Hey Bill, There is no absolute definition for enlightenment but I have a great article which I will post that was written by a great teacher of enlightenment.
The Ascendant
by MSI
When we perceive the external world, we are looking at our definitions of forms and objects, but not the underlying Unified Field in which they appear. Similarly, our inner world, feelings and thoughts clutter our awareness, but the awareness of awareness itself is never known.
The Ascendant is the space in which things exist; it is the essence out of which everything is made: thoughts, feelings, computers, my aunt Daisy.
This is not a void as some have claimed, this is not an emptiness or negative reality. Rather, the Ascendant is a positive state of fullness, of Infinite potential energy out of which everything comes. Since the Ascendant underlies and permeates everything in creation, it is called Omnipresent.
Everything comes from it and exists only because of it.
Nothing can or does exist in isolation.
Everything is composed of the Ascendant, continually flowing in and out of manifestation.
The Ascendant cannot be measured or defined. We can assign a name to it, like Infinite or Unbounded or Absolute, but these still imply it is something. Any name for the Ascendant or belief about the Ascendant is not the experience of the Ascendant. It is only when we abandon our insistence on attempting to limit the Unlimited by assigning waking state concepts to it that the Infinite light of the Primal World dawns within.
Freed from mental fabrications about the nature of Reality, awareness is experienced as Absolute and identical with everything that is.
The Ascendant is without prior cause, it is its own cause; it is ever-the-same, unchanging. Like water, it is not altered regardless how much dirt is added to it: only the clarity of it is shrouded while its essential nature remains the same.
The Ascendant is perfect stability, it is the Ground of all grounds. There is no experience of duality in the Ascendant, there is no difference between the self and the Self. There is no separation.
Like a peak experience while painting, writing or composing music, there is no subject-object duality. There is no thought in the Ascendant, there is no feeling, there is nothing other than Silence: Eternal, self-sufficient.
The Ascendant is the Ultimate Reality from which everything has come and in which everything continues to exist forever.
To experience this as our True Nature is enlightenment; to remain ignorant of this means remaining caught by the boundaries of illusion, life after life, caught on the wheel of samsara, of cyclic change.
Through Ascending, the Ascendant is experienced as our own essential nature, as awareness of awareness itself, as pure Unlimited consciousness. This is the experience of Infinite Freedom. This is liberation from the boundaries of the ego.
Since the Ascendant is the Source of everything, recognizing that "I am That" means that I recognize that I am All-pervasive. This is the state of Is-ness, free from any and every duality, freed from the sense of My-ness or even Am-ness. The Ascendant simply is. And That I am.
Even though the experience of the Ascendant is impossible to define in words, it is a real experience. In fact, the experience of the Ascendant is more real than any waking state experience. The experience of the Unbounded is infinitely abstract and yet infinitely concrete. Having once tasted this clearly, life cannot remain the same. There is no previous behavior pattern, habit, judgment or belief that can withstand the force of Unbounded Awareness, for the Ascendant is the root of everything.
When the mind is experiencing the silence of the Ascendant, there is no motion of thought. Like a perfectly still pond untouched by the wind, there are no waves, no ripples, no motion of any kind when the mind is opened to the experience of the Ascendant.
This state is measurable by the electroencephalograph: coherence of brain waves is the objective measurement of the subjective experience of Ascending.
The mind consumes vastly less energy when it floats in the Ascendant; because of this, the body settles down to its deepest possible state of rest. In the perfect state of Infinite silence, there is no necessity for breath: the individual retains life by recognizing that he or she is part of Universal Life, in no way different or separate from Eternal existence. In other words, life continues because life is the essence of the Ascendant. In this state, no decay is possible, no illness, no death, no suffering, no pain
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The Ascendant is the source of everything. Nothing lies outside it; nothing is built of anything other than it; nothing can exist for the smallest fraction of a moment outside of it. It is the conscious part of consciousness; it is the part of existence that exists. It is all that ever was, all that will ever be; you with your human nervous system have by your birth been given the ultimate gift, a machine that cannot only experience the Ascendant but direct it in any way you choose.
You are actually already directing the Ascendant all the time. But if your mind is not continually focussed on one desire at a time, your mutually contradictory thoughts and desires cancel each other out. Not entirely, of course, or else you would be a catatonic schizophrenic, you would do nothing but sit and stare off into space.
Since you are reading this, it is safe to assume you are not so self-contradictory that you are sailing in entirely useless circles in the boat of your mind.
The mind in contact with the Ascendant is like a perfectly still pool. Thoughts and desires are like stones dropped into the pool. If one stone falls, perfectly concentric ripples spread beautifully over the water and reach the far shore.
