Enlightenment is Just More

           Six years ago, as I was getting into bed one night, I became aware that I was going to “receive a download”. I had not had an experience like that before. I didn’t know what it meant, I thought perhaps a new book would come to me.

The next day, as I was out walking, suddenly only pure consciousness was here. Jesus was present as well, which I understood to be symbolic, a verification that what I was experiencing was what is called Christ. A few days later, on another walk, I became aware that I was to go forward teaching, “What Jesus was, I am. What I am, you are, too.”

Ego was still so present at first there was a freak out. I put an end to the melodrama quickly, but ego was still disturbed by this idea, for obvious reasons. However, ego still had lofty ideas of what this meant and it was still playing itself out. For years I’d been using the term “Truth” for, well, truth. But now I found returning symbols I had not used in years, God, Christ, and Holy Spirit (or just Spirit). I assumed I was going in a new direction, but it turned out to be an old one coming to an end.

In the meantime, I felt that something had to give with the dramatic mystical experiences I had. I knew they represented something real occurring, but there was no way to live in that heightened state of gobsmacking oneness, love, and joy. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but it seems that in the back of my mind I thought I would shift into a place where these kinds of experiences would become the “new normal” and therefore less intense.

Instead, fast forward to now and this great deflation of lofty spiritual ideas and experiences. I didn’t shift into a different state where I adjusted to the intensity of those experiences, but I came to see that intensity was ego induced.

When I was twenty and first a student of A Course in Miracles and had the first mystical experiences (that I was to remember), they faded in time. I felt I’d lost something. My awareness of truth continued to grow, however, just not with the intensity of those experiences. So, as time went on, looking back I realized I had not lost anything. Those experiences were like an opening, an introduction to an awareness that progressed much more subtly. The time of the intense mystical experiences fell further behind. They were replaced by an ongoing awareness of truth that I valued every day.

I had the experience in 2011 that The Enlightened Mind is here—and it never left. But ego was still here and for it nothing is ever enough. It blocked any awareness that enlightenment was occurring. I had no idea. Decades after those dramatic, intense experiences I had at twenty, they came again, heralding the full shift in consciousness. Ego fell away. And now I see how much they were about ego and how much the awareness of truth that I had before the shift was like the awareness I have after it.

When people used to say to me that they wanted those intense experiences of oneness, love, and joy, I’d tell them they really didn’t. What I meant was that the ego backlash that followed was awful. But now I’d say, “They aren’t necessary. Your ordinary, everyday experiences of truth—your sense of a comforting, guiding, teaching presence with you—are closer to enlightenment than dramatic mystical experiences.”

So, it seems that I could say, “What Jesus was, I am. What I am, you are, too.” But I won’t, because just as if I use the word Christ people automatically think Jesus, if I use “I” people think Liz. Truth is not a person, it is not an identity, it is not a self. It is simply what is. So, I will say this: The truth that Jesus realized is the same truth that has been realized in this consciousness and is the same truth in you to be realized. (Not as succinct, but less likely to be misunderstood.) Without ego, there is no inflating this to mean something grand, extraordinary, and fearful. It is just a plain, ordinary, everyday fact.

Anyone who has had an experience of pure consciousness will tell you how familiar it feels, and that they realize that it has been here all the time, just unrecognized. Don’t believe it when ego tells you that the awareness of truth that you have is not enough. It’s the same truth, no matter your degree of awareness of it. Because it turns out that enlightenment is nothing special. It is just more of what is already here.

 

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