3 Simple Ideas About Enlightenment Cover It All

There are only three things you need to understand about spiritual enlightenment:

~our perceptual envelope is made of nonconceptual awareness
~realization is the act of noticing that nonconceptual awareness
~simple meditation yields attentional skill, making noticing easier

Your perceptual envelope is simply the panorama of your experience as it is happening. In sleep, you can say it contracts to just outside the inside of your head. While you are awake, it includes everything you are seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, and whatever you happen to be noticing.

Our nonconceptual awareness is simply what’s left over after you subtract anything you can currently notice. We can call these conceptual objects. Conceptual objects are the product of frames, which are simply the network of ideas we use to understand something. For instance, if you see a dog, your attention suddenly has access to all kinds of information about dogs. That’s the ‘dog’ frame activated. In this way, a conceptual object is formed and you can understand what you are looking at. Everything we experience generates conceptual objects. They form our ever-changing picture of the world.

We, as individuals in the world, are conceptual objects to ourselves. That’s what people call the “ego.” The nominal prescription of Spiritual Enlightenment Culture is that you must eliminate, or for many, “kill” your ego. The notion is utterly ludicrous, yet it guides the behavior of probably close to a billion people. The idea is generally that having an ego locks you into delusion, and that once unlocked from the ego, your experience is utterly transformed by your freedom and you are basically now living as God in a body.

Poppycock. The fact is that our nonconceptual awareness is always composing our experience. Once you come to notice your nonconceptual awareness AS nonconceptual awareness, you simply see that it was always there, you just weren’t noticing it. The conceptual objects are still there too, including the one we label ‘ego.’ All that’s really different is just that we are seeing past, or through the objects to what they are supported by and “made” of—our own, ordinary awareness in its nonconceptual phase.

Nobody could honestly say that enlightenment is easy, but many are confused as to exactly why it is difficult. It’s often cast in moral terms like goodness, purity, saintliness, being much higher and refined than merely ordinary. We are often asked to drop things that are purported to take us away from these, like having sex or a good time at a nightclub. These activities are deemed “worldly,” and the world, being impure and full of delusion, is to be avoided. Basically, Spiritual Enlightenment Culture blames the world for the lack of enlightenment within it.

But that’s not true, and believing it is just throws barrels and barrels of gasoline on the fires of delusion, because believing you have to be more pure, or more good, or somehow more advanced than you are now, simply distracts you from what’s always right in front of you, which is your nonconceptual awareness spinning your perceptual envelope into being. In this way, Spiritual Enlightenment Culture is itself, vastly responsible for the lack of enlightenment in the world today. But it’s not the only cause, for there is something even more daunting about finding enlightenment, and that’s its ubiquity.

What I mean by ubiquity is simply the fact that we have never not seen our nonconceptual awareness. It has been perfectly ubiquitious in our experience for our entire lives. There is nothing that contrasts it, at all, because it’s what makes up everything we experience, inescapably. Thus, we don’t notice what’s always there because we’ve never not seen what’s always there. Our attention deals in objects, things we see, hear, think, feel, etc. The field our attention plays on is our nonconceptual awareness, but since attention is tuned to objects, it ignores the field they are on. As it turns out, it’s extremely tricky to notice something you’ve never not been looking at. To my mind, that is the real problem of finding enlightenment, learning to notice something you’ve never not been looking right at your entire life.

Here is where meditation comes to the rescue. With meditation, especially a simple, positive object meditation like a mantra or watching the sensation of your breath, you invariably develop attentional acuity. Meditation, when done properly and effectively, is like crossfit for your attentional function. But rather than having a series of exercises, you only need the one.

As you continue to practice a simple meditation fairly regularly, one in which you simply bring your attention to rest of whatever object you’ve chosen to focus on, keeping it there until you notice you’ve been distracted by thought and then bringing it back again, you are preparing the ground for being able to notice the nonconceptual phase of your own ordinary awareness. But before that happens, it’s likely that you’ll be slated to have a few “mystical” experiences, and here is where Spiritual Enlightenment Culture thinks it can swoop in to save the day like a superhero by explaining what your mystical experiences are about.

You’ll likely hear about chakras and energy, meridians and ascension, the power of crystals and ascended masters in the higher planes watching over us. The list of conceptual objects telling us about our spiritual “reality” goes on and on, in any number of directions and with very little cross-cultural coherence. It’s almost like it’s all made up. If you asked me, that’s because it all is. You can and should ignore every little bit of it, because in the end, it is all entirely superfluous to what enlightenment is really about, which is noticing something about the very ordinary day-to-day experience of being alive.

However, this isn’t to say there is no mystery at work here. In fact, there is still a seemingly random element to all this, and that’s how to foment that very first moment of recognition. You may have been training your attention properly for decades, you may have decided to eschew all the pomp and circumstance of Spiritual Enlightenment Culture, but you still have yet to notice the nonconceptual phase of your own awareness. This is when knowing somebody who’s already noticed can potentially help by pointing it out to you. But they are certainly not required. However, what is required can really only be called luck, or grace. This is the final ingredient in the enlightenment equation, being guided by life to suddenly seeing something that’s always been right in front of you, and it’s at this point you may want to appeal to whatever higher power you care to acknowledge for the privilege.