I'm Not Interested in Enlightenment

"I am not interested in enlightenment if it means detachment from the emotional body, the earth plane, the challenges of being human. I am interested in enrealment, because it means that my most spiritual moments are inclusive, arising right in the heart of all that is human: joy and sorrow, shopping list and unity consciousness, fresh mangoes and stale bread. Enrealment is about living in all aspects of reality simultaneously rather than only those realms that feel the most comfortable. We are not just the light, or the mind, or the emptiness, or perpetual positivity. We are the everything. It’s ALL God, even the dust that falls off my awakening heart."  - Jeff Brown

Jeff Brown is an author, teacher, enrealment activist, and grounded spiritualist - and I adore his work.  Again and again, he captures my thoughts and feelings in eloquent and impactful words.   Jeff says, "If you want to live a more spiritual life, live a more human life.  Be more truly, fiercely, heartfully human."  I couldn't agree more.  You can check out Jeff's work here, and sign up for his newsletter here. 

I am, through and through, a seeker.  I want to know how things work, and why people are the way they are.  I want to understand the mysteries of life, love, and fear.  I find the investigation of being human endlessly fascinating.  Am I am bag of meat infused with electricity, was I fearfully and wonderfully created by a God with specific attributes, or am I consciousness incarnating again and again into human form?

I grew up in the Christian church, and as a young girl I won awards for memorizing bible verses at AWANAs.  As a pre-teen, you could find me at Church 4 days or more a week - Sunday sermon, Tuesday bible study, Wednesday youth group, and Thursday morning prayer breakfast.  I was fully invested.  Then things started to go really sideways in my life (you can read some of my personal story here).  I questioned why God would allow me, a devoted child of god, to experience such an unfair allotment of hardship.  Oh, yeah, I knew all the answers... but they didn't jive with my soul.  The thing is that truth holds a certain weight.  You can feel truth.   When I started to dig deeper into the explanations that Christianity provided for the way things were, they just didn't add up.  I had to admit that as a child, the pretty stories were... pretty stories, but the deeper truths that my soul was seeking couldn't be answered by Christianity.  In fact, I found the explanations it offered offensive. 

In my 20's I became deeply involved in the spiritual community. I sat with gurus and spiritual leaders and participated in rituals and processes.  A 90-day intensive process, which included chanting the same mantra every day for 90 days, led to me meeting (with no logical explanation) the goddess Kali in an Ashram in India.  I learned how to meditate and access my theta brain waves, alone and in groups.  I saw my past lives, and experienced (completely unexplainable) shared memories of past lives with another person.  Overall, I learned a great deal from this lifestyle, but to my surprise, I also found one of the largest collections of inauthentic, ego-driven assholes that I've ever - to this date- experienced in one niche of life.  For some reason the allure of being 'spiritual' attracts a certain type of person... and, the plain truth is, I don't like or respect that type of person.  Of course, I also met lovely, humble, authentic individuals in this community, but they were few and far between.  

Finally, in my 30's I had created an authentic spirituality that fit whoever this "me" is that I am in this lifetime.  Hinduism teaches that there are two experiences of God - nirguna or saguna, and that based on your personality, you are either attracted to one or the other of these experiences.  Nirguna is a god without form or without qualities, the eternal all-pervading and omnipresent divine consciousness. Saguna means with form or with qualities.  So for those of us in the Western world, an example of this would be believing in Jesus, and feeling comforted and inspired knowing (or pretending to know) what he looked like, what he said, what he felt.  He is a god with qualities.  Saguna. 

My personality lends itself to the nirguna experience.  When I think of the vastness of everything that is, the extreme wonder of it - I feel that expansion in my heart.  Any words or explanations I try to put to that experience, limits it.  When I say, "This is the answer", I feel my soul constricting and getting smaller.  I enjoy living into the questions, the wonder, the 'stale bread and the fresh mangos' - ALL of it.  Being fully myself, being the most authentic and true version of myself, the most human that I can be - this (I believe) reveals the most god that I can be.  To use Jeff's word: enrealment. 

All of these being said, if you have a different experience, if you believe in a god with attributes, Jesus or Kali, - I don't think you're wrong.  I don't think that I'm right.  I don't know.  I would, however, enjoy exploring the questions of life with you and learn more about where your soul has led you to find the answers.  That I find endlessly interesting.  Not the rules of a book, but YOU.  I can't think of anything I love more than learning what resonates for another person's soul.