What do I mean by the myth of enlightenment and spiritual awakening? Could it be enlightenment is a mistaken belief? Surely I don’t mean that! Well, yes I do. Let me explain…

The myth of enlightenment as finding

At 16 years old, completely unbidden, joy took me by surprise. I had never felt so happy. The bitterness I experienced growing up in my family of origin seemed to disappear in the brightness of this inner… what? Bliss? Light? Whatever its name, I felt ecstatic!

In the light of how I felt, I categorized this event as a spiritual experience. For a month, I saw everything and everyone with new eyes, as if for the first time. A different way of Being took over my thoughts, emotions and behavior.

My body even felt different! It seemed lighter, more buoyant. It tingled and vibrated with a current of spiritual energy. I had found heaven, and I wanted this spiritual experience to last forever!

The myth of enlightenment as losing

However, like most human and spiritual infatuation experiences, it didn’t last.  As it faded, because I had attached my self-esteem to it, I felt devastated. Apparently, I had fallen out of favor with the Creator of the Universe! Feeling flawed and unworthy, I often cried myself to sleep.

By the same token, I felt overwhelmed for months with thoughts that God had abandoned me. Even though I carried on with the life of a teenager wrapping up her high school days and applying to colleges, I plummeted into depression.

I could see no one to turn to. At times I spoke with friends whom I thought could help me, yet those conversations always ended in disappointment. My soul craved to get back into favor and regain what it had lost.

The myth of enlightenment as trying

As a result, my anxious thoughts propelled me toward a desperate, longing-filled search. Often in a state of inner frenzy, I spent some intense years begging God, reading, searching, meditating, going to church and attending spiritual retreats.

Yet no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t return to the original experience of bliss. Nothing in life mattered more to me than regaining that which I thought I had lost — my connection to Being.

Beyond finding, losing & trying

After almost 40 futile years of “wandering in the desert,” I began to wake up to some truths that had eluded me earlier in my life.

To summarize, I realized I had been like a fish swimming around, asking, “Where’s the water? If I can only find the water, then I will have arrived!”

How ridiculous for a fish to say that! We would probably advise the fish merely to open its eyes, shift its focus, and see the water has been there all along.

Like that fish searching for water, our minds make so-called Enlightenment way too complicated. If we simply shift our focus, we see we are the Awareness we have been seeking. We see enlightenment as Awareness — that which sees and knows we are not our bodies, thoughts, emotions or experiences. All of life displays within the Awareness that we are.

That realization is so in-our-face, we overlook it. We can tie ourselves into knots trying to “find” enlightenment, not realizing we already are that which we seek.

The end of the myth

In the light of this realization, I quit looking to the mind for answers. I stopped seeking an experience as evidence of Awakening.

John Wheeler, in his book Awakening to the Natural State, wrote, “If you avoid trying to run this through the mind, it is all straightforward and easy to understand.  The difficulty comes when we try to employ thinking, which is always limited, instead of simple seeing, which is open, clear and direct.”

Wheeler’s words tell me Awakening doesn’t need to take time. It is not an experience. Thinking “enlightenment” required pounding on doors, I had been banging on the wrong door. That door doesn’t exist! What I seek has always existed, right here and right now, apart from time and separate from emotional experience.

To sum up, there is no place to get to. We are that Awareness: we are the enlightenment we seek. The mind can’t get this; grasping that truth happens beyond the mind.

That’s all there is to enlightenment and spiritual awakening. No striving, trying, pushing, or forcing. No finding, losing, and trying. Only looking and seeing there is no place to go.

We’re already there.