Crossing the Threshold of Enlightenment
-- The experience of a non-meditator

Preliminary Note - especially for the disapprovers!

On this page I give an account of how I 'found enlightenment' or 'became enlightened' (neither of those is a very good term to use; I would prefer to say that I gained fundamental clarity). I now have a little flea to lovingly and gently place in the ears of the very many people who get indignant, uptight and judgemental upon somebody who has the simple straightforward honesty to talk of 'what is' in their life, for beneficial purposes and without the affectation, coyness and sense of taboo that many traditions have put upon speaking about one's own enlightenment.

There is a large proportion of people who have come under the influence of such traditions and typically think of themselves as being 'spiritual', who rush into judgement upon anyone who talks or writes openly about their enlightenment or being enlightened. Typically their judgemental onslaughts accuse such people of having an enormous ego, great arrogance, no modesty (as though modesty were anything truly desirable!) and really being the lowest of the low, and all that.

I occasionally get such garbage from people who visit this website (and presumably read this page, among others). What those people demonstrate is their own serious problems with issues of personal status and their unwillingness to open to the reality of enlightenment and self realization / self actualization for themselves or indeed anyone else. They also demonstrate a strong judgemental tendency and indeed an enormous 'ego' (according to their own definition, because actually the whole concept of the ego is an illusion of the non-enlightened) in that they are setting themselves up as arbiters of what is supposedly correct outlook and behaviour for other people. That is the sort of distortion that a taboo places upon a person. I wonder how many of those people have done any serious deep self scrutiny to establish what their true motivations are in their various behaviours towards people and indeed towards the likes of me!

There is a very major difference between somebody who goes on and on about their being enlightened for the purpose of asserting some sort of supposedly superior status (clearly not healthy) and the person who regards their enlightenment as being just a natural thing like having a nose, and who mentions it simply where it serves beneficial purposes like assisting others towards enlightenment and self actualization.

However, regardless of that difference, for anyone to go around slagging off other people because of their supposedly having big egos and being arrogant etc actually tells one most about the abuser. Such latter people have become distorted by the so-called spirituality that they have taken on - a sort of 'spiritual reality', sourced from the dark force, which is based on beliefs, rules, taboos, judgements and power / control agendas, with true, undistorted love nowhere to be seen. Whose business is it if a person is unhealthily flaunting his enlightenment (or anything else about him) in public? -- It's that person's business, and his alone (except of course where the person is actually interfering with people in some material way)!

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be discerning and aware of the problems and issues of particular people around them - but if they feel driven to go further and give unsolicited judgemental criticism / abuse to such a person, then what they really need to do is to clear their own emotional problem that makes them want to behave in that way and mind anyone else's business but their own.

I commend to all such people the true self realization / self actualization methods given in Healing and Self Actualization - The Safest and Quickest Way, which would enable them to get in touch with their deeper, accepting but discriminating and clear-minded selves, and to become, at their appropriate points, enlightened themselves.

Introduction

Crossing the threshold of enlightenment is for most people something extremely elusive to achieve*. At the same time it is very difficult for those who have crossed this important threshold to effectively describe their discovery of the fundamental 'mind-essence' and their then continuously experiencing this as their own true nature and identity, in meaningful terms to others. I am therefore offering my own experience in the hope that it will give some additional pointers for those people aspiring to enlightenment or self actualization and clear out some well-nigh universal confusions on the subject.

* Actually the whole notion of achieving that is a major part of the problem. Enlightenment would occur naturally and effortlessly in its own time for anyone who uses effective genuine self realization / self actualization methods in an aware and ongoing manner. Striving for enlightenment rather than overall self actualization distorts the whole self actualization process and leads to an unbalanced or distorted enlightened state. That is one of the great errors in various Eastern-sourced religious or spiritual traditions - particularly notably in Buddhism.

If you are looking for an effective and balanced self actualization methodology, you need look no further than Healing and Self Actualization - The Safest and Quickest Way.

One great advantage of this particular account for many people will be its freedom from a religious viewpoint or belief system and from esotericism. There is nothing esoteric, nor indeed 'spiritual' about enlightenment - though you'd hardly think so from the tomes upon tomes of esoterica that have been written about and around enlightenment. Enlightenment isn't about 'spirituality' but about simply being fully open to 'What Is'.

No one person's experience is the same, and indeed the context of my own recognition of my innermost nature (which is what enlightenment really is) could be seen as highly anomalous. However, I caution against all the standard Buddhist and other teachings and tracts on the subject because pretty well all of them, however widely accepted and highly regarded, relate to a very unbalanced view of the significance of enlightenment for us and how it needs to be achieved.

I use in places in this article the concepts and terminology from the Dzogchen teachings of Buddhism, because they actually introduced me to enlightenment, but I have actually distanced myself from that, and for example nowadays I do not use their expression 'recognition of the nature of mind', because I'm normally talking with non-Buddhists, and 'recognition of one's innermost nature', 'recognition of one's innermost level of consciousness', or simply 'crossing the threshold of enlightenment' sit more comfortably in my conversations with such people, and indeed with myself.

I give below a certain amount of personal information about myself. This is simply to put the real subject of this article into a meaningful living context, primarily to enable the reader to understand how anomalous my own experience is and to make allowances in their using my experience to direct themselves towards that inner recognition that marks the beginning of their overt enlightened state. This text isn't intended as an autobiography and thus omits many, many things that you'd reasonably expect to find in one. I don't want people falling into the trap of getting fascinated with me or my personal details. These are best set aside and forgotten once the important points are taken on board - think of my story simply as a demonstration model. The importance of this article, if any, for you the reader is any information you manage to extract that may help you in your process of self actualization; anything else is sheer distraction.

Part 1: The Background

My early life

I was born in 1942 in Harrow Weald, Middlesex, in the North-West London suburban area. That was in the Second World War. I have few war-related memories. My prime memories remaining from those early years - up to the age of six - are of the tormenting and often electrifyingly frightening inner world that I lived in whenever my eyes were closed or I was in the dark. This was no ordinary fantasy world, however, not least because, as in a dream, it was not directed by my own willpower.

In that world I was incessantly on the move, desperately searching for I knew not what, though warmth, love and peaceful stability were undoubtedly a major part of the object of that quest, which was never in any way fulfilled. With devilish constancy I was pursued by a weird variety of animated versions of normally inanimate objects that filled me with an unspeakable terror, even though none of the various 'things' ever did anything more than hiss at me or perhaps make a slight hum or ticking noise, or in one case, came heavily up the stairs. One particular such experience is recorded in a poem of mine - There's Nothing To Be Frightened Of.

I don't remember ever feeling physical pain in that 'world', but the emotions of fear - indeed abject terror - and intense blends of grief, loneliness and various longings, were always with me, often overpoweringly so. There was a drabness of colours: a general impression of greyness, often tinged with a dull rather dark green when the loneliness and longings were uppermost.

Although in this tormented world I could effortlessly fly (despite having no wings), my ability to do so seemed to be dictated by something other than my own will, so it often gave me no escape just when I most needed it, as I frantically put my back to the wall, facing one of the variety of sproses and sprouses that were after me, or the doot that was coming down from the ceiling and hissing at me...

I would frequently find myself in great dark pits like lift shafts, which I called thunder holes, in which I would rise up or down like a lift, in dread of coming to rest at a level where there were things ready to 'get' me. Another common element, when terror wasn't uppermost, was the running water that I often encountered, like very dirty washing-up water but with a horrifying sense of sliminess, decomposition and corruption. But above all, in whatever context, I had a longish greyish muzzle like a wolf. This was absolutely consistent, and at no time in that world did I consider myself to be a human. By the time I was five and started at school (I didn't go to nursery prior to that), I'd become a little bit puzzled as I realized that in that world of the night I was clearly an animal, yet clearly I was a human in 'ordinary' life.

Despite the tremendous terror and anguish I suffered, I never could tell anyone about these experiences, though towards the end of that period I think I did talk to my younger brother fleetingly of some of the things that chased me, though without giving any hint of the power, magnitude and unremittingness of the experiences, and in junior school the one 'gold star' I ever earned was in an English lesson for writing a fairly light-hearted and partly fictitious account of a dream involving sproses and sprouses, two of the objects of my early dread. I never had any impression that I could find emotional support in my family or surroundings generally, so it was all an extremely lonely situation.

I think it highly significant that at that time there was no family pet, and in the 'other world' I never thought of myself as a dog or any particular type of animal, so it's extremely unlikely that in my first, say, three years of life I'd already acquainted myself with a dog and identified myself with it. In any case, even if I had identified with a dog, how would an infant so young translate that experience into that of actually having a dog- or wolf-like head and constantly seeing the front of its muzzle through the inner corner of its eyes? That would take quite a lot of brain processing for one so young!

These 'other-world' experiences were definitely not dreams. Dreams, when I remembered them, were themselves troubled, and could contain elements of that tormented world, but were less consequential and didn't have that tremendous and unremitting power. This 'other world' emerged pretty well the moment my eyes were closed or I was in the dark, and crystallized out of the visual 'noise' of the seething mass of minor flickerings and somewhat luminous clouds of dancing images that I or presumably anyone would see in the dark or indeed against any dark background.

Even that background seething mass of images was a source of terror for me in those early years. Indeed in fact I now know it was really the primary terror, but it was so overpowering that I did my best to shut it out of my mind (whereas most children actually block it out completely and in waking life are unaware of the hell they've been going through at night).

During tremendous ordeals given me by the dark force in 2004, at one point the dark force showed me (allegedly for self-healing purposes - ha-ha-ha!) a re-run of a sequence of those night terrors images that I'd experienced at the tender age of three, and with horror I not only recognised much of it as being authentic from that time but also as being a whole mass of stuff associated with dark practices, with troupes of all manner of bizarre semi-humanoid beings passing by, many of them with a twitchy and almost insect-like quality (some of them apparently being demons of some sort), amongst them being representations of squirming sexual orgies and of the odd happenings that had given me still more intense terror at that very early age. For an explanation of the early childhood terrors, see Night Hells (Night Terrors) and Hearing Voices.

Then, if I remember correctly I was at the age of six when the Eagle comic first appeared. After the second or third issue came out there was a memorable night when my mind was filled with hero fantasies all spilling out from the Dan Dare serial in the comic. End of my tormented world. No phasing out: Dan Dare fantasies had come to the rescue, and that was it! My awareness was grounded in this world.

One nocturnal fantasy that quite often came to me in those years was of my being a king and having many people coming and bowing and prostrating themselves to me; I would keep telling them they needn't do that and wanted them to feel that we were all equals; I wanted my kingdom to be one of universal love - though as a young child I had little detailed idea of what the latter meant or involved.

And why do I mention these things at all here? Well, for one thing all that torment was just the start of a life with a lot of inner suffering which gave me a very strong motivation to free myself. And then, if I came into this life with a strong feeling of loneliness and lack of love in my surroundings, can you be surprised that I moved with strong motivation and great dedication towards the ultimate 'homecoming'! So those who look at me as extremely virtuous or in some way superior or elitist in having travelled as far as I have in terms of enlightenment and self actualization in this life are missing the point!

