming occurs in another reality, an alternate reality that follows different laws. It is the reality that has been described in so many different ways by so many different mystical traditions and religions. Today, though, we can study it like any other subject, and experience it by following proven exercises.
Awareness only experiences. So awareness is not responsible for its experiences. Nor do experiences have any ultimate consequences. There is a great liberation that comes with this realization. We know our permanent selves, so we know what dies and what survives at the time of physical death. We see life as a dream. Life becomes a thing to enjoy, to experiment with, an opportunity to create.
We see our personality as a tool, not as who we are. We use it to interact with reality. We change and develop it according to our wishes. We see that everyone’s experience is unique, so we don’t attempt to conform to outside standards except as they further our own purposes. Rather, we feel completely free to seek out new experiences, to live our lives in the fullest and most personally satisfying way.
Nor do we initiate conflict with anyone else, because they are unique, as we are. Everyone must be unique; that’s the purpose of making human beings, to have a lot of possibilities to experience.
We are all doing the same thing-going in a different direction.
