The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.
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The beautiful line in the Course of Miracles says, “It has taken time to misguide you so completely, but it takes no time at all to be who you are.” To be who are means who you are in your essence underneath the mind structures, the conditioned mind structures, and the only access you have to that is through the little doorway of now. And it is only here, it is only through the power that is inherent in the present moment that all those mind structures dissolve. The power of the present moment is the power of life itself, your very being. What arises in the now is presence, allowing this moment to be.
Any Denial of the Now
Where is life? Here, now. Life cannot exist separately from here and now. So any denial of the now, resistance to the now, running away from the now, mentally always trying to get to the next moment because fulfillment is there somewhere, and you miss this life. And then you reach the age of eighty-five still looking for something, and you missed the Beloved, the divine that is here in every moment.
The Illusion of Me
You align yourself with the form [of the moment]. Don’t fight the form. The moment you fight the form, the form of me gets strengthened in yourself. The me that is based on my thought forms gets stronger through the struggle, the reaction, the reactivity of what is. Ultimately, the illusion of me gets strengthen by fighting what is.
This moment—there is only one moment—appears in different forms. …
There is an inevitability to whatever form this moment takes. And so if you do not resist the form that this moment takes, internally, you are no longer trapped or imprisoned by the form that this moment takes.
The Complaining Pattern in the Mind
Every time you complain, you strengthen a little bit of the form identity of me, the complainer, the thought form, the reaction. Your egoic [sense of self] inflates a little bit though the complaint.
Every complaint means you are right, and what you are complaining about is wrong—the situation, the person, the place. You are superior to that which you are complaining about. That is the illusion of how the self-entity inflates continually itself through that. It never lasts for long and then it needs something else. … The self-importance grows through every complaint, the imagined superiority of me as compared to that which I am complaining about.
The Truth is far more all-encompassing than the mind could ever comprehend. No thought can encapsulate the Truth. At best, it can point to it. For example, it can say: “All things are intrinsically one.” That is a pointer, not an explanation. Understanding these words means feeling deep within you the truth to which they point.
Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate “other.” You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is.