Trying to make sense of life in my childhood

Oh dear! It was enforced Sunday School, and then, in my early teens, enforced attendance with my mother at church Evensong. It was prayers, hymns and belief mumbo-jumbo at school. They talked of peace and loving kindness and all that, but for the most part in an unkind, moralistic way. I longed for the real thing but saw very little of it anywhere. People tried blackmailing me with all this 'if you don't Believe you won't please God and won't go to heaven', etc. The biblical Jesus said and did the odd things that made powerful sense and filled me with longing, and yet much of the biblical account of him didn't add up and I felt had to be untrue (I've more recently learnt that the balance of historical data points to my intuition having been correct). I knew of nobody to inspire me and be a focus of my love and longing for a sense of connectedness. I was left particularly confused because it seemed to me that if I and other people aspired to all the noblest aspects of humanity, that must be our true nature. Why, then, were we, on the surface, falling so short of that?

Presumably connecting with the early fantasies about being a king, I had lurking at the back of my mind an idea that seemed preposterous, and therefore I never, until a little after I became enlightened, seriously entertained it or spoke of it to anyone, and it always remained quietly, patiently, waiting there in the background, and remained with me undulled over the decades. It was this: my main purpose in this life is to be a spiritual teacher, even leader*, to spread the way of universal love. Note particularly that this was not like an ambition ('I want to be a train driver; I want to be Prime Minister'), but rather a simple recognition of who I really was. That for decades I was superficially accepting the ubiquitous worldly messages of denial of that inner sense of reality was one of the many causes of my suffering. I suspect that very many other people have similarly been sitting upon an unexpressed and unrevealed deep aspiration or self-recognition of this sort and thereby denying their true and deeply expansive nature.

* That was the best description that I could put on that deeply sourced aspiration until in very recent years, when I was able to see it cut free from the distorted notions that the dark force cultivates in pretty well everyone's minds. I would now redescribe that aspiration as being, to be an effective promoter and catalyst for genuine self actualization and all the positive change that that would bring about.

Sometime before the age of ten I occasionally agonized about the nature of death, not being able to accept the Christian notion of going to heaven (or hell) afterwards at the whim of a personal God. The very idea of ceasing to exist seemed horrifying and incomprehensible, yet I'd apparently come into this world out of nothing. I looked within my mind trying to understand how mind could possibly come into being out of nothing and disappear into nothing at the end. Looking into the beginning of my life experience like that, I was puzzled, for all I could perceive beyond the earliest memories was not really nothing but rather, naked awareness, which seemed to have no beginning nor, presumably, end. I had nobody about me who could point out to me the immense significance of that observation, so I just had to note it as an apparently insoluble mystery of existence.

A little later I tried to make sense out of all that by privately speculating that perhaps we are born again over and over, reliving the same life! How incredibly boring and pointless - the thought hardly cheered me up! This did link, however, with an important private speculation of mine: that all my life experience had surely arisen out of and was the product of consciousness and thus the notion of an external concrete reality could be incorrect. That certainly kept the door open for the acceptance of a greater reality than what we usually refer to as the material world. Anyway, I'd never heard theories of reincarnation then, and an evolutionary progression through different incarnations didn't occur to me, and it came as quite a surprise when I eventually learnt that some eastern religions believed in such a process.

I remember there were a few months, I think in my very early teens, when I actually tried believing in the personal God of Christianity. Briefly I managed to kid myself that it was bringing some relief to my inner misery, but I knew all along really that this was a nonsense: God either was or wasn't there, regardless of whether I believed or not, and no compassionate God that I'd want to know would turn away from me just because I didn't hold a belief in Him and praise Him every day. Even the sun doesn't require me to hold a belief in it and praise it for it to continue to shine upon and nourish me!

One day when I was in the sixth form in the grammar school we had a visiting speaker on Buddhism. I didn't remember anything much that she said, or follow it up, but it had struck me at the time that what she said of Buddhism made a lot more sense than the theistic religions. My only reason for not following it up at that time was my general unwillingness by then to be seen to be associated with anything that might be called religion or to depart at all from scientifically verified 'reality' (I thought of myself as very science-oriented), and I felt a little nervous about getting into something that seemed a bit exotic and strange, for paradoxically I found I'd become distinctly afraid of the idea of letting go altogether of the idea of a personal God* (apparently preferring the 'devil' I knew...! [ouch!])

* ...And guess what 'God' really is! If you haven't already read it on this site, you can get your answer from The True Nature of 'The Dark Force' and its Interference and Attacks.

Finding my way in adulthood

Beyond homosexuality - beyond sexuality

I became more and more troubled and stressed by the contradiction between what I still sensed of my inner self and my external conditioning. The loneliness of not finding anyone really on my wavelength became increasingly oppressive, this all being exacerbated by fear about the homosexuality I was concealing (and of course, masturbation). Eventually, at the age of 29 I 'came out' about the homosexuality, not always with exemplary tact! After a few pathetic little attempts to interact with other 'gay' men (the contents of my short story A Monastic Weekend describes part of one such attempt) I quickly came to an important decision - never again to seek to meet anyone on the basis of their sexual orientation or even gender. I'd realized that despite all my fantasies, my and presumably other people's true nature transcended such mundane things; the fantasies had been unmasked as pure, naked self-deception. Naturally I got accused of being 'unnatural' and even 'fascistic' in making such a choice.

This didn't mean, however, as various people imagined, that I was rejecting or suppressing my sexuality or sexual feelings. Sex itself wasn't the issue; it was the manipulative behaviour of people which surrounded sex; it was our old enemies desire and attachment and the wielding of power over each other rather than anything much to do with love*. To so many people, sexual 'love' was primarily about exerting willpower (or submitting to somebody else's) and a grasping for self-gratification, even when they sought to justify their behaviour by preaching about the beauty and sacredness of the experience. I considered it better to keep to myself and masturbate privately rather than get entangled with people who persistently wanted me to be less than myself and indulge in emotional ego-trip role-play in the name of love. This was certainly not what I'd call an ideal situation, but I was handling it in the best way I knew. I always kept my options open for loving physical relationships with men or women, but realized that to seek them or get entangled with people who were seeking them with me would only bring more problems and unhappiness.

* see Love Is Not What Nearly All People Believe.

That dreaded weed

My (non-sexual) encounter with one particular 'gay' man had a particularly important spin-off: he introduced me to smoking cannabis. Let's be clear that I don't recommend the use of any mind-affecting drug, and indeed I know various people for whom long-term regular use of cannabis is having a seriously harmful effect, but it does appear that there is a very small minority of people who are able to use particular drug experiences to open their minds in a highly constructive way*. Such people do not keep using the particular drug but incorporate their resultant enhanced vision and outlook into their everyday lives and very soon turn their back on the drug altogether. I turned out to be one of those people.

* I say this with considerable caution, because unfortunately most people would interpret such a statement as something of a commendation of cannabis for such people, and that isn't really what I mean. Indeed, I have come to understand that even the particular people who use cannabis only briefly for constructive purposes and then never use it again still run a real danger - and I myself had thus been in real danger when I had those long-ago 'smokes'. In some cases even a single 'smoke' could be the trigger for a major problem with the dark force, which could wreck the remainder of that person's life.

In my case my eventual severe dark force interference problems probably didn't relate in to my early and brief cannabis smoking in a really major way, but still could have predisposed me a bit to my much later major problems, even though other, very major, factors much nearer the time would have been the prime culprits. On the other hand, for some other people it could work out very differently. The fact is that nobody can know that their next 'smoke' isn't going to precipitate a life-wrecking problem with dark force interferences and indeed attached entities, and clearly people can draw their own conclusions about the advisability of using cannabis at all, regardless of any supposed benefits that it might confer.

One evening's overpoweringly vivid cannabis experience opened my mind to a whole new way of experiencing life, as well as greatly enhancing my mental creativity. For the first time I had the experience of standing aside from my restrictive and negative feelings and beginning to see things, even if fleetingly, in a joyful, non-judgemental way. Subsequently over the next two years I very occasionally had a smoke of the weed, on a couple of occasions alone in the countryside; a hint of that experience is captured in my poem Smoking Grass on Pewley Down. Significantly, despite the happy glow and wonderful displays of mental images that I experienced, I got increasingly bored with the effects, intuitively knowing that my task was to make all the positive aspects of such experiences manifest in my life generally, as the drug effects had simply shown me qualities and abilities that were already innate in me. Indeed in 1974 I decided to cease using all mind-affecting drugs altogether, including such socially acceptable ones as caffeine and alcohol, as part of a drive towards clearing myself of habitual tendencies and any perceived need for 'props' - but here I'm jumping ahead of my story...

Enter Re-Evaluation Counselling

By mid-1972, a year after my 'coming out' about the homosexuality, I was feeling all my hurt feelings inside so intensely that it seemed that at some point I would burst into tears at any moment, even in public, and somehow fall into some hellish pit of mental self-destruction; an intense grief continuously manifested as a physical ache in all my joints. This terrified me, for I'd picked up the pernicious 'men don't cry' conditioning that so plagues and dehumanizes our culture. I simply had never been told and didn't know that crying was a natural healing process and needed to be allowed. Yet the very thought of submitting myself for treatment of any kind, or indeed of regarding myself or being regarded by others as mentally ill in any way, was completely alien to me. To take prescribed tranquillizers or other drugs to make me more comfortable was not an option I ever seriously considered, and it filled me with horror (it still does!) that so many other people were so ready to allow their senses and experience of life to be dulled thus and their brains to be possibly damaged.

Then through a seemingly 'divinely' timed set of coincidences I got pointed to one of the first groups in the country to be practising Re-Evaluation Counselling, a very powerful and purposeful type of co-counselling. They were actually in Guildford, where I was living at the time. The prime aim in Re-evaluation Counselling was to unblock the functioning of the rational, loving, dynamically peaceful and happy mind by enabling crying, trembling and laughter as well as certain other emotional discharges or releases to occur freely. Over a few years I estimated I must have cried about 500 hours* - so much for my 'don't cry' conditioning! And on top of that was a similar amount of time spent with trembling and laughing. A tremendous amount of inner healing occurred during those processes, and I quickly accumulated important insights into the irrational behaviour of people around me (and of course into my own remaining irrational behaviour and emotional patterns), which gradually made it possible for me to be less hurt by other people and likewise more understanding towards them.

* Yes, you may well be wondering where I'd got all that emotional stuff from. Indeed, many people have gone further and assumed that there had to be something deeply unsound or 'wrong' about me to have had such an immense load as it turned out that I was carrying.

In fact, in 2007 I established that there appears to be a clear and precise explanation for this immense load of emotional trauma, and it cuts right across the beliefs of the vast majority of healers and people who are into life improvement or self actualization. If my new understanting is correct, almost all of the tremendous load of emotional trauma that I was carrying was not my own! From the viewpoint of that scenario, I myself was in fact remarkably sound and stable - it was just what had got attached to me that was the problem! For the eyebrow-raising explanation, please see the relevant section in My Own Self Actualization 'Path' - Part 2.

My 'reading' now is that most likely all really significant emotional issues that were actually my own were fully cleared in the 1970s through my use of Re-evaluation Counselling - and even that clearance would have been greatly quicker than it was if I hadn't had the great load of other people's baggage to try to clear simultaneously.

