Kundalini Splendor

Out beyond ideas of

wrongdoing and rightdoing

there lies a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn't make any sense.

Rumi

Once again, I have been reflecting on the notion of enlightenment as an ultimate goal of the spiritual quest. My conclusion is that pointing to such a state as the end all and be all of the journey is a serious mistake.

First of all, what is an enlightened person? Have you ever met one? For me, to be enlightened would be to carry into every single facet of your life your spiritual purpose, your commitment, and your way of being. When I hear of "gurus" and teachers who abuse their students, who show their ill temper in private by yelling at their helpers, who violate the common rules of courtesy and kindness in their treatment of their friends, or who obviously are on a personal "power trip," I turn away. To lure students into the fold by promising "enlightenment" is, I believe, a false promise.

The truly enlightened being would conduct him/herself with great humility, for she would have been introduced to the ultimate secret--that the individual human does in fact not even exist except as a particle in the Great Being, a tiny throb in the impulse of time. While we are here we do, of course, conduct outselves in a different way, acting as if we and those we encounter and the world about us is "real" in the usual sense of the term. How else could we survive? Further, one of the reasons we incarnate on this plane is to discover what it is to be "merely human," with all the travails and sorrows this state affords, rather than some superhuman reality, with unlimited powers and access to constant composure.

In order to move ahead we relinquish all pretensions to be other than humans struggling together up a common mountain, constantly advancing and retreating again, sometimes holding hands or whispering encouragement into one another's ear, as we labor forward in our shared journey.

The "enlightened" being would also, in my notion, be perfect in every way--he/she would have a command of the history of civilization, of art, of philosophy east and west, even science, and certainly of current world affairs--in other words, that person's knowledge would not cease with "what baba told me." "What baba told me" may be of great help to many of us seeking aid in our progress. But it is not an assured recipe for "enlightenment."

The journey is the goal, the goal is the journey. We can indeed make progress toward enlightenment (whatever that may be), but we cannot, on this plane, ever fully arrive. Some are more progressed than others, and their light shines through in a darkening world. (Maybe Rumi was one of those.) But only a handful of true saints and saviors have come near completion on this planet. To think otherwise is, in my view, to be deluded, to operate by a false assumption.

In the meantime, let us go forward, dancing along the path, keeping our courage through the "down turns" and the upward swings, ready to move ahead in the joy that is often ours for the asking.