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from RiverBankOfTruth Website
It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication
of everything we imagined to be
true."
It is a ride through hell. It is the tearing down of all of your cherished beliefs and everything you thought about yourself. There is no way around this.
In The Hobbit - The Desolation of Smaug, they had to enter into the Mirkwood Forest to get to their destination. There was no other way for them. It was not a walk in the park.
Likewise, we must enter the shadowlands, and come face to face with our shadows. It is there that our false ideas of who we are are shattered. It is there that all of our false beliefs are destroyed. We must face these false notions and see them for what they are.
This is the only way to heal, to become
whole again, to live in integrity.
It is a complete surrender, a process of
brutal self honesty. It is a path of complete acceptance of the
truth, no matter how difficult it is to bear. I still remember it
vividly.
We deceive ourselves at every moment, and the world also deceives us at every moment. We live in perpetual cognitive dissonance, justifying the most absurd things in our minds. We constantly lie to ourselves… and we believe it.
To awaken to the truth that you seek, you must tear down the lies.
But we are too attached to the lies.
We want to hold on to the illusions and to become enlightened at the same time. That is not possible. But there are hundreds of phony gurus and "spiritual teachers" that will tell you it is.
They offer you processes to,
...and whatever else you may be desiring.
This has nothing to do with awakening. This is only polishing the ego...
They all lead you right back into the Matrix. You may even be lucky enough to get a golden cage, but it is still a cage, and you remain imprisoned in slavery. This is the road that most people choose to follow...
This road is well traveled by the herd.
We have been weakened by the onslaught of programming since our childhood. Most people want to remain in the herd, as they find comfort in the company of other deluded souls. It takes a certain individual to break free of the herd.
The Siddhartha road is not easy. It is a treacherous road that will shatter every part of your existence.
No, it takes a certain type of person to
walk that road; a person that is willing to give up everything to
find his true Self.
Also, everything came crashing down at once.
In the past, I was strong, and I kept my
sense of self, of who I thought I was. But this time, my sense of
self, who I thought I was, gave up. I stopped trying to be strong. I
just collapsed.
I kept saying,
My health collapsed, my business collapsed, and those that I thought were my friends were not.
I was alone. I tried to be in denial, grabbing straws as I was being dragged down into the abyss. My world around me collapsed, but so did my self worth, self esteem and my false ego. I felt unloved and abandoned.
My life story shattered...
In that time, I was slowly being dismantled, as I had to face the hard cold facts. I had to be brutally honest with myself. Eventually, I came to the point of realizing that I hated my broken body, I hated the world, I hated myself, and I really hated god. Yes, I was very angry at him. He abandoned me. I felt the entire world abandoned me. It wasn't fair.
I threw out everything spiritual in my
house. I was facing my darkness with brutal honesty. I sat with that
for a while. Imagine the despair of seeing what lies hidden behind
your persona, behind the lies you tell yourself daily.
It said,
That was it...
So I thought about it. I realized that I was not accepting what was happening to me. I was fighting it. I was trying to push away the suffering, but it was obviously not working.
So I followed the message, and
surrendered to the suffering, that which is.
The suffering felt endless, yet I endured it...
I don't even know how to explain it. And then on the morning of Jan. 1, 2004, I woke up. Not to a new year, but a new life. The suffering was gone, all was forgiven, and I was at peace. A peace that I had never known before. That which I thought I was no longer existed.
My false perception of Self vanished. I remember the singing of the birds, the Sun entering through the window, and everything around me was seen in a new light - a light of awe and amazement.
My mind had ceased its chatter, I was
experiencing a very deep peace.
I began to awaken to who I Am. I became acutely aware that I Am eternal and sovereign. Each wave awakened me more to my deepest Self. Each wave also shattered the illusions and deceptions of the world.
As I awakened, my eyes saw a very
different world. All the pieces fell into place. Someday I will
describe the many revelations that flooded over me. I have already
written much about it.
This love is unconditional. It spread out from me everywhere. All of the bugs, the lizards, the birds, the plants, the trees, everything was inundated with this love. I could not tell where I ended and the other Beings began.
We were all intrinsically connected with this love; and yet my individual Self remained. I was not the bugs, the birds or the plants, but the connection was so deep, that I felt they were as if a part of me.
There was simultaneously separation and no separation.
It is not easy to describe, but this divine love is nothing like the love of this world. But when you do awaken, and you do see the world with new eyes, you soon realize that no one else is seeing the same thing.
I tried to tell a few people what had happened to me, but no one believed me. They thought that perhaps I cracked under the pressure of suffering and had gone crazy. No one wanted to hear anything I said, as it exposed their false beliefs.
So I remained quiet for eight years...
"I awoke, only to find
the rest of the world still
sleeping."
What I woke up to I call Knowings, as opposed to knowledge.
Someone who has not awakened to his true Self has a difficult time understanding. They believe it is just knowledge, a different set of beliefs.
Therefore people say things like,
They think they are only my beliefs.
It is quite pointless to explain this to people, because all they know is beliefs. So I remain alone, with but a few friends that have experienced their own dark night of the soul, and awakened to their true Self, if sometimes only a glimmer.
That is all it takes for one to see that
their is a deep consciousness separate from the vast majority of
people.
It was by Grace alone.
Grace is your Self. Grace is not something to be acquired from others. If it is external, it is useless. All that is necessary is to know its existence is in you.
You are never out of its
operation."
But it demands courage, discernment, and a brutal honesty of yourself. The mind is a very tricky opponent, and will deceive you at every step, as your awakening is the end of its control over you. But it can be done.
Nisargadatta Maharaj did it.
You must simply allow Grace to act within you.
"As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen,
for grace and love to enter."
No one can do this for you. All I, or anyone else, can offer you are sign posts, pointing in the direction. But you, and you alone, must take that road. It does little good to read my writings and not act upon them, to not take that road yourself.
Otherwise, you are only hanging out at the signposts, believing that you have already arrived at the destination. This road is not for the timid or the faint of heart. not at all. But there is no other road.
No one will simply wave a magical wand over you.
It is a road of destruction and the question is,
Because on this road, you must give up everything... Every piece of you will shatter. Can you endure that?
As the great Bhaktivinode Thakur has written,
So,
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