4 Spiritual Teachers Share Their Search for Enlightenment

Traditionally, the goal of a spiritual practice has been to attain enlightenment, but is that what today's seekers are really after?

https://www.yogajournal.com/yoga-101/spirituality/the-search-for-enlightenment/

What is Enlightenment?

The poll results may also reflect a deep confusion about what enlightenment is—after all, sages and scholars have been debating the definition for millennia. 

Depending on whom you talk to, enlightenment is a sudden, permanent awakening to the absolute unity of all beings or a gradual, back-and-forth process of liberation from the tyranny of the mind. Or both. It is freedom from feelings or the freedom to feel fully without identifying with those feelings. It is unconditional bliss and love, or it is a state devoid of feelings as we know them. It is a shattering of the sense of a separate self, a transcendent experience of unity, a radical freedom available only to the few who are ready to give up everything and surrender the ego to pure awareness.

Buddhists and yogis tend to agree that in a sense we are already enlightened; we are already there. “Enlightenment is really just a deep, basic trust in yourself and your life,” says Zen priest Ed Brown. 

The work that awaits us is stripping away the layers of delusion that we have accumulated through our karma, so that our natural state of peace and wholeness can be revealed. “Enlightenment is not a new state that is in any way obtained or achieved,” says Richard Miller, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and founder of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, “but rather, it entails the uncovering of our original nature that has always been, and always is, present.” Or as Robert Svoboda, the first Westerner to graduate from a college of Ayurveda in India, says, “The enlightenment process is much more about getting rid of stuff than grabbing hold of it.”

To understand how the concept of enlightenment is framed by today’s Western ambassadors of the yoga tradition, YJ interviewed five prominent teachers whose practices in yoga and meditation collectively total 125 years and span many traditions. When we asked them whether we must aim for enlightenment to practice authentically, the conversations often turned to intention—a word that comfortably carries the weight of hopes yet doesn’t sink under our expectations.

When asked how they hold the goal of enlightenment in their own spiritual practices, not surprisingly, they each had unique ways of relating to liberation. But whether they view awakening as rarefied, permanent, and sacrosanct or hard-won, human, and imperfect, they all spoke of enlightenment as coming home to our deepest truths and aspirations—a gift a teacher gives or one that emerges from the depths of solitary practice. And like most precious gifts, it remains a mystery until we receive it, until our hearts open and do not close.

Looking around at his peers in the Buddhist and yoga communities, Cope acknowledges that no one he knows would claim to be enlightened, including himself. Encounters with practitioners who are “really transformed” are inspiring and rare. “I have a mentor,a Zen practitioner, who is as transformed by this practice as anyone I know. He lives a quiet, scholarly life. Has a girlfriend, drives a car. He does not have disciples. He’s just like the rest of us, except that his mind is less driven by greed, hatred, and delusion. Being in his presence helps me to soften, and I’m sure that’s the closest I’m going to get to enlightenment.”

For Kempton, students’ relationships to enlightenment have everything to do with their teachers. “If your teacher is enlightened or in a lineage of enlightened teachers, that state will be much more tangible for you than if your teacher is in the second generation of Western students of possibly enlightened teachers who might not even consider themselves enlightened.”

That state of ultimate enlightenment is permanent, but, says Kempton, there are also “stations” along the way—moments available to most of us when we “no longer identify with ourselves as a body-mind and experience ourselves instead as free awareness”; when we are not separate from others; when the dichotomy between form and emptiness dissolves; when we are capable of “free, unselfish, loving action” because we are no longer at the mercy of the ego, with its thoughts and feelings.

“Sages and seekers have been trying to define enlightenment for thousands of years. The Hindus say it’s fullness, and then the Buddhists say it’s emptiness,” says Walden. “it’s difficult to talk about things one hasn’t experienced, but I would say it’s our unconditioned state. it’s a state of innocence and purity. Maybe we’re born with it, but as we grow older, we have more experiences, and it’s obscured. By the time we become seriously interested or aspire to enlightenment, there’s this veil of avidya [ignorance , the root of suffering]—and a lot of work to do to peel away the layers.”