I cannot help but notice that my dogs are naturally enlightened. How do I know this? They demonstrate it with each breath they take not with our silly and pompous words. They are completely free and clear and their life force shines through at every moment. No master ever had to tell them to “live in the now” they just appear to do this naturally. This really made me think. For 48 years I have been looking here, looking there, for this enlightenment - a free and open heart. They did not have to “find” it, they were born with it. Now on the other hand, they really are not all that smart (sorry dog lovers) and I have seen them eat their own shit.
So I must conclude via basic logic that therefore this enlightenment must not have much to do with intelligence - whew, dodged the bullet there! And this also leads me to believe then that enlightenment must be not so much about finding something without but about realizing something within. Nothing that spiritual teachers of the ages and from many differing orientations haven’t been saying for thousands of years.
In the vernacular Jim Morrison of the Doors - a white Shaman of Modernity if there ever was one - said, “you’re searching for something that has already found you”. If anyone has read “No one gets out of here alive”, amazing as he was, I don’t think that Jim Morrison was enlightened but he had that Shamanic contact with the Logos and brought back a zinger for us now and again.
So why are we humans who are so enamored with ourselves apparently the only unenlightened creatures on the planet? Why do we have to struggle so hard to achieve what a tapeworm is born with naturally - after all, in fact at a purely physical level we are not all that different from a tapeworm and precious little different from a dog!
I can only conclude that it is our human consciousness. By saying this I do not intend to demean our consciousness because I think that we are really amazing and believe me or not our Gaia Mother thinks the same of us - this was a shock to me since I have always basically hated us and this opened me up to love myself - if She can forgive us, then certainly I can. (Just because she loves us does not mean she approves of everything that we do, as I would think any human mother would understand all too well!) What little so called enlightenment that I have experienced has always been glimpsed beyond my conscious self - once for an instant in meditation and for a few hours here and there with mushrooms.
So our consciousness seems to be a two edged sword. At once it has enabled us to survive on our Mother’s planet, having evolved after over 3 billions years here. And it has enabled us to catapult ourselves in a mere 10,000 years to a dominate position here - even to the point where the Great Mother of us all has accepted us almost as an equal. But at the same time, the sword cuts both ways and this consciousness, so inextricably bound up in language, appears to cut us off from what is inherent in all other DNA life on the planet.
Is anyone else thinking of a “deal with the devil” here?
Perhaps just as we each create our own realities through our choices of thoughts, words and actions, we humans have created this unenlightened reality of our consciousness by choices made maybe many thousands of years ago. And that is not to say that we made a poor choice. My guess is we made the only choice. Once the dominator tribes swept down upon the Goddess cooperator tribes, it became kill or be killed and a cruel cycle not unfamiliar in nature brought us through our bloody history to this point.
So while I see much hope for individuals, the only hope I see for our species is that some critical mass of individuals will reconnect with this unconscious power and sweep away the materialist madness by which our consciousness seems to be trapped the way one would sweep dander off of their shoulder. And I don’t think that we have another 10,000 years to accomplish this.