This information is from "the Guide" by Eva Pierrakos. Is it enlightening?


"Your own consciousness is not just one unified state. You consist of many aspects of consciousness which may often be in total disagreement among themselves and whose state of development may vary widely.

When the real Self takes on a task before it goes into an embodiment (incarnation), it chooses to take certain aspects of consciousness along with it, if I may put it this way. On the path you are helped to fulfill this task which your real Self understood, which is to bring unification between the disconnected aspects of your consciousness, and also to refine, reeducate, and purify these divergent aspects. Your ego, which is your active, determining outer consciousness, can choose to seek an understanding of these connections, or to evade it. Your ego consciousness is the borderline between the inner light world and the outer void. As I said, when the human mind becomes entangled in the partial reality of three-dimensional consciousness, it can easily forget the task. Only through a struggle can it be reawakened to the greater consciousness. I might also add here that human beings receive a great deal of spiritual guidance in this struggle if only they are willing to perceive the help.

When the disconnected mind forgets the greater truth of being, the conscious ego self temporarily identifies with the aspects needing re-education and purification; it then loses a sense of its real identity. This extremely painful state comes about only when pride, self-will, and fear are allowed to rule the consciousness. The moment you have exposed, owned, and realistically evaluated those negative aspects you had exclusively identified with and therefore struggled against seeing, this shameful isolation ceases and the aspects are seen exactly for what they are: simply aspects of the total self.

It is therefore extremely important in your pathwork that you explore yourself and stop hiding the negative part of yourself. For the more you hide it, the more you lose yourself in it and the greater the desperation of the illusion becomes. Only when you take the courage and adopt the humility to again and again acknowledge and expose the negative parts of yourself does the miracle occur: you will then no longer secretly identify with those parts of you which you wish to hide. Paradoxical as this may seem at first glance, the more you expose your destructive part, the more you know of your true creative self. The more you expose the ugliness within you, the more you know your beauty; the more you expose your inner hatred and all its derivatives, the more you know of your already existing state of love that can then shine through.

Just imagine the incredibly painful predicament you put yourself in when you hide that which you are most ashamed and afraid of. It is precisely because of this hiding that you compound the very attitudes you most hate in yourself. You make them infinitely worse through the concealment and then become more and more convinced on deep levels of your consciousness that they constitute your real being. This vicious circle makes you more determined to hide and therefore feel more isolated, more negative, and more destructive just because of your methods of hiding. For hiding always requires projecting your real guilt on others, blaming, self-whitewashing, hypocrisy, and so on. Therefore you become more invested in and convinced that the hidden part is the ultimate you for whom there is no hope. Your true task must begin by exposing all of you. I have said it so many times, because there just is no way around this aspect of spiritual development. All the seekers of spiritual growth who avoid this delude themselves and must at one time or another encounter a rude and painful awakening. You must go through this process; you must expose all parts. Yet such an exposure also brings in its wake the awareness that the worst opinion of yourself is never justified, no matter how ugly the traits and attitudes may be that you have hidden. They are never justified - because these parts are only isolated aspects of the total consciousness which your real Self has taken charge of.

As you go through these steps, you become aware of your higher Self, not as a theory or a philosophical premise, but as stark reality, right here and now. You experience yourself as the real entity you are, have always been, and will always be, no matter what the isolated aspects of consciousness fabricate in the way of delusion and folly. This is indeed a great and wonderful task! In the process you learn about your inner reality and all its various aspects and levels of consciousness."

It is intellectual, and may, if understood and applied into experience, become enlightening.

It's not really clear enough for someone who has not already read about this subject, it's far too short to explain properly the nature of consciousness but kind of serves as a checklist, and full of too many hooks, catches, and cliches.

One thing in particular that grated with me; the idea that once enlightenment is achieved that is it, you're stuck there in eternal bliss. I believe that enlightenment may well be slipped into and out of at any time, an enlightened person may well slip into depression and frustration. Far from it being a fixed state, rather its a slippery eel that you have to catch and hold on to.

Not so, oh wondering one.