Over the years, within the Re-evaluation Counselling community an increasing emphasis was put on the contradiction and breaking of rigid patterns of feeling and behaviour. This was certainly an important advance, but it tended to be done rather unawarely, often using one rigidity to contradict another, so its effectiveness was very variable and despite its successes it quite often created new problems.

Re-evaluation Counselling theory didn't postulate any particular broader, non-physical aspect to human experience, but it was clear that the practice could eventually lead to full liberation of one's innermost nature, whatever that might imply. The sticking point for me was that the co-counselling process depended on one's counselling partner having sufficient awareness to be able to support one's opening up without the partner's own hurts and rigid behaviour patterns getting restimulated by the 'client material' and getting in the way. There was no general understanding of the need to recognise and set aside the feelings and compulsions of one's ordinary mind when in the counsellor role, so I sometimes had very disagreeable and upsetting experiences when I got landed with people with strong and manipulative patterns as counselling partners*, and although I was often a very effective counselling partner for some people, I'm sure there were times when my own anxiety to gain status made me over-zealous and pushy, so causing particular people difficult experiences.

* There was one occasion on a large residential RC workshop where I got paired up with a particular man, really much against my real wishes, who I found particularly upsetting and frightening in a certain manipulative quality about him and something about the way his face moved, which even then told me that there was something very seriously wrong about him.

Now that I'm often able to 'read', through a process of inner inquiry, what was likely to have been going on during earlier challenging situations of mine, I understand that that man most likely had a partial walk-in or some similarly troublesome sort of attachment, and, under the control of the dark force, it was controlling him to try to get me so frightened that I would go out of body sufficiently for it then to get a partial walk-in or other seriously problematical sort of attachment established within my own person, so effectively destroying this life of mine.

THAT is how dangerous Re-evaluation Counselling can be - because people are opening up to each other without any significant understanding of the problem of dark force interference and the way that the dark force seeks to exploit such situations in order to pass on and proliferate extremely serious personal problems.

In Some Potent Self Actualization / Healing Practices I describe in detail two completely safe and IMMENSELY more powerful and efficient methods for clearance of all emotional issues (and gaining a lot of additional self healing) - and those methods are Self-Power Walking and Grounding Post. Self-Power Walking especially is also breathtakingly simple, requires no analysis nor reliving of experiences (indeed, no awareness of specific issues at all), and depends on nobody else to work with you. It is joyful and invigorating to do, requiring no crying, trembling or 'heavy' stuff at all. And if for some reason you have difficulty in being able to use those methods, there are The Work and the EFT, so there's no shortage of choice for advancing very considerably upon what Re-evaluation Counselling can do for you. So, let's now consign RC, with all its side-tracks, longueurs and problems about finding oneself working with unsuitable people, to the Recycling Bin!

In any case, as I sought to work at deeper and deeper levels, and was so strongly motivated towards liberation, other people increasingly took fright. At age 38, after 7 years in the Re-evaluation Counselling community, I was quietly ejected from the Re-evaluation Counselling group in Exeter because almost all the members felt so threatened by where I was at, and they preferred to continue colluding together in maintaining their own level of unawareness. So much for the loving commitment to each other's 'emergence' that was supposed to be such a hallmark of the Re-evaluation Counselling community!

How mountains were mirrors

For a number of years then I felt deeply hurt and betrayed by that very section of humanity that I'd thought was to be my salvation. But meanwhile I was developing in other ways. For one thing I made a regular practice of doing long and often remote hard single-day walks (typically 18-21 miles or 29-34 km, with some 1,000-1,500 metres of ascent), especially on Dartmoor and those parts of the coast path that were within easy reach from Exeter, and I also established an annual spring visit to Fort William to walk on mountains and wilderness in the Scottish highlands; over the years I also got in a number of mountain walking trips to various parts of the Alps. My walking was usually solo, though I also enjoyed the company of others when I had the opportunity. I never felt any loneliness out there on my own in the wilds. The sense of oneness, unbounded space and transcendent peace was always with me up in the mountains, and I knew it was something very special and important that was really needed by everybody even if they were quite unaware of it. Little did I know then, however, just how important was that experience! Little did I realize that what I was actually looking at in that experience was my fundamental nature - that of enlightenment itself - and if at that point I'd recognised it for what it was I could have permanently transcended the very nature of suffering there and then!

Creativity beginning to flower

Following a request from a very young niece, in 1980 I started writing short stories, some of which left me quite awestruck at the depth of awareness of the content that emerged as though channelled from a 'higher' source* (try reading A Squoggle Comes Home to Roost, for example, to see what I mean).

* Hmmm... Well, that's what I thought over the years, because various people got all sorts of supposedly wise and wonderful words channelling to them from what were always claimed to be higher sources - but my understanding nowadays is that what was really happening was that deeper aspects of my own awareness (or 'mind' if you like) were working with my 'normal' fully conscious aspects to create the stories, with input coming from still deeper levels of my awareness but also various distortions coming in from the dark force. This is really what happens whenever a deeply aware person is creating works in any field of the arts.

So, what was being speculatively taken to be some external higher source was none other than deeper levels of myself.

Also, I did a lot of nature photography and, using the slides so produced, gave adult education classes and one-off slide talks on natural history and hiking.

Enter the Alexander Technique

In 1990 I started getting clicks and aching in my neck. Already for a decade I'd had lower back grumblings with occasional very troublesome flare-ups. By the end of 1992 my neck was so troublesome that I was feeling a new fear and desperation as the attentions of the medics, physiotherapist and osteopath all proved to be to no avail. Once again, enter a spot of seemingly divinely timed coincidence: an acquaintance strongly recommended the Alexander Technique, and just then I'd got enough money to cover the cost of a course of lessons, which I normally didn't have as I was very long-term unemployed.

It was almost Christmas, and I couldn't start lessons for about 4 weeks, but I did buy what appeared to be the best of the available books on the technique, and drank in its contents as though I'd found the one oasis in a boundless hot desert. It all made sense and related clearly to the theory of Re-evaluation Counselling, but it was from a different viewpoint, which put emphasis on learning simply to let go of habitual tendencies in one's use of the body rather than to dwell on emotional release. I realized that release of those habitual tendencies that were locked up in the body must release their counterparts in the mind, so, apparently, freeing two prisoners with one key.

With nothing to lose, although it was reckoned that virtually nobody could learn the technique from a book without personal one-to-one lessons, I at once experimented with the lie-downs that are the central thing that one takes time for (a direct equivalent of Buddhist meditation sessions, though with the mind applying itself to letting go of physical tensions and distortions). After a week of lie-downs (at that time some 12 to 14 per day!), a major chronic tension released in my lower back, and simultaneously I was aware that I'd been relieved of a heavy chunk of deep and probably lifelong anxiety. Although my neck didn't exhibit major release of its chronic tensions until some 9 months later, because my spine overall was getting into a better state of alignment and I was learning better use of the neck, the neck pain was at once reduced to a much lesser level, and because I now knew I was in control, what pain I still had was no longer the cause of fear and mental suffering, and thus was much more bearable. By the time I was getting noticeable major release in my neck it was normally out of pain altogether.

With the AT I learnt a looser, less stressful mode of walking, and indeed the technique benefited every part of my life - apart from a few physical problems that to this day remain apparently intractable. The AT integrated 100% into my everyday life, so that at all times I maintained awareness of my state of balance, poise and alignment and how I was carrying out my body movements, and I was able to interrupt and let go of the habitual distortions and reactions as and when they arose. This also worked on the purely mental level, proving to be a much more efficient way of freeing and opening up parts of the mind than by spending hours on end crying. I could still cry over something that arose in my mind, but I would keep my attention on the letting-go aspect, so that the 'physical' emotional release process was brief and my outlook kept positive.

Increasingly, especially while I was walking, even just in Exeter High Street, I was aware not only of a healthy and powerful sense of continuity and lengthening in my spine, but it seemed that the spine, in a powerful yet diffuse sort of way extended through my head and opened out into an unimaginable sort of space, which seemed almost to be a silvery or blue-silvery light yet was not a light in any ordinary sense*; there was something very uplifting, fine and noble about it, yet I didn't really know what it was. I tentatively assumed it must be some form of growing 'spiritual awareness', and left it at that. Eventually I'd notice it sometimes during one of my lie-downs, and when I did, I felt this amazing peaceful warmth radiate from that boundless space and fill my body. I didn't dwell on this, however, for my intuition counselled against allowing myself to get fascinated or absorbed by such an experience.

* I now understand that, although in a way this was indeed indicating a growing depth to my awareness, the primary point was that my own deepest aspects were giving me that impression as an indication of a major positive reconfiguring process that was occurring in my non-physical aspects at that time, brought about by my use of the AT.

The trail hots up

About the time I took up the AT a friend introduced me to an important book called Jesus Lived in India by Holger Kersten. For the first time in my life Jesus began to look like a great spiritual teacher* who was real, as distinct from the moralistic and largely fabricated Jesus of the Bible, the Church or 'Jesus freaks'. I learnt from that book as well as others subsequently that Jesus had been teaching true spirituality, not religion, whether or not he called it that. He'd been teaching about individual responsibility, karma and reincarnation. He'd been telling people to turn away from the temples and the scriptures and to look within themselves, where the true 'Law' was written, and where they could find Enlightenment ('the kingdom of God') even within this lifetime. He did not die to absolve anyone of their sins; indeed he survived the crucifixion.

* I didn't understand then that spirituality itself, as is generally understood, is itself extremely problematical. Please see Exit Spirituality - Enter Clear-Mindedness.

I was also introduced to Ian Stevenson's book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, which presents a seemingly quite overwhelming case for the occurrence of reincarnation*. Taking that as well as accounts of other overwhelming evidence for reincarnation, I now considered it highly likely that my apparently wolf-like identity in my early childhood 'fantasy' world indicated that I had been such an animal in my last life - though I found that transmigration of 'souls' between human and animal realms appeared not to be widely accepted in mystical traditions outside Buddhism, and subsequently I've been given a fully convincing explanation for my experience.

* My own more recent inner inquiry, supported by energy testing, is strongly suggestive that although reincarnation does occur, the situation is more complex than is generally known. Please see The True Nature of 'The Dark Force' and its Interference and Attacks. Regarding the wolf-like muzzle that I had in those early childhood night experiences, my much more recent inner inquiry paints the following scenario - inevitably somewhat speculative. My having that muzzle did arise from a set of past life experiences, but not of mine. They belonged to one of the parasitic 'lost' souls attached to me, who in one of his incarnations had been seriously into 'dark' practices as a shaman and had made a regular practice of projecting part of his awareness into the 'mind' of some sort of rather wolf like animal (not actually a wolf).

Not only the historical Jesus but Buddhism too had at last started gathering real meaning in and possible connection with my life. I didn't rush out and immediately investigate Buddhism, though, because I was greatly put off by what I felt was all the Eastern cultural baggage that appeared to go with it.

Also by the time I took up the AT, for two years I'd been writing crazy and challenging novels with a powerful undercurrent of deep awareness that many people would regard as 'spiritual', which seemed always to be channelled into them from some deeper source without my bidding. Then in 1995, at last - at last! - a slight upgrade of my computer system enabled me to break through the musical literacy block that had prevented me from realizing any of the powerful music that had been in my mind from my teens onwards. By the end of 1996 I was composing my 6th Symphony, a pretty monumental and turbulent work entitled K2 - A Song of Enlightenment. Its focus was a remembrance of Alison Hargreaves' demise on the mountain K2 in the light of a celebration of human endeavour and the 'journey' towards enlightenment. The final movement - a celebration of enlightenment after all the toil and strife - was a partly choral one, and although the music was all working out of its own volition, I had no words to fit the choir's sections.