If two stones are dropped, there will be crests and valleys that cross over each other, emphasizing some, cancelling others. If a whole handful of stones hit the water at once, chaos is the result, there is no order left. The reflection in the pond is broken into a myriad of imperfect shards. The full moon can be sailing serenely above, but the pond will show only frenetic motion.
On any sandy beach, the kind and quality of the waves very much determine the shape of the sand. The kind and quality of our thought waves very much determine the overall shape of our minds. The ripples caused by our thoughts and desires produce both immediate (surface) and long-term (underlying) effects. When the pattern of thinking and desiring is chaotic, the result will necessarily be abnormal experiences, mental, emotional or physical, and abnormal behavior. The extent of the chaotic thinking directly determines the extent of the disorder in life. When the pattern of thinking and desiring is orderly, the result is health, happiness, joy, progress, creativity, fulfillment.
This may be easy to grasp intellectually regarding the individual life: if my thinking is disordered, my actions and life will be disordered. But since the Ascendant is the Source of everything, it is also true that my chaotic thinking will react with all parts of the Universe at all times and all places.
Like salmon returning to their hatching grounds to spawn, there are no accidents of fate, there are only our own thoughts returning to their source in our individual minds.
There is quite literally no one to blame, no one to condemn, no one to judge in any way whatsoever. My desires have created my Universe, just for me; your desires have created your Universe, just for you; the fact that so many of our Universes seem so similar and seem to share many common features is a happy or a useful coincidence that defines our common humanity. (Those whose individual Universes are much out of synchrony with the majority of humanity tend to end up in mental hospitals. Or prisons.)
This implies that the best cure for all disease, mental or physical, is the same, reconnecting the individual mind consciously to the Ascendant.
The human mind is so infinitely flexible that it can stretch in its experience from the most concrete to the most abstract, from the physical reality experienced by our senses to the abstract, internal reality of Consciousness itself.
The unifying thread of life is Love. From the most abstract to the most concrete, at every level of existence, at every level of experiencing, runs this slender thread. It seems delicate, a fragile thing, easily lost or broken, but is not so. It is more obdurate than granite; it can never be broken, never diminished, never lost; and it is forever growing, primarily by being given away.
We cannot fall out of it, although sometimes we mistakenly believe that we do. Rather, what happens when we feel that we have fallen out of love is that our mutually contradictory projected desires have made it impossible for our relationship to provide further growth. This is the kindest and most accurate description.
For underlying all our desires, the melange of contradictory impulses we drop into the still waters of the Ascendant, there forever remains our original intention, crystalline, flawless, pure, directing our being through situation after situation, life after life, world after world. And what is that original intention? It is to return to our Source. We are not and never will be at home here; we will always feel that we are the dispossessed wanderers of time.
That, truly, we are.
Like Pellinore of the Arthurian legends, we have lost our kingdoms and queendoms and wander aimlessly about, slowly rusting since our home has become invisible to us.
Yet is our exile self-imposed. We chose to be here; we can choose to return whence we came whenever we so desire. Nothing can stand between us and our re-union with our Source, for we never truly left the Ascendant. We only thought we did; we have travelled exceedingly far in our imaginations, but it is fantasy merely. The Ascendant will wait patiently for us to remember, throughout all Eternity if need be. For we are the Ascendant.
No matter how long we forget this simple fact, no matter how long we adamantly deny that this is true or continue to build up false dreams and strange beliefs, the Ascendant waits patiently for us.
There is no thought we can think, no action we can perform, that will ever change this simple fact. The Ascendant is the root of all that we are, it is the fullest expression of all we shall ever be; it is the Source not only of us but of everything everywhere at all times.
Life, therefore, is extremely easy to understand.
If this seems difficult to grasp, it can only be because there is some part of it that has not been properly understood. It can only be because there are still some dark areas of our personalities that have not yet been addressed. How can we change this?
In any way that works!
Ascension is a systematic procedure for re-educating the mind to free itself from judgment and condemnation. This is a completely automatic process; once begun it continues much by itself. The mind is similar to a phonograph record, there are grooves in our brains, neuronal circuits, formed by repeated experiences and thoughts.
It is possible to retrain the mind so that the deepest grooves are those that lead to expansion of consciousness, to liberation. The mind just needs to learn how to take the correct angle, then the entire process is perfectly natural. The older grooves are overshadowed and eventually erased.
The natural state of the human mind is enlightenment!
to shut down every discussion with a lenghty and repetitive mix of dogma and latent agression, disguised as deep spiritual insights?
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