If you’ve listened to spiritual podcasts or read mindfulness articles not unlike my own, you’ve probably gathered that an underlying assumption is that enlightenment is a good thing; that this is what we should all want. But is it? Do we want that? True freedom leaves no assumption unquestioned, even (and especially) the ones that sound lovely. Let’s dig into this one.
I mean, I had a great time living in my ego.
My ego knows how to have a good time. My twenties were marked by extravagant and shameless self-seeking conquests. My first concern in every decision was of myself (and of course my animals). I hurt a lot of people in the name of self-expression and finding myself. I plowed through the world on a belligerent mission to make it bend to my will. And I was pretty good at it.
But during that time, things started to change. I was slowly waking up. I was waking up to the idea that maybe I’m not so independent after all. Maybe my life is about more than just little me and my immediate needs.
These early years were marked by a growing intellectual understanding of spiritual principles. I understood and had bought into concepts like the soul, interconnectedness, and mind over matter. These concepts made sense to me, but they weren’t real yet because I hadn’t applied them and experienced their meaning for myself.
Moving from knowing something in your head to living it out loud in your life is a massive step, or often series of steps. Especially when it has to do with something as big as how you live your daily life. Let’s just pause here to appreciate that. It requires a lot of courage and faith.
Athletes are a good example of this concept. You can learn all about soccer (not sure why I picked this sport) in the classroom. You can read the rulebook. You can even be taught by David Beckham himself. But until you get out there on a real soccer field with a real ball and real players in a real game using your own feet, you’ll never truly master the sport.
Spirituality works the same way. We can read all the books in the world, we can listen to the world’s greatest spiritual teachers all day long, but until we start applying the concepts in our own lives, we’ll never really get it. And we certainly won’t see the full effect play out in our lives.
The rest of this article assumes a basic understanding of some of the concepts that I write about, like waking up and that our thoughts create our reality. If this is your first article at Let’s Think Free (welcome!), I recommend checking out those links or some of my “New? Start Here!” material on the home page. Then come on back!
Back to our question: Is enlightenment what we want?
First of all, what do I mean by “enlightenment”? It’s such a fluffy word; let’s nail some of this fluff to the floor. To me, enlightenment is achieved by aligning thought, word, and action with our inner truth. It’s the whole package. We don’t just know and recite the golden rule, we live by it.
Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Luke 6:31
I won’t sugar coat anything (it’s bad for you). Enlightenment requires transformation. And transformation involves loss. Loss of your former self; the former you that you thought you were. That can be scary and a lot of people gloss over this important part.
When I made the decision to live out the spiritual beliefs that were in my head, to behave in a way that was consistent with my inner truth, I experienced a series of losses that I had to cope with just like any other loss. But I’ll share that what made it all worth it was what I gained. I gained a deep, personal connection with myself and the world around me.
Therefore my answer is, “yes.”
In my opinion, the path of enlightenment is always worth it. Sure you give up short-term pleasures like how can this person meet my needs for long-term desires like how can we serve each other to meet the needs of the world. But in my mind it’s a matter of trading “just okay” for “blown away” – and that is definitely something I want.
Enlightenment is a personal experience that’s different for every person. But to give you a sense of what that loss-gain deal might look like (so you can prep yourself accordingly or run the other direction), I’ll share some of the ways that this showed up for me in my life when I set fire to my former lifestyle and decided to go all in.
1. I had to break up with my ego.
Ah the ego. I’ve heard many definitions of the ego, but I like Eckhart Tolle’s best. Tolle explains that ego is identification with form. Form can be a number of things: our body, our things, or my favorite, our ideas (politics, anyone?).
This was probably my biggest loss of the whole enlightenment experience. I was shocked when I first listened to Oprah’s Supersoul conversation with Tolle when he explained the ego. The explanation was too logical to refute and too true to dismiss.
In one hour, I lost my entire identity. I’m not my body, or even my mind. I’m not my thoughts. I’m not my ideas. I’m not my achievements. I’m not any of the things I’ve purchased or the people I know or the things I’ve done. I’m none of it. If I’m none of these things, what am I? Spirituality and now science suggest that, at the core, we are the awareness of all of these things.
Once you know this deep in your soul, there’s no turning back. To live this knowing out loud, I had to accept that I am not my ego and act accordingly.
This means not taking it personally when someone disagrees with me – I am not my ideas. This means shaking it off when society criticizes my looks – I am not my body. This means letting it go when someone damages a prized possession – I am not my things. As I’m sure you can imagine, it’s a lot harder than it sounds.
I’m far from being a master, but I’m making progress. I measure my progress by my ability to respond versus react. The ego is clever and doesn’t accept “it’s over” without a good fight. But with a little bit of awareness, compassion, and love, the relationship is slowly running its course. With the breakup, I’ve found a new freedom in my mind from conditioned thoughts and emotional reactions.
Removing the ego from the equation opened my world up to real connection – with the world itself, not just my idea of it.
2. Self-righteous stopped being fun.
I’m passionate about many things. The top two that come to mind are women’s rights and animal cruelty. Nothing boils my blood or riles me up faster than a sexist comment or the words, “I hate cats.” Makes me want to slap the person upside the head and shout, “Wake up you stupid ignorant bastard!”
When you start living your spiritual beliefs out loud, suddenly this charade becomes much less fun. Because now I know that I have control over these reactions. I now understand that it’s my thoughts about their words, not the words themselves, that are making me furious. I now know that I have complete control over my thoughts. The circumstances themselves are completely neutral, it’s me who is giving them meaning. What a let down.