It was a strange thing that although I'd often previously been rather awestruck by what had emerged from my compositional tinkerings, this time I was not only awestruck but had this inexplicable feeling that somehow what I was composing then was leading me to something unimaginably wonderful in my own life. My 'rational' mind did its best to sneer "Oh yes, that's what they call wishful thinking!", but I was still haunted by this strange feeling as I had a poke around in bookshops for books that might have Buddhist texts that I could use for those choral bits. At that point I also thought to look for a book that might introduce me to the fundamentals of Buddhism without all the cultural baggage that had made me previously keep my distance. And what did I find? The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying - truly the answer to my 'prayers'*.

* Well, it seemed to be at the time! As noted further below, I subsequently distanced myself from all Buddhist teachings, which I see as containing untruths aimed at gaining or maintaining control over people and diverting people into illusory realities and thus become captives of the dark force. Enlightenment and self actualization are MUCH better approached without reference to religious or spiritual teachings or traditions.

Three days into reading that book, there came that memorable New Year evening. The electricity of the last movement of my 6th Symphony, which I was composing just at that point, became, in addition to all its 'official' meanings and connotations, a celebration of my very own enlightenment! Having read that according to the Dzogchen teachings our true nature is that of the Buddha, which went even beyond the goodness that I'd already understood to be at the core of everybody, I sat aside from my computer and, with no preconceptions or any sense of trying (the latter being something that my AT training had taught me not to do), I looked within my own mindspace, and...

Part 2: Enlightenment

Looking over this section in my hindsight from 2010, for me it makes slightly uncomfortable and even embarrassing reading, in that there is an awkward, self conscious aspect in my writing about the experience so soon after the event. However, I am leaving that 'as is' and am not 'sanitizing' it, because that does actually reflect the way I was feeling at the time, and therefore it reflects an aspect of the experience itself. I have, however, added later annotations to help maintain a reasonable degree of 'sanity' and balance to the proceedings.

I was at the time feeling quite a bit awkward and self conscious even in overtly having anything to do with 'spirituality', and it took me some time afterwards to relax and settle down into accepting that enlightenment, although important, was nothing 'special' and was simply a natural point in my self healing and self actualization process, just as puberty is a natural stage in one's physical development. What was confusing for me and distorting my experience of becoming 'enlightened' was all the 'spirituality' and indeed Tibetan Buddhist baggage that I was inevitably associating with it at that time because of the way I'd been introduced to it - not least all the traditional coyness and even downright taboo associated with writing or speaking about one's enlightenment. That Tibetan Buddhist baggage dished enlightenment up with a lot of completely unwarranted 'preciousness' and indeed almost 'holiness' that was actually not at all harmonious for me, and which would be distorting to anyone's perception or understanding of what enlightenment really is. It was thus a great relief and liberation for me eventually to drop Buddhism and indeed the 'spirituality' crap altogether and see enlightenment as just as 'precious' and 'holy' as one's nose.

I must first point out something extremely atypical about this event. I had never done formal sitting meditation, and, despite my use of the AT, my mind was still incredibly active and 'noisy', seething with mostly uncontrolled thoughts, images and feelings. I claim, only half in jest, that I must have had one of the noisiest minds in history for one who crosses this particular threshold. So what I didn't do when I turned away from the computer was to meditate and achieve some phenomenal quietude. On the contrary, I was feeling an uncanny crescendo of some inner excitement and awe, as though I knew that something momentous was about to happen. The following account, then, is of what I'd call an active contemplation rather than what most people would think of as meditation.

I assumed from what I'd read so far in the book that I wouldn't recognise my innermost nature, because Sogyal Rinpoche said that this couldn't happen without years of meditation and the guidance and pointing-out from a qualified 'master'. So it was not in my mind that this could or even might happen at this stage and neither was I aiming for it.

When I sat aside from the computer and the music at that point, it was simply to look within my mind, in an imagining and inquiring sort of way, to see if I could see my inner goodness as this perfect 'buddha nature' of which Sogyal Rinpoche had so eloquently written, with its unbounded 'compassionate'* love and untainted and untaintable qualities. It all unfolded from that. I can't remember the exact order in which the different aspects of 'the View' came to me, and in any case some of the aspects that I've listed sequentially actually came together. Basically all that happened was that I took up the various fundamental points made in the book and simply checked them within my own mind. I was aware of no psychic phenomena, no angels singing (nor for that matter demon trumpets) nor funny lights; indeed you could even say that virtually nothing happened! What had actually happened was nothing more than a change in viewpoint.

* This is quite a thing in Tibetan Buddhism, making a big meal of what they call compassion. The problem about this isn't that compassion is exactly wrong (nothing is intrinsically right or wrong), but that it is actually unhelpful because it is a distortion of what people are really trying to get in touch with, which is their intrinsic empathy.

The Buddhist notion of 'compassion' is heavily loaded with a moralistic and thus judgemental view of people and their outlooks and behaviour, and implies a great deal of giving oneself away without getting any sort of return - which is seen as extremely virtuous. In reality such behaviour is extremely harmful for all involved, and that is well understood among many (but by no means all) healers here in the West. When you keep giving yourself away for the supposed benefit of others, you are depleting your own non-physical aspects and so weakening yourself, and through doing so you are also having a weakening and disempowering effect upon all who you are supposedly helping and indeed to some extent upon everyone who has anything to do with you.

A healthily balanced, enlightened and self realized person would have virtually unlimited empathy, but would not allow that to hinder his looking after his own wellbeing first and foremost, so that he can be most catalytic for other people's self empowerment. It's both an interaction of non-physical aspects ('energy system') of oneself with other people and a straightforward, down-to-earth matter of being a good role model.

To me there is no mystery at all about one thing that seemed rather to mystify Sogyal Rinpoche - the reason why so many 'great' Tibetan 'masters' seem to die more or less prematurely. Because of their distorted notions of their role among other people, and their toxic idolization of 'compassion', they set themselves up to have their life force energies progressively sucked out of them by their students and all others who they are seeking to 'help' or indeed who are 'looking up' to them in any way. Additionally, their whole stance ensures that they accumulate all manner of problematical or 'negative' energies and thought forms from people around them. Those 'masters' are not teachers of anything worthwhile at all. Sorry, but apparently true!

Crossing the threshold that the book said I couldn't

The buddha nature; love & compassion

Quite disconcertingly, the moment I looked within myself I was immediately aware of myself filled with that very love that the book said distinguishes what it called the buddha nature (i.e. one's underlying enlightened state). 'Love' as is normally meant is a grasping and conditional sort of thing, which is directed to individuals (or maybe particular groups) to the exclusion of others, and is to do with desire and attachment, pleasure and displeasure, and tends to be coloured by compulsions rooted in our own individual sets of disturbing and actually negative emotions.

On the other hand this love and compassion that was uncovered now was like a radiation, shining out without fear or favour on all beings, objects and phenomena. It was completely outgoing and unconditional and making no demands; it transcended anything I'd previously known as love or compassion. Compassion here was not a separate thing from love but simply one of the inherent qualities of love. It was clearly timeless and unceasing. It must have been faint glimpses of this that I'd felt during the preceding year when I'd seemed to be opening up some sort of spiritual awareness. As I turned my mind to successive aspects of 'the View'*, this timeless love never left me, nor could it, because I now knew that I was that love and that love was me. This was a love that made no demands and singled nobody and nothing out for special attention, and I sensed its phenomenal power to heal and bring about positive change when focused.

As already pointed out, the Buddhist 'masters' have got it wrong about compassion (as well as a whole lot of other things), and at the time I became enlightened I was taking on some of the confusions and plain inaccuracies in the Tibetan Buddhism teachings.

In fact, even then what I was really opening to was NOT compassion but my intrinsic empathy - just temporarily distorted a little by the confusions I'd picked up from Sogyal Rinpoche.

For a more balanced and coherent account of the true nature of love, please see Love Is Not What Nearly All People Believe.

* 'The View' was a shorthand term quite a bit used by Sogyal Rinpoche to mean "the view from perspective of recognition of the nature of mind [i.e. enlightenment]".

Oneness with the enlightened ones

As I thought of the historical Buddha, his very presence and countenance seemed to be in that radiation of compassionate love. I directed my focus to other enlightened masters of the past: Padmasambhava, Avalokiteshvara, for example, and masters of the present day. Whoever I thought of was in that light that wasn't a light. I thought of Jesus. His presence was at once recognizable here within me. But no, that's not correct, to say that each of these presences appeared within me. Rather, that the light of love was Jesus and was me; it was Buddha and was me. We were neither different nor the same; indeed, the concept of 'we' was meaningless here; the duality of everyday conceptual thinking was now transcended.

Yes, in the above I had got a good point, but in the midst of a flurry of Tibetan Buddhist bullshit. I completely distance myself now from any raising of individuals onto pedestals. Nobody is to be looked up to because they're enlightened, for that just gets in the way of our becoming enlightened ourselves. We are all as we are and do as we do. Simple! And likewise, now I'd keep well clear of that 'compassion' bogey, which, at least in Tibetan Buddhism, seems to be almost as much of a status thing as enlightenment. I'll stick with my intrinsic empathy, thank you very much - it doesn't earn me Brownie points for my status, but it's a damned sight healthier and more beneficial to all involved!

Note also that I wrote then of "that light that wasn't a light". It's important to be clear that that in itself was NOT my innermost, non-dual nature itself, but simply something that was arising from it. Countless people through human history have got that confused and have consequently created a very serious problem for themselves. Fortunately I did understand from the book, that my actual, non-dual enlightened state or essence was something much more subtle, which I was experiencing too, but which could not in itself be described in any direct way - though later I did arrive at a few 'schematic' brief descriptions of it to make it more comprehensible to other people, and even now I think those were about as effective as could be for that purpose.

...and with the great wrongdoers too

How compassion seared the heart* as Adolf Hitler and all manner of tormented deluded beings who'd wreaked havoc in this world were also seen to be one with me! This was an awareness that had been in my mind in a mundane conceptual form over about the last year. See the divine essence of these beings and understand with heart-rending compassion the enormity of the torment and suffering that their delusions and the effects of their past behaviour have been wreaking upon them and could well do so in the future! It was now possible to see directly that in essence I was no lesser than Buddha nor Jesus and no greater than Messrs Hitler nor Nero - nor indeed the drunk who last asked me for some money 'to buy a cup of tea'. What an inspiring leveller!

* There he goes again! Compassion, my sun hat! It was simply my intrinsic empathy. Also, nothing is divine nor Divine - except in the astral sub-reality of illusion and delusion, through which the dark force interferes with us. ...You mean, you didn't realize that Divinity was of 'the dark side'? Well, you can think again now! More about that aspect in The True Nature of 'The Dark Force' and its Interference and Attacks.

The Vows!

