enlightenment-principles

Understanding what it means to die, to sever oneself of the foolish hope for immortality, is what allows human beings the capability to appreciate simple pleasures and endure whatever hardships living a full life requires. Eternity is beautiful whereas time is unredeemable and problematic. Our faith, our hopes, and our love exist only in points of time. We discover eternity by avoiding the snares of prejudice and mental delusion, using the memory of whole civilizations to understand the past, and employing human consciousness to transcend fluctuations in time.

There exists a universal order that we each play a distinct role in carrying out. Light always struggles to emerge from darkness. Each of us is the bearer of our own lantern. We find ourselves when we realize our place in an interconnected world. The struggle to pierce the darkness that shrouds us from realizing a state of perceptive awareness is the biggest part of both our individual story and our communal storyline.

Life surrounds us. Each day we witness the plenteous gifts of nature. Even following the most bitterly cold winter, new life waits feverishly to erupt. The flower head sown in the prior season quickens to bloom in the eternal spring of wilderness gardens. Each of us hankers to blossom. Life is the active resistance to disintegration and death. A state of grace comes from a life devoted to seeking the pinnacle of human attainment. None of us should suppress our own or another person__ quest for transcendence. Each day we must give full measure to our internal life force. With all our energy and intuition, we must determinedly seek out what is the best part of us. We must faithfully tap our potential for goodness, unapologetically rip ourselves apart if need be, bravely go where we fear, and boldly tread where we must go in order to carry out the sacred blueprint for leading a meaningful life that is imbued in the deepest alcove of our unbidden souls.

Since we human beings are the cause of the environmental problems that we face today, we can also be the solution. We just need a shift in our thinking. We just need to move away from the paradigm of competition and domination. Then this world will not end. In fact, the world will prosper and return to its original place as the cradle of self-discovery and the advancement of human spirituality. And such a world is a true democracy.

When a person understands the problem that vexes them, and comprehends the choices that created them, they begin a journey of the mind seeking personal liberation from suffering.

Self-deception and vanity are grievous sin. The ego is the cause of all human suffering. We suffer from life only when we fail to examine the cause of our sorrow. Letting go of destructive illusions and freeing oneself from egotism of self-pity enables a person to sense the rich intertexture of their inner world, which is the only facet of reality that we exercise exclusive dominion and control.

A life of hardship and personal suffering is unavoidable. A person must endure many humiliations of the mind and body, and expect persons whom they trusted to someday betray them. People inevitably witness the death of their loved ones. We also witness acts of depravity committed by criminals that lurk in every society and rouge acts of scandal committed by government officials in charge of the public welfare. A person must nonetheless resist personal discouragement, sadness, dejection, and despondency. I must reach an accord with pain, suffering, and anguish, or forevermore be tortured by reality while constantly seeking to escape from the inescapable agony of being.

A person experiments in life and reflects upon those events in order to discover how to lead a meaningful life. We conduct a quest searching for the source our essential being. What we seek is inside us waiting for us to discover. Until we realize the vital inner source that provides direction for our life, all our efforts are in vain. The ego with its craving and fearful protection strategies is what prevents us from perceiving the transparency of the world in which we belong. When we cease clinging to the past and no longer daydream of the future and unreservedly accept whatever is occurring while sacrificing ourselves in service of other people our sense of self vanishes and we exist only as conscious and nonjudgmental witnesses of reality.

Bless the world with your mind, heal the world with your heart, lift the world with your soul; elevate the world with your life.

Enlightenment is to replace your own self with the self of the universe!

The ego with its protective defense mechanisms is the biggest impediment to attaining spiritual growth.

The choices we make in life determine human identities. A person might choose to avoid or confront their deepest night terrors. A person can elect to live carefully or rashly. A person can embrace ignorance or incessantly work to acquire knowledge of the larger world filled with people, nature, and ideas. A person can live a placid life or boldly seek out vivid encounters is a world filled with anarchy, chaos, hazards, and incomparable beauty and slender. A person can hold onto attachments and fear death or live their life as a mere witness and perceive their personal death as part of the collective story and the culmination of a life will lived. A person can employ their time in a material world to enhance personal pleasures or to develop their innate skills and strive towards attaining self-realization. A person may perceive their existence as pitiful drudgery, or live a courageously, making a statement with their wounds and scars that life is a thrilling mystery filled with longing, love, and holiness.

The act of writing is a contemplative vision quest, a somber expedition of discovery that requires the writer to subordinate their ego in order to travel in soulful solitude towards a desirable personal haven of rejuvenating enlightenment. Writing for personal growth entails unconditionally surrendering oneself to the struggle of tearing their sense of self apart. It demands the solemn willpower to dissect and analyze the fissures of a self-absorbent soul one layer at a time.

In order to grow sometimes we must cease striving to meet other people__ expectations and begin establishing new goals that develop our personal potential. If we live a life to satisfy all the direct or implicit anticipations of other people, we end up living a life full of regret because we failed to develop into a complete manifestation of our being.

Nature blessed every person with the innate capacity to express wonder and awe for the eternal world and act with a kind and unstinting soul.

We can only come to terms with our own place in the world by compassionately commiserating with the pang of longing that our brethren experience.

Enlightenment is the moment when you are most alive and most compassionate.

We foster personal meaning out of life by exulting in all of nature, exhibiting a reverence for people, animals, plants, and by expressing compassion and sympathy for the entire community of life.