There are many ways to enter enlightenment. All forms of spiritual awakening spring from the horribly mundane: the things we don’t often think of as spiritual. This carnal realm is the touchpoint we have and need, however, to access the outer and lighter realms. Most of our lives, we feel dense, anchored to the ground by gravity and the heaviness of our bodies. Every once in a while, though (and sometimes accidentally), we go soaring. We just need to train ourselves to pass into this ethereal state more regularly.
Your nervous system is the key. It is calibrated with just the right amount of sensitivity to help you practice finely tuned awareness of all that is happening inside you and around you, but it also allows you to commune with what is beyond. Our meditative practices are about transcending our selves, passing through and letting go of all the things we typically believe make us “who we are:” our thoughts and our sense of feeling “alive” and being “a person.” You must leave your “personality” behind.
You can also access the transcendent state by being “in the flow:” having a supreme state of presence with what you are doing and what is around you. It happens sometimes when you are waxing a car, planing a board, or digging in the dirt. All the sudden you have lost all sense of yourself and you feel lighter, like your body is no longer holding you down.
Other portals to the spiritual are when your nervous system is firing on all cylinders – unfettered pleasure including sexual ecstasy, feeling “on top of the world” or inexpressible gratitude for life in all its complicated beauty. It also comes to you in abject grief, if you allow yourself to enter it fully and completely. To be in grief is a very human experience. Being fully human is one of the ways to also transcend your humanness.
There is a reason we think of enlightenment as something a person attains over time. There is some movement involved: a “passing over.” But do not think of it as a mountain to climb and of the work as arduous. The eternal is available to you in this moment. The spiritual practices of interocepting, slowing down, meditating, trying to get “in the flow” and/or all these other practices of ordinary mysticism are just preparing you for what is already available to you in the air right next to you. The practices just help you learn to be open. That is not so much climbing a mountain as learning to be present to and commune serenely with the life you have, in the world you inhabit.
Even our trauma, once we learn to master it, will open up a portal to the spiritual realm. When renegotiating trauma, we are seeking to pass through – with a greater sense of ease – what would have otherwise lodged itself in our systems as stuckness (trauma). Yes, the goal is to enter and move through the thing we have been avoiding all our lives, this time without fear. It sounds impossible, but helplessness is another thing that opens us to eternity. Release and surrender are two of the highest forms of being human, though we are also wired to avoid them.
Photo by Ricardo IV Tamayo on Unsplash