An overpowering compassion filled my heart, and from within, with a wild fury of positive energy, came a vow that I silently made to myself and indeed the Cosmos: that from that point on, every thought, word or deed of mine was dedicated to the spread of love and compassion in all other beings - for the rest of this life and for whatever follows beyond. Towards this end, a subsidiary vow - the basic bodhisattva vow - similarly emerged: that I was from now on dedicated to attaining full enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. Externally I cried and trembled a bit as the energy of the vows emerged as though out of some great trumpet into the Cosmos.

Oh ha-ha! What a calamity of newly absorbed Tibetan Buddhist bullshit! Quite apart from all the 'compassion' stuff rather than plain, down-to-Earth empathy, there's another major gaffe. Such vows as I blurted out then may appear to be wonderful and virtuous - but I came to understand ten years later that actually ALL vows are HARMFUL and of 'the dark side'! This is because they are effectively self-made curses put upon oneself, which limit one's free choice. You're MUCH better off without a curse upon you that forces you to think and act in certain ways regardless of the full reality of each new situation that unfolds.

A truly aware and clear-minded - indeed, enlightened - person thinks and acts out of love and consideration for the deepest and ultimate good of all anyway, so any dictation from an earlier part of that person's life - or a previous lifetime - that (s)he must think or act in particular ways thereafter simply imposes the more restrictive and less aware outlook that the person had at the time of the creation of the vow, and thus creates stress and disharmony, hindering the unfolding of any true deeper and beneficial purpose of that person's life. It also greatly increases the hold of the dark force upon that person.

Even marriage vows are harmful, because they do not take account of the reality of future situations and the partners' ever evolving true needs. How can they possibly know, when they come together really closely, such things as whether or not in the future it would be appropriate for either of them to be close with anyone else as well, or indeed to separate again within the current lifetime?

To my understanding nowadays, Unless a time limit was expressly included in a vow at the time of creation it continues indefinitely, carrying over into any successive lifetimes (thanks to the 'assistance' of the dark force, often causing major problems. In fact the vows of mine that I mention above came out in that 'driven' way because one of the parasitic lost souls attached to me was carrying such vows and was being controlled by the dark force to drive me to foul up my future by making such vows for myself.

My current self actualization process includes dissolving ALL vows that I have made AND all the thought-form replicas or other traces in my non-physical aspects of vows belonging to the parasitic 'lost' souls that were attached to me - and this dissolution process is now in an advanced stage.

The glory of impermanence

From this viewpoint I saw in unprecedented, albeit far from total, fullness the impermanence of everything, no matter what its apparent solidity. I saw all objects, all experiences in my consciousness, my life, to be like waves on a boundless ocean within the boundless expanse of this indefinable space that was 'my' awareness. I was staggered that whereas previously - indeed right up to that very day - impermanence had bugged and troubled me, now this fuller view of impermanence filled me with compassion* and joy!

* Again, 'compassion' was really the wrong word here, for it was really simply my intrinsic empathy. As to why I was feeling empathy so strongly when contemplating impermanence - presumably it was simply my awareness that the vast majority of people find the very notion of impermanence to be so tormenting that they try to shut it out of their mind or escape it in some other way, such as by cultivating attachment to people, objects and experiences, and yet upon perceiving impermanence from their own enlightened viewpoint they could at a stroke be released from all that fear and torment (or potential torment) over the impermanence of everything including themselves. Aware perception of the impermanence of everything is very much a liberation, and promotes happiness, deep-seated freedom and 'living in the present'.

Death, where is thy sting?

This life of mine of course was part of that display of impermanence. I could see, breathtakingly clearly, that this awareness or underlying consciousness that was the true 'me' was unborn and undying; this life was just one wave upon the ocean, each experience within it being just a transient wavelet upon the bigger wave. My fear of death dissolved; I even saw imaginary chains falling away into the waves as I was released from that deception. Although I couldn't directly see any past lives of mine*, from this viewpoint past lives seemed beyond doubt as they were a logical conclusion of this whole system of interacting cause and effect that brought all phenomena into and out of 'existence'; if this life were a wave upon the ocean, then it was presumably preceded by countless others. I now had an unshakable conviction that went beyond belief, that death would simply be the end of one part of the show I was observing, and would usher in another stage. Indeed, by the time this period of contemplation had finished it seemed to me that I had 'died' during that very hour and transcended the 'death' that would mark the end of my present life - if that makes sense to anyone! How sweet the kiss of death!

* As I understand it now, there was a particularly good reason why I couldn't see any past lives of mine: I hadn't had any soul reincarnations - as far as I can establish through deep inner inquiry, I am a direct incarnation of fundamental consciousness (a no-soul incarnation), not an old soul at all, as various healers, mediums and psychics were all telling me. My understanding is that on the occasion related in the above paragraph I would most likely have seen some memories from a number of previous lifetimes if I had been through a succession of reincarnations of the same soul - except for the near certainty that if I'd already soul-reincarnated a few times I'd have almost certainly lost any ability to become enlightened in the first place. As far as I understand it now, I've had at least a fair number of other no-soul lifetimes, but one doesn't get either direct memories or true past life information relating to them, except for sometimes certain rather general indications, which are always devoid of chronological data and thus 'story'. Those are non-karmic incarnations, which don't impinge upon each other in any karmic way. I explain the difference between those two types of reincarnation and their significance in The True Nature of 'The Dark Force' and its Interference and Attacks.

Me? - Who or what am I anyway?

I observed all the thoughts, memories and feelings that had up to that evening seemed to be 'me', and I looked for a 'thing' that I could really identify as 'me'. I couldn't fault Sogyal Rinpoche's account of the illusory character of the ego. From this viewpoint it was clear that the real 'I' was none other than this indefinable and indescribable awareness that was observing all the motley collection of arisings in the mind (i.e. thoughts, memories, feelings and all that seemed to be information from the sense organs) that I'd previously regarded as 'me'. And as I contemplated that deception falling away, another element of the teachings* was getting underlined...

* Yes, that's one great problem - that what these Tibetan 'masters' say or write is regarded as 'teachings'. That is all to do with the control agenda distorted relationship between 'master' and his / her 'students' or 'disciples'. Fundamentally, there is really only one teacher for oneself - one's own life experience! All that these so-called 'masters' can really usefully do is to give some pertinent prompts and pointers to assist people in learning from their own life experience.

Severing the connection to the source of suffering

In Dzogchen meditation, and in maintaining 'the View' (i.e. the 'enlightened' perception) in everyday life, Sogyal Rinpoche tells us, our aim is not to suppress or judge the thoughts and feelings that appear in the mind, but to allow whatever arises to follow its course in the mind without accepting or rejecting it or following it up; you could also say we neither identify the arisings as being 'me' nor as 'not me'. This was just what was happening here for me. Despite the accelerating increase in my positivity over the years I'd still been holding many angry and resentful feelings to my bosom concerning a number of things in my life. As I let go of the ego-identification with these things stored in the mind, they were all welling up into view. The vast ocean of worldly mind was boiling up in a tumult of waves full of negativities and feelings of attachment and aversion.

For the first time, instead of looking at the negativities with discomfort and rejecting them, I observed all these arisings with that unconditional love still shining upon everything without exception. Each of the thoughts and feelings rose up and gracefully fell back, dissolving into the wild, wild sea. Among them I repeatedly saw the chains of broken shackles falling away. The word 'ridiculous' (said in a condemnatory tone), which had riddled so many of the negative thoughts kept glinting in the dissolving fragments as they fell away. As all this was going on, I also saw that it was that illusory image of 'I' that had gathered all the hurts of my life and indeed any previous lives of mine. The naked awareness that was the true 'I' had nothing in it to get hurt! I saw at once that in everyday life henceforth, each time any hurt feeling arose I just needed to look into the essence of the feeling and of the real 'me', that is, the naked awareness, and the hurt feeling would fall away and dissolve*, just as this mass of arisings in the mind was doing right now.

* True in theory, but at that time I had no knowledge about the effects of having parasitic lost souls or other entities attached to one, and the ways that the dark force can attack with troublesome emotional feelings to confuse one's enlightened experience. The large collection of parasitic lost souls that had been attached to me (i.e. as strongly suggested by my inner inquiry on the subject) were more than a match for any notion of my being able to release all emotional 'nasties' that arose in my mindspace just by looking into their essence - though I've no doubt at all that it was my consistently doing the latter that enabled me to come through the massive onslaughts from the dark force (i.e. what is generally but incorrectly called the 'dark forces' (plural)) in 2003-2007 without getting wrecked or taken over by 'them', and now to be coming out the other side of all that so swiftly and strongly.

The ultimate aloneness, yet the end of all loneliness!

I'd gone through life up to this point bearing a deep and intractable loneliness, which was repeatedly reinforced by the isolation that this life had forced upon me in all manner of ways. Now that I perceived that at the level of absolute truth there was no being, no consciousness, outside this one that was me, surely I should have been seared by loneliness! But on the contrary, feelings of loneliness now presented themselves as just more of those arisings of old self-delusion which I could observe falling away, no longer controlling me. True that in a sense this was the ultimate aloneness, but it was so merely through perceiving the ultimate oneness of everything, and that there was nothing outside that oneness. But as that oneness itself encompassed everything including all beings, I couldn't possibly be lonely any more, for however alone I might be at times at the worldly level I was not separated, and never could be, from all the beings and all the love in the Cosmos.

* This couldn't, however, prevent me from feeling the loneliness and isolation feelings of certain of the parasitic lost souls that were attached to me - especially when the dark force attacked me with those feelings - so it turned out that in practice there was no way that I could avoid at times experiencing those feelings and not being able to dissolve them all there and then just by looking into their essence.

Surely all this couldn't mean that I have...

Repeatedly I interrupted the contemplation to consult 'that book', for I was aware that it was almost as though I'd hit the jackpot that I hadn't for a moment thought even worth looking for at this stage as a non-meditator and complete newcomer to Buddhism or overt spirituality. I checked and rechecked to try to find something to help me eliminate the ridiculous (sic) idea that this could have happened to me. But all my attempts to eliminate it from my inquiries just helped to confirm that this must indeed have happened.

A spaciousness in everything

One of the qualities of this mind essence or naked awareness is its space-like character. After all, it is the space within which all phenomena, both internal and external, manifest, including our whole universe, so we're talking of some universe-dwarfing infinity! Simply allowing a sense of spaciousness in everything that arose in my mind helped me maintain my alignment with the naked awareness. Sogyal Rinpoche exhorts people in everyday life to 'think spaciously' all the time for this very reason.

It's extremely important here to make the distinction between spaciousness and any sense of being 'spaced out'. It is the latter which people usually aim for, or at least find and try to cultivate, believing that this is 'spirituality'. What they are actually doing is ungrounding their awareness and increasing their openness to the astral sub-reality and thus to the dark force, which operates through it. You actually make enlightenment much more difficult to occur if you get yourself 'spaced out', and it occurs most readily when your awareness is very well grounded.

This is absurd: it's not even new - I'd been looking at it all along!

As Sogyal Rinpoche said in the book, one of the reasons why people have so much difficulty in recognizing their true, enlightened, nature, is that it's so simple and so ordinary! - For it's been staring them in the face all along, only they've assumed they had to look for something beyond and much more tangible and spectacular. It's as if they've been searching for the elephant's footprints in the forest when actually they've got the elephant locked up in their own basement!

