The Five Tenets Of Enlightenment
The five tenets define what the
enlightened, or liberated, relationship to the human experience is, and what it
looks like in action. They describe simply and clearly how to manifest what is
discovered in the spiritual revelation—how to embody the absolute nature of
that revelation in the life you are living, here and now.
These tenets represent the path to enlightenment, but they
also represent the goal itself because, as the traditional teachings have
always told us, the path and the goal are one. What that simply means is that
the place that you want to get to, and the position that you take in
relationship to your experience in order to get there, are one and the same.
In an evolutionary context, the goal is to become
enlightened, which means liberated from ego, so that you can become a vessel
for the pure egoless passion of the authentic self to express itself