Being angry and self-righteous was so much fun. It felt so good to be passionate about something; to stand up for something and push against something else. Now that I know we’re all one and I’m really just pushing against myself (another person, yes, but fundamentally me), it’s just not quite as fun.
I still experience impulsive reactions, but for the most part my self-righteousness quickly fizzles into compassion. Compassion and understanding for where these people are. Perhaps not so surprisingly, compassion is a much more powerful albeit more subtle emotion than anger. I’m no longer quick to push against opposing ideas. I accept them, give them no power by not reacting, then deliberately choose what to do next from a space of love.
Separation can be fun in the moment, but in the long run, the universal love that comes with enlightenment is far more fulfilling.
3. I let the toxic relationships go.
I’ve done a major cleaning house of a lot of my relationships. I can remember, when I started waking up to more of my spiritual nature, looking around at all the relationships in my life and being taken aback by how toxic they were.
I had some friends who elicited terrible thoughts about myself because all they did when we went out was objectify women. I had friends who only knew how to take and never offered to give back. I had friends who couldn’t be happy for me. I had friends who opened up, then retreated for months, even years at a time. I had friends who couldn’t care less about me.
To live my most intimate truth, I had to dig deep into my soul and get real with myself about who I was choosing to spend my time with. I had to ask the tough questions: “Is this relationship serving me? Is this who I choose to be?” I had to be brave enough to hear the answer. And even braver if the answer was “no.”
It’s not always easy to let relationships go, but it doesn’t have to be dramatic and confrontational. I’ll offer how I did it. For me, it happened naturally. When I started living my truth out loud, when I started being myself and stopped pretending to be what I thought others wanted of me, they either loved me or they let me go. It was as easy as that.
Be willing to let them go.
When I lived my truth out loud in front of everyone in my life, I lost the friends who didn’t love the real me and I gained real connection with the ones who did.
4. I had to decommission my bulldozer.
Ah my bulldozer… how I miss you. My bulldozer and I were a masterful duo by the end of it, until that fateful day I put her away for good.
I use the term in jest to describe the (very) common way most people go about interacting with the world. This actually isn’t a criticism; after all, these are simply the values that are taught by society. Dominate. Lead. Act. Do. Rawr. We’re encouraged to be aggressive; to get out there and make change happen.
When I was operating in bulldozer mode, I was relentless until the world changed in the way I wanted it to. My life experience had taught me that if I pushed hard enough, something would give. I was conditioned to believe that I always get what I want, even the seemingly impossible or unprecedented. I found evidence for it in my life, which only served to reinforce the belief.
But I now know that the resistance that I bulldozed my way through was really just life offering its wisdom that my current path of choice (often one of self-righteousness) might not be the path of least resistance – or what I want at all.
One example stands out in my memory. It was late 2014 shortly before I started “playing with creation” and testing out my spiritual beliefs in my own life. It was our finest hour, the bulldozer and I. The triumphant win before the great fall.
I was dating someone long distance. We were both in the military and selected to go to the same training school that year. If you’re unfamiliar with how the military operates, the probability of getting your first choice in just about anything is very low. I didn’t get my first choice. But I was determined that we would be in the same class so we could spend those 9 weeks together.
I turned on my bulldozer and I didn’t let up. I used my powers of will and intellect to shape the circumstances around me. I got ahold of the attendance list. I found out who got what dates. I asked around. I reached out. I worked with my supervisor. I made offers to swap dates. It took weeks… but it worked. Because I decided it was going to work.
This is how the universe works. It listens. It gives you what you ask for. The problem? What if that’s not really what I wanted? What if human brain me just thought that’s what I wanted… when higher self me who has the big picture was off making bigger, better, less painful plans…
We got the same class dates. We went to the same class. I thought it was going to be wonderful. It was a disaster. A beautiful disaster. Ironically, it was this time together that made us realize we weren’t right for each other. So we broke up. Which led to my greatest suffering (to that point in my life), and greatest awakening.
The universe meets you where you are. If you want to use a bulldozer, it will let you. If your operating mode is “crash and burn” it will let you crash and burn.
Putting away my bulldozer marked the terrifying moment I decided to let go of all “control” over circumstances. Control now comes from a much more powerful place: inside my head. I still direct and manage and make decisions in my life, but I no longer force the “how.” Because that’s not my job.
When I put her way for good, I lost the finite power of my bulldozer but I gained the infinite power of the universe that comes from the path of enlightenment.
5. I had to entrust my life to wings and wind I couldn’t see.
I love this analogy because it calls out the element of faith. Faith is trust in something you have no evidence for. I have no hard evidence I can show you except for the anecdotes of my life. I have no proof for the “power of the universe” or “the ego.” But I do have personal experience; and I can offer that, in my life, these things are very real.
When I decided, in the summer of 2015, to commit to living my spiritual beliefs – in thought, word, and action – my whole world shifted. My experience of life transformed. You were born with wings that you can’t see (just ask Jimmy Buffet!). You can’t see the wind, but you know it’s there. Airplanes defy gravity because of invisible forces that lift metal into air (just ask my husband!).
We may not have all the tools yet to measure and scientifically understand the ego or the higher self or the mind’s interaction with matter, but we don’t need to for it to work in our lives. It works, regardless of our understanding of it. All we need is faith. Faith and a willingness to feel.
If you’re ready to let go of the small you that you have believed yourself to be, if you’re ready to unleash your true potential, then leap. Go all in on yourself. Live in a way that aligns with your deepest truth. Commit and recommit to the path of enlightenment every day. You will blow yourself away.
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