I remembered again that early time in my childhood when I'd sometimes agonized about the nature of death, looking within my mind to try to identify some sort of beginning to my life experience. Now I knew without a shadow of doubt that the naked awareness I had perceived then was the selfsame 'thing' that I'd at last recognised as my true nature. Would that I'd had an enlightened person there and then to make sense of it! Because at that time I'd had no intimations from anyone of the true nature of mind or of reality, even though I'd perceived it clearly and directly I hadn't recognised it for what it was and had continued to live a life of suffering. I now realized that, like most people, I'd had glimpses of this pure awareness on many, many occasions, sometimes with transient experiences of peacefulness or euphoria, but without any inkling that I'd been directly seeing enlightenment itself winking at me!

I've arrived - and I didn't even know I was coming!

As the multitude of implications of my new viewpoint steadily gathered around me and began to 'sink in', so another tremendous sense of relief was emerging - the sure knowledge that I had finally arrived. That is, my life quest was over, successfully completed; there was nothing more that I had to seek or to do to fulfil myself*. This seemed incredible, because despite having been purposefully moving towards liberation from limiting habitual tendencies and negative emotions, I'd had no idea that I was heading for such a sublime goal, and up to that point had still felt painfully lacking in a life direction and was plagued by a feeling of unfulfilment despite all my creative work - and now, suddenly I'd hit the fulfilment that my life had all along really been pointing to, without even trying!

* Although there was an element of truth in that, actually overall this was a big distortion, which I'd picked up from Sogyal Rinpoche in that book. The point is, we do not incarnate just to become enlightened. Becoming enlightened is an extremely important point in the unfolding of one's life, but it isn't in itself one's life purpose - as actually I partially acknowledged in the second paragraph below.

Surely we don't incarnate to experience puberty, but it's still a necessary step in our life process. Similarly with enlightenment - except that very few people get that far!

But even that wasn't the end of my astonishment about this aspect, for I also saw that because my true nature was perfect and unchanging, my whole life quest that had brought me to this point had in fact been illusory; in reality all that suffering, and even the very concept of a spiritual path had been self-delusion - a lot of old balls! In reality I'd travelled simply from here to here but yet it had seemed to be such a big and tortuous journey! How amazing!

I should perhaps clarify one thing here: paradoxically, having 'finally arrived' did not mean there was nothing further for me to do in this life, because it was and still is up to me to use the rest of this life to develop towards complete enlightenment and to benefit others. But now at last I had a rock-solid foundation for my further development and activities, and indeed a sound and far-reaching purpose in life*.

* I now understand that a strong sense of having or needing to have a purpose in one's life is generally problematical and has little or nothing to do with one's underlying life purpose, which simply unfolds if one really allows it to. Such feelings are best cleared using one or more of the emotional clearance methods which I give in Healing and Self Actualization - The Safest and Quickest Way.

My reference to 'complete enlightenment' reflects the confusion between enlightenment and self realization in the Tibetan Buddhist teachings. What I'm developing towards is full or complete self realization (what I'm tending to prefer to call self actualization, but it is the same thing). Enlightenment is complete in itself, and, as I've already intimated, is best thought of as simply an important step in our development, just as, on a purely physical level, puberty is.

My personal ambitions

What folly that I'd been tormenting myself worrying my head about getting money and fame from my literary and musical creativity! Not that there was anything wrong about making a living from them, but as there were clearly obstacles to the acceptance of my work and I could very likely spend the rest of my life struggling against the odds for recognition and getting nowhere, my previous ambitions fell away and I felt a great relief. Now I could happily turn my back on the whole lot and go off to devote the rest of my life to spiritual practice!* But I knew that in practice (sic) I wouldn't do so for the time being or even at all, for it didn't take much thought to understand that my literary and musical work had much in it to broaden and deepen people's awareness and therefore was a gift to humanity which it was my part of my life's higher purpose to produce and use reasonable measures to seek to disseminate. I decided there and then to make all my literary works available on the Internet at an early stage and to stop bothering about getting accepted by publishers or agents. Disseminating my music would be more problematical for various practical reasons, but while I had inspiring music emanating from deep within me, it had to be part of my life task to channel it into new compositions for the benefit of others, regardless of whether it would bring me any money or personal fame.

* Yes, and get myself well and truly ensnared by the dark force in a way that in the event it failed to achieve precisely because I didn't devote my life to so-called spiritual practice! I had no idea at the time of writing the above, that the whole edifice of 'spirituality' was itself 'of the dark side' and most definitely something I needed to keep right out of. As it was, my involvements in 'spirituality' at all from 1998 to early 2007 caused me massive problems with the dark force, which had clearly targeted me for wrecking or being taken over by 'the dark side'. See Exit 'Spirituality' - Enter Clear-Mindedness.

Clearly some sort of sense was now emerging with respect to that deepest and long-secreted 'life task' awareness of mine: that my real purpose in this life was to be a spiritual teacher. This didn't mean, of course, that I necessarily had to emulate Jesus or the Buddha and become some super powerful big name; there would be so many ways that I could be a positive force (or perhaps one should say, a channel for such positive force). Anyone who seeks always to be true to himself and touches other people positively in ways that open or widen the doors of spiritual awareness in their minds is effectively a spiritual teacher or leader of sorts, even without being publicly regarded as such and gathering a circle of overt disciples. In my case my creative work was clearly one of my vehicles for such positive touching of others, and no doubt other means would emerge as I developed further. I had no doubt that whenever I reincarnated in the future I would be some sort of spiritual teacher, presumably more advanced than in this life - the important thing being positive effects, not my perceived status!

I have the following later observations on the above paragraph:

• A good part of my constant inner urge to benefit Humanity may have been coming from a vow that I was unawarely carrying (actually not of mine but made by one or more of the parasitic lost souls attached to me, in one or more of its lifetimes), to the effect that I would always seek to benefit others rather than myself. Not so healthy! However, this was masking a very major genuine life purpose of mine, which could be seen as being of overriding importance - assisting people towards becoming clear of the tyrannical stranglehold of the so-called 'dark forces' (i.e. the dark force) through genuine comprehensive self actualization - and, indeed, as far as possible, to go at least some way towards finding a way towards seriously weakening it or indeed bringing about its actual dissolution.

• That underlying life purpose of mine got a bit distorted into the concept of having a task as a 'spiritual teacher' because in about 1999 out of curiosity I went to a clairvoyant / medium to see what she would pick up about me - I just turned up off the street and gave her no information about myself. She told me an amazing amount about myself that was more or less true and which couldn't have been just guessed, but as I now know, there were distortions in what she told me, in line with the dark force agenda that had been laid down for me.

  So, my true underlying life purpose, which was very much about disseminating awareness of true self actualization (including enlightenment) rather than 'spirituality', and also about publicly highlighting the pernicious nature and pervasiveness of the dark force interference in everyone's lives, as well as eventually directly addressing the massive problem of 'the dark side', got transmogrified by that clairvoyant, and subsequently by others too, into 'spiritual teacher', so straightaway I was being directed towards becoming yet another tool of the dark force - being a teacher of supposed 'spiritual' realities and 'spiritual' (i.e. ungrounding and dark force connecting) practices. (See Exit 'Spirituality' - Enter Clear-Mindedness.)

I no longer need music! Nor mountains!

My attachment to all things of this life was dissolving throughout the contemplation. Again the imaginary image was of broken shackles falling away into the waves of that vast ocean of the mind. The great 'loves' of my life, music and mountains, were no exception. I no longer needed these things. Note that needed is the operative word here. That didn't mean that where there had been wonderful things in my mind and life before, there would henceforth just be pointless blank; I wasn't rejecting them. Far from it - but from now on I could freely choose whether and when to involve myself with music, and similarly for going on mountains, and I could leave all these wonderful things behind with equanimity at the time of death or in the event of changed life circumstances that pointed me in other directions. I saw that when I went on mountains in the future it would be not out of a sense of need but as a celebration and a glorious type of meditation in which I would transcend every worldly emotion that arose; I would experience oneness with the spacious grandeur of the mountains and wilderness, and radiate that inspiring peace and nobility into the Cosmos and quietly into the heart and spirit of all beings (i.e. via that innermost level of consciousness within which we are all one).*

* Oh God! (sic) Eeek! What execrable spirituality-speak of mine! Let's have a go at rewording that into something sane, healthy and grounded:

...and a beautiful self actualization practice in which I could experience freedom from attachments, and oneness with everything and everyone, in a most uplifting and healing but immensely grounding context - so in subtle ways becoming more effective in initiating / catalyzing self actualization in others.

I saw how most people's unaware motivation for going walking up mountains and out in wilderness areas was to 'see' the reflection of their true nature that their surroundings presented to them; even apparently relatively unaware people were intuitively seeking such connections and engagements with Nature which could open up little chinks in their unawareness. But in the short term few people indeed would immediately recognise the underlying nature (sic) of what they were experiencing up on the mountains, so to a large extent they would fall back into their habitual ways and thought patterns upon returning to 'ordinary life'.

The paradox of transcending joy

Even as I felt wave upon wave of joy, the like of which I'd previously experienced only briefly up on the mountains, I perceived that I was observing this emotion from a viewpoint beyond. I could now feel the joy, although sort of wonderful, to have a certain unsatisfactory quality because it was still a worldly emotion that was transient and linked to at least the possibility of suffering, whereas the peaceful radiation of compassionate love that emanated from the naked awareness was constant and was beyond all such emotions. I correctly guessed that I'd be filled pretty well continuously with this great joy for several days (it was actually two whole weeks, and felt almost as incongruous as going around with a continuous erection for all that time!), and then the joy would subside, leaving it easier and less distracting for me to keep my attention within the enlightened essence. As I was now observing joy from beyond, I knew I wasn't going to fall into the common trap of thinking that the joy itself equals enlightenment and so try to dwell on it and seek it out again when it went away.

Especially since the dark force was, right then, strenuously seeking to deceive me and lead me astray, I award myself a whole lot of Brownie points for recognising as clearly as I did then, that that joy was not 'me' and was something unsatisfactory, to be transcended!

In fact what was really happening then was that, unbeknown to me, I was being ATTACKED by the dark force to hide the true, much more subtle joyfulness that, as an aspect of my true nature, was beginning to become more manifest. The unsubtle transient emotion of 'joy', like erotic feelings, which people also consider extremely positive and pleasant, is actually based in painful emotions and so is not at all what people believe it to be. The dark force on this particular occasion was seeking strenuously to get me hooked on the 'joy' deception to unseat me from my enlightened state - just as the dark force manages to divert most people away from enlightenment if they're getting at all close, by giving them attacks with apparently pleasant emotions or sensations to get them to mistake those for enlightenment.

Fortunately in my case I remained resolutely too clear-minded for the latter to happen.

---

N.B. The following 'post mortem' notes are much more recently added or revised, because of the radical changes of outlook and understanding that have resulted from my actively clearing from myself a plethora of deceptions and distortions that had been previously coming to me from the dark force. I have deleted some other notes that were here and which would have just continued to cause unhelpful confusions.

Was my experience enlightenment?

This is a double-edged question. The strict answer is 'no', but not in the way that most people would mean. The experience was just a passing experience, albeit a wonderful and important one. Enlightenment is not in itself an experience but more like gaining a particular viewpoint upon our experiences. So, to answer what most people would really mean by that question, we have to rephrase it:

Had I become enlightened when I had that experience?

