What is Enlightenment?

You are where you are right now in life because of how far your conditioned mind has taken you. Since most of conditioning, social programming, is inhibitive, you will probably find that you have not come very far at all.

If you are like most people, your life is besieged with problems. You are facing one type of crisis or another. There is an imminent threat on the horizon and you have no idea how to deal with it.

Where did all these problems come from in the first place?

They came from your conditioned mind.

And how are you trying to solve these problems? Again, with your conditioned mind. In other words, you are asking the same trouble-maker who created all your problems to solve them. The result, of course, is only more entanglement.

Who you are is pure spirit. But your conditioned mind is what keeps you earthbound. It convinces you that not only is the physical world real, but so, too, are all the conventions taught by your society and your religion.

What makes this problem far worse is that your conditioned mind is conditioned not only by your current experience in this body, but by all the experiences in all your various bodies. This in Sanskrit is known as your samskaras.

It is for this reason that liberation appears so very difficult. Liberation is the acknowledgement of your own true nature, your essence quality of pure awareness. But time after time, you find yourself pulled into the gravitational field of problems. These problems exist as a deliberate attempt by the egoic mind to keep you lost in samsara, or worldly experience.

Thus, for the spiritual aspirant there are two forces. The ascending quality of pure consciousness and the descending quality of contaminated consciousness.

Pure consciousness is identical in all forms of matter, whether it is necessary to create the orbit of a planet or the growth of a flower or the life-force in a person. Contaminated consciousness, however, is diverse, and regulates itself according to the body and culture. It believes in the immortality of the personality and the physical form although all evidence shows that these are ephemeral. It does everything to cement this conviction. Thus, all it's energies are based on survival of the body-mind complex. This is an impossible agenda.

Those who seek liberation pursue sadhana, or a spiritual path. The entire purpose of sadhana is to remove the conditioning from the mind so that it perceives it's own truth.

Who is being liberated? It is not the atman, the pure self, the awareness without attributes, it is manas, the conditioned mind alone that needs to drop its agendas that keep you earth-bound and on the kharmic wheel of death and rebirth.

Mind is split. One part of it longs for liberation. The other is earth-bound and resists it.

The mind that longs for liberation is the ascending mind. This is the witnessing mind. This is what is awake in you.

The mind that fights against truth is the descending mind. This is the conditioned mind. This is what keeps you asleep.

Once you learn to distinguish the ascending mind from the descending mind, your sadhana will speed up considerably.

It is mind that is liberated, not the atman, the soul, the pure essence. The liberation is when the ascending mind becomes clear and powerful, until the experience is that of no-mind and witnessing mind.

But as long as you have a conditioned mind, you will always have troubles of one kind or another because this is the mission of this mind, to entangle the being in sentience and deny it the freedom of its true unified nature.

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