 49. Enlightenment |
Enter the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the (true) gate and difficult is the way (hard to comprehend at first) which leads to life, and there are few who find it.
-Jesus, Matthew 7:13,14
Karma is our clinging or attachment of our conscious being to something or any thing, if we do not cling to any-thing, not even our own body and mind and all of our thoughts, feelings, memories, then we become free of Karma which is the freedom from all created things, and we are not reborn, reincarnated into this realm again. This freedom from all external and internal THINGS, including our own self identity is the attainment (returning) of God-self-realization.
-RAM DASS
And a certain scribe came and said to him, master I will follow thee whither so ever thou goest, and Jesus said to him, the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the son of man hath nowhere to lay his head. (Matthew 8:19, 20) Spacious with omnipresence, could the Christ indeed be followed except in the overarching spirit.
-YOGANANDA
It is sublime as heat and night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics which visit in turn each noble poetic mind . . . It is of no use to put away the book; if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond, nature names a BRAHMIN of me presently: Eternal necessity, eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence. . . This is her creed. Peace, She saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the great Gods.
-EMERSON, his Journal
In Sabikalpa Samadhi (Hinduism) the devotee has attained realization of his/her oneness with spirit but cannot maintain his/her cosmic consciousness except in the immobile trance state. By contentious meditation he/she reaches the next state, level, phase of Nirbikalpa Samadhi, in which he/she may move freely in the world without any loss of God-perception, in this state the devotee dissolves the last vestiges of his/her material or earthly Karma (attachments). Never the less, he/she may still have certain astral and causal Karmas to work out, and therefore takes astral and then causal re-embodiments on higher vibrational spheres.
-YOGANANDA
Spiritual enlightenment is not a reward after a long struggle, spiritual enlightenment returns in the absence of any struggle.
Spiritual enlightenment is what is left when there is nothing left to experience.
Spiritual enlightenment is not an achievement (of the ego).
Spiritual enlightenment is not the accumulation of insights or physic abilities, although insights and physic abilities may occur.
Spiritual enlightenment is not the solving of a great mystery, it is the ending of mystery.