Notwithstanding what any Tibetan Buddhist 'authority' would claim, I would say without reservation that I had become enlightened at that point. Becoming enlightened is a radical and sudden change of viewpoint - a sort of pretty well permanent 'phase shift' in your life experience. That is a lasting change, and is something completely independent of whatever experience accompanies or is triggered by that change.

The Tibetan Buddhist teachings confuse self realization and enlightenment. What they are calling full enlightenment or even just enlightenment is actually not enlightenment but full self realization / self actualization (though it does include enlightenment). They tend to call the crossing of the enlightenment threshold 'recognition of the nature of mind', which isn't actually wrong but is greatly misleading in the context in which it is normally used. So, they regard the real enlightenment as not enlightenment but simply as an important step towards 'enlightenment' (i.e. full self actualization).

However, although thus it looks superficially as though they are pointed in the right direction, even though in a rather confused way, actually their notion of what constitutes 'self realization' (and thus what they're calling 'enlightenment'), although looking sort-of correct, contains distortions whose effect would be to divert most people into various illusory realities, including facsimiles of enlightened and self actualized states, and thus away from true self realization / self actualization, and indeed into the clutches of the dark force.

This confusion and apparent downgrading of the significance of actual enlightenment can be seen to be part of an overall patten of control agenda and personal status issues revolving around the so-called 'masters' and their hierarchy of priests (okay, lamas - it's all the same really!). If they were really free of dark force influence they would not be calling themselves masters nor gurus, nor having ongoing circles of dependent students, and would be actively seeking to empower people in finding their own unique expression as self actualized individuals, instead of cultivating the 'sheep' mentality - forever following, following, following, and swallowing teachings, teachings, teachings! (which is all dark force sourced control agenda and nothing wholesome).

Actually, even in the writings of quite a number of Tibetan Buddhist 'masters' that I read, it was clear that their outlook was very inconsistent as to whether 'recognition of the nature of mind' was or wasn't in itself enlightenment, because the prime emphasis was actually still being put on 'recognition of the nature of mind' as representing the most radical change that could happen to your awareness - and in various parts of their writings they did refer to individuals as being 'enlightened', when actually the latter individuals were clearly not fully self realized, and that implies that the 'masters' did really regard 'recognition of the nature of mind' as being having been the true enlightenment.

I'm sure all this comes down to an overall strategy to make enlightenment appear to be as inaccessible as possible to anyone who isn't being led and controlled by these 'masters', or at least the Buddhist 'Establishment'. My own finding was that enlightenment is MUCH more accessible and easy to gain than such traditions would have us believe, and the healthy place for enlightenment is through individual self actualization 'process' right out of the way of 'masters', 'gurus' and other potentially controlling forces.

The difference between naked awareness and what emanates from it

An exceedingly common confusion arises from people expecting one's core essence or fundamental consciousness to be visible in some way, and therefore assuming they are seeing it when they are really 'seeing' experiences that have arisen out of it. Ultimately all phenomena and objects, whether apparently in the mind or external, have arisen from that naked awareness. Even those wonderful qualities and emanations that I've described, such as the constant emanation of unconditional love and empathy, are not themselves fundamental consciousness, but rather, they are aspects of its emanations, just as what we experience when we look at the sun is not the sun itself, but is the light that shines from it.

The truth here (as far as anything at all can be called 'truth'!) is that there is no need at all to be trying to dwell in one's underlying naked awareness. The whole approach of Tibetan Buddhism, and indeed to varying extents all Buddhist traditions of which I'm aware, is distorted and leads people into an unbalanced and highly problematical sort of 'self realization'. If you use genuine self actualization methods and cultivate a healthy grounded state in your everyday life, then your enlightened state opens out naturally without your having to make an issue of it at all! What is a beneficial ongoing practice in everyday life is simply allowing yourself to be peaceful, non-judgemental observer of all that you experience, whether seemingly pleasant or unpleasant - seeing everything that you experience as existing or arising within your mindspace and not being external to it. Indeed, the need is to go one step further and recognise that you are your mindspace rather than anything that possesses it or exists within it. That's all - so simple!

Naked, non-dual awareness, thus, is an extremely subtle thing to seek to perceive or observe in any way. According to the Tibetan 'masters', once you've 'recognised the nature of mind' (i.e. become enlightened) you need to constantly increase the extent to which you're perceiving your non-dual aspect directly - BUT that is a horrendously unbalancing thing to be doing, and points one towards a seriously unbalanced and depleted sort of self actualization.

My understanding so far is that you do not need to consciously perceive your non-duality as such AT ALL!  --There, how's that for heresy! Indeed, it's generally most helpful not to apply one's mind in that sort of way at all. The point here is that when you try to perceive 'it', you simply distort your (actually perfectly natural) perception of it by unawarely identifying it with particular concepts - looking for something that is like 'this' or 'that'. The real way to cultivate whatever level and extent of non-duality awareness is for your best interests is simply to cultivate the ongoing state of being the non-judgemental peaceful observer of all that you experience, PLUS still fully engaging with the physical life experience.

You do NOT need at all to try to empty your mind for this. You simply become more deeply aware of yourself as being observer of whatever thoughts and experiences arise, without attachment to them or getting into intellectual analysis of them (the latter except in the case of applying clear thought to a particular situation in order to resolve it or provide some genuine creative benefit from it). Non-duality is an aspect of everything you experience, and it simply doesn't have to be sought for, because it's simply 'base level' of all you experience.

What the 'non-duality freaks' such as so many Tibetan Buddhist practitioners and 'masters' are doing through trying to home in on their non-dual aspect is to play a seriously harmful game of one-upmanship. The more unbalanced and non-duality overweighted is a practitioner's life experience, the more (s)he is looked up to by all and sundry, as though (s)he were in any sort of desirable state. It is not only unbalanced, but actually an ungrounded state, with the problem of greater openness to the astral sub-reality and thus the dark force, whether or not it presents itself as 'entities' in such a situation. By making non-duality an issue one immediately distorts or altogether loses sight of it, and also most likely completely misses its true significance.

For this reason I no longer regard any but the most cursory application of the Dzogchen approach to self actualization as being helpful towards a healthy and balanced self actualized state. You deepen your non-dual awareness in a healthy way, not by focusing on it, nor by thinking about it, but by using a grounded awareness deepening methodology that does NOT focus on it, and getting on with life! -- Enter Healing and Self Actualization - The Safest and Quickest Way!

Had all my negative emotions gone for good?

No, not at all. There's a huge amount of misunderstanding about enlightenment, including the notion that when you become enlightened you lose all negative emotions. Actually ALL of what I would call emotions (transient emotional feelings) are really 'negative' or at least problematical in nature - even what people would typically identify as positive emotions such as 'happiness' and 'joy'. The underlying happiness / joyfulness is really an ongoing state or quality, without big peaks and 'troughs', and so really is different from what people call an emotion, even though it can be experienced more to the forefront at times.

What had happened as a result of my enlightenment was that the emotions that I was carrying were mostly changed in nature, because of my having become much more the peaceful observer of what I was experiencing. So, I could feel emotions without nearly so much being drawn by the feelings into actually reacting on the basis of the emotions. I still had the ongoing task of clearing the various emotional traumas and stresses that I was still carrying, because they were still a limitation on my ability to enjoy life and live it to the full. That represented my primary ongoing self actualization process.

This change proved to be a great salvation for me from late 2003 onwards, when the dark force sought to disrupt my life and indeed either take me over or completely destroy me by means of a range of attack strategies, most of them involving huge attacks with emotional trauma energies and feelings - and throughout those taxing times I still remained almost completely peaceful observer of the 'nasties' that I was feeling, which could sometimes be quite hellish.

This was all a tremendous demonstration of the strength, stability and non-attachment one can have when enlightened. I experienced massive attacks with fear without actually being frightened; with panic, without actually being panicked; with anxiety, without being more than a little anxious at a superficial level; and even with outright terror, without being what you'd call terrified - though at that extreme level of attack I was actually experiencing a certain level of the emotional state of terror - BUT again, I was still being peaceful observer even of those brief exceptional peaks, albeit with more difficulty! However, the severe attacks were nonetheless generally still very difficult experiences, which were considerably disruptive to my life at times. People still can have difficult experiences when they are enlightened - something that apparently not many people realize.

Because of the widespread misunderstandings of what enlightenment really is, various people, upon reading in this site about the disruptiveness of the dark force attacks upon me, and the huge amount of trauma material that was available for use in the attacks (actually not mine at all but belonging to parasitic lost souls that were attached to me then), concluded that I wasn't enlightened at all, because in their books enlightened people were quietly spoken and humble individuals who meditated a lot and didn't have significant emotional material left - not realizing that such meditators have actually concealed rather than resolved their bigger and deeper issues, and are living impoverished, unbalanced caricatures of what a healthy enlightened life would be like.

The practical reality about my situation with the dark force interference and attacks was that it demonstrated to me in no uncertain terms that I had a pretty phenomenal degree of non-attachment (a potent indicator of being enlightened), and as a result I was able to not only withstand real 'wrecking class' attacks but also to progressively gain sufficient clarity of mind to extricate myself from the dark force deceptions and find ways to get progressively clearing myself of the interferences, and eventually to find out the likely true nature of the dark force as a step towards more effective measures to weaken the dark force and theoretically even to go some way towards bringing about its dissolution (i.e. to whatever extent, if any, that that proves possible). Without enlightenment, in the face of what the dark force was doing to me I would presumably by now be either dead or an intractable 'case' in a psychiatric institution.

However, even without any traces left of stored emotional trauma / stresses / issues, a healthily functioning enlightened person would still on the odd particularly stressful occasion experience emotions - and this appears to be widely unrecognised because of the harmful overuse of meditation in pretty well all traditions that recognise enlightenment. In this case the emotions would arise and rapidly dissipate, without significant attachment to them, and they would not drive the person into dysfunctional behaviour.

Thus (yes, it's heresy time again!), even an enlightened person, very advanced in his self actualization, could still here and there experience anger (a supposed complete contra-indicator for a person being enlightened). However, that anger would be very different from what normally manifests as anger in adult people. It's more like a brief explosion of bright - you could say, effervescent - frustration or indignation - much as Harvey Jackins described healthy anger release in Re-evaluation Counselling.

This healthy sort of anger doesn't lash out at people, nor drive a person to any negative or condemnatory behaviour, and is simply a quick, completely non-destructive release of pent-up stress energy - typically almost immediately transforming into a volley of laughter, which releases the rest of the particular stress.

Beware! Enlightenment, like meditation, is commonly misused

I have already pointed to this in the above sections, but it needs further emphasizing here.

In Buddhism, enlightenment, like meditation, is all too often seen as a handy escape from experiencing uncomfortable emotions. When you recognise your innermost nature you perceive directly and recognise the deepest level of consciousness as your true nature. The error that people almost universally fall into then is to place such a great weight of their awareness in that subtle 'space' within which all phenomena and experiences arise, that, as in regular meditation, they let go of their awareness of emotional traumas and issues that they are carrying, with the notion that by doing so they are clearing themselves of those issues and so are in the process of becoming 'fully enlightened'*.

* That is, what I would now call fully self actualized, because becoming enlightened is actually a simple one-off transition with no degrees of comparison.

In fact my current understanding is that what people do by following the standard Dzogchen teachings (and probably most guru teachings) in this respect is to lose awareness of important emotional issues* that they are still carrying. Minor issues can dissolve that way, but various major issues remain in place even though awareness of them dissolves. Such people may achieve an impressively empty mindspace (as though that were an important goal in itself) and peaceful and composed manner, but their awareness and lifestyle is constrained by the issues that they are still carrying, and through having gone into a total denial of those issues they may have committed themselves to being ensnared by the dark force and programmed into a degradational sequence of soul reincarnations** (i.e. if they were not already on that unenviable track). They would also have completely unnecessarily greatly reduced the abundance and variety of their life experience.

* For the vast majority of people most or all of these would be ones that really don't belong to the respective people in the first place, but to the parasitic lost souls attached to them. These still need clearing off, however, because they cause problems very much as though they do belong to the affected person - so becoming unaware of them rather than clearing them out isn't a cool option.

** As I now understand, that would be part of a frankly horrendous future prospect for such people, as I explain in The True Nature of 'The Dark Force' and its Interference and Attacks.

On the other hand it is possible to operate in what is ultimately a healthier and more balanced enlightened mode, which doesn't seek to deny or "just let go of" one's emotional issues. The smart way is, while still allowing yourself to be peaceful observer of all you experience, and maintaining a sort-of background awareness of your non-dual aspect, also to allow all thoughts and feelings to arise still, and to follow an active healing path for the various traumas - and that includes healing any past life core trauma(s), whether they are yours or belong to any attached lost souls, and, at the earliest time possible to actually clear off all attached entities. That is most effectively done not by 'just letting go' (which can far too readily be 'going into denial by stealth'), but by allowing emotional release (crying, trembling, laughter, etc) in small measure, and, more particularly, using faster and more efficient healing methods such as I enumerate in Healing and Self Actualization - The Safest and Quickest Way.

Restrictive patterns of outlook and behaviour also need to be dissolved as part of the healing, and that requires what I call positive reprogramming through all aspects of one's life. True self actualization methods progressively clear such issues and indeed all issues, and while many require some degree of awareness of one's issues so that they can be dismantled / dissolved, there are some such methods that require little or no such awareness of or confronting of specific issues. I mention again the practices pointed to in Healing and Self Actualization - The Safest and Quickest Way and various pages that that page links to.

One great thing about those methods that I give is that to varying, and in some cases a considerable, extent they progressively clear out all one's interference and influences from the dark force - absolutely essential for genuine and comprehensive self actualization, and something that appears to be completely missing from the various Eastern 'spiritual' traditions such as Buddhism. Virtually EVERYBODY has at least some degree of dark force interference / influence, whether or not they are aware of it, so this is a very important issue. Enlightened people are not exempt from such dark force interferences - though almost universally they believe that they are, because they so readily use their enlightenment as a sort of smokescreen (sort-of 'hear no evil, speak no evil, think no evil' and all is hunky-dory - except that it isn't!).

Mystical states and the old bogey of 'enlightened bliss'

"Your position sounds to me like the writings of Xxxx, who describes enlightenment as a mystical or blissful state and writes extensively about that..."

How many times have I been told that sort of thing by people who are into 'spirituality' or even believe they are into 'self realization'! And I inwardly groan each time, because almost always these people are impervious to any attempts of mine to put the record straight for them about what enlightenment really is.

One thing those people, and the authors or supposed teachers whose writings they've been reading, are NOT genuinely into is self realization / self actualization, and one thing that virtually NONE of those people are is enlightened, never mind that they may believe they are enlightened.

It is the dark force that has persistently interfered with these people to get them erroneously equating enlightenment or/and 'self realization' with a mystical or blissful state.

"- But hang on! Xxxx writes at great length about his enlightened mystical experiences and the blissful state and inner knowledge that he's gained from enlightenment. You're not seriously saying that that's come from the dark force, are you?"

Yes, I am! If he were genuinely enlightened he would not have written that confused rubbish in the first place, or would have renounced or at least drastically revised what he had written.

What that author was writing about was various illusory realities that he'd taken on board because the dark force had controlled him into believing that those illusory realities represented an enlightened and indeed self actualized state. That's the sort of thing that so-called spirituality is about, and that's part of the reason why I give such strong warnings on this site about the menace that 'spirituality' really is for us.

As I've sought to show on this page, being enlightened is NOT in itself an experience, and, although I have loosely referred to it here and there as a state, is NOT a state in the sense that people usually mean - i.e. a sort of emotional state. Rather, it is akin to a viewpoint.

Yes, it does make the life experience much more positive in a whole variety of ways, but it is NOT a mystical NOR blissful state. Indeed, the very notion of 'bliss' needs dropping like a red-hot brick, for it is a bit of bait inveigled by the dark force into various teachings and 'spiritual' traditions so that their supposed quest for enlightenment is distorted into a quest for an illusory reality that they interpret as peaceful and blissful, which they then take to be enlightenment. Indeed, what people commonly interpret as an experience of 'bliss' is nothing more that a particular type of attack from the dark force in order to seek to lure and control them.

I've had that done to me, but at least fortunately I had the clarity to be extremely suspicious even at the time, when I didn't realize that it was the dark force itself that was causing problems and troubles for me - so I wasn't led all that much astray, and to whatever extent I was led astray, it wasn't for at all long!

In fact, if any 'state' is to be associated with genuine enlightenment, it is clarity. By that I do NOT mean an ungrounded state of meditational or mystical 'clarity', but simply clarity in all everyday experience - your being always the peaceful and insightful observer of whatever is going on for you - whatever you are experiencing.

Also, the notion that enlightenment brings you 'inner knowledge', although in a sense true, is generally misunderstood because people cannot understand what enlightenment really is, and in particular the non-dual nature of what an enlightened person perceives as the fundamental level of himself and all 'reality' (i.e. of consciousness). The 'inner knowledge' gained from enlightenment is hardly what a non-enlightened person understands by 'inner knowledge', because that person would be thinking in conceptual terms. To a non-enlightened person, 'inner knowledge' cannot help but mean some sort of repository of conceptualized information that is available only to the enlightened 'Elite', and that is one thing that enlightenment itself doesn't bring you.

However, genuine self actualization (rather than specifically enlightenment) does progressively open you to your deeper levels of consciousness (i.e not only the very deepest, which is non-dual and thus non-conceptual) and so, yes, it does become possible to gain conceptual information that is unavailable to ordinary people - but it isn't specifically enlightenment that opens you to that (though it is an important step in that self actualization process). 

However, that sort of 'inner knowledge' generally comes complete with serious distortions caused by dark force interference, and hence the various supposedly self actualized writers and 'teachers' coming out with distorted notions of self actualization, enlightenment and the nature of reality (i.e. even if they are not channelling or dowsing), which their followers and readers then take on board more or less as gospel, so reinforcing their own patterns of misunderstanding anything to do with enlightenment and self actualization.

On this site I show how suitable people can, with great care and vigilance, use energy testing to enable them to start gaining such information, which, when without dark force interference, is NOT esoteric nor 'spiritual' but down-to-earth and practical, and can, subject to certain serious caveats, be used to further one's self actualization process and to consistently make healthy and life supporting choices in one's everyday life.

One further point. If you spend time 'learning' about enlightenment, whether from books or directly from gurus, or/and discussing about it, you are not getting closer to enlightenment, and indeed almost certainly are making it more difficult than ever for you ever to become enlightened in this lifetime. In order to become enlightened, what you really need is a comprehensive genuine self actualization process, and that means actually getting on with it! Repeatedly reading or discussing about enlightenment or self actualization simply helps seal your fate as a captive of the dark force because of the illusory realities that you're creating by so doing - quite apart from your lack of actual self actualization process and thus lack of the very means by which you could otherwise become free from the dark force's interferences and attempts to control you.

Why only certain people can become genuinely enlightened

Only people without a soul can become genuinely enlightened. -- There, that's heresy for you!

It is almost universally not understood that the soul is a dysfunctional or pathological manifestation within one's consciousness resulting from a particular type of tampering from the dark force. I explain about this in The True Nature of 'The Dark Force' and its Interference and Attacks. The healthy (though relatively rare) state is to have a continuum of pure consciousness between fundamental consciousness and the ordinary mind, whereas the normal state is to have a certain 'level' of that continuum adulterated with programming and beliefs, creating a block on the flow of awareness and actual communication from very deep levels of one's being, and indeed functioning as a 'cap' on the person's deepest level of conscious awareness. It is that adulterated 'level' that defines the 'soul', and thus a fully healthily functioning person actually has no soul, and is greatly better off for that absence (which is actually a maximal presence of pure and healthy consciousness).

The vast majority of people who believe that they are enlightened are not truly so, because only a quite small proportion of them are no-soul incarnations. The rest have identified NOT with fundamental consciousness (and thus non-duality) but with their soul - that is, if they haven't been further sidetracked by getting ensnared in some illusory reality in which they believe that they've found enlightenment. They may experience an 'awakening' to some sort of spaciousness and inner peacefulness and warmth, but are actually not consciously seated in non-duality as a genuinely enlightened person is.

There is one exception to that general statement, in that first-time soul incarnations may in some cases, as something of a rarity, gain genuine enlightenment, but only tenuously so, and for this reason they would easily be led astray, into false notions of what enlightenment really is, and get sidetracked into illusory realities in which they are experiencing something more tangible as supposed enlightenment. I do know two individuals for whom this appears to be the case. One of them had got so sidetracked by the dark force that one time he pronounced to me that "I am at the Second Level of Enlightenment, and I'm sorry to have to tell you, but you are not even enlightened!". A no-soul person doesn't nearly so readily fall into such deceptions and sidetracks, and finds it much easier to remain with a clear direct perception of his basis in the non-duality of fundamental consciousness.

Because the soul is inherently a state of confusion, such 'pseudo-enlightened' individuals, having read or been told about non-duality, may believe that they're experiencing it, and thus that their enlightenment is confirmed - but actually the programming in their soul is fooling them into a constant failure to understand what non-duality really is.

Generally speaking, when a person has experienced what they regard as a "spiritual awakening", that is NOT genuine enlightenment, even though the vast majority of such people regard it as such, and it may mark an apparently extremely positive turnaround in the person's life. If you look with real, deep awareness at such life turnarounds, you'd find almost invariably that they relate to 'spirituality' rather than genuine self actualization - so in other words those life turnarounds were usually traps sprung on the particular individuals by the dark force in order to keep them well and truly sidetracked away from becoming genuinely and fully free.

Does all this this mean that there's no hope for people who have souls and who want to become genuinely enlightened and self actualized?

-- Actually, no, not at all - provided that they use self actualization methods that dissolve the dark force sourced programming and beliefs (and other distortions) that constitute the defining principle of their soul. Unfortunately, most supposed self actualization methods (including meditation) do not achieve that, but the Good News is that, as far as I can ascertain, the methods that I present in Healing and Self Actualization - The Safest and Quickest Way do progressively and eventually completely dissolve the soul programming, so that the person then is in the really healthy state of being once more simply a direct incarnation of fundamental consciousness. Then becoming genuinely enlightened would come naturally as part of one's ongoing self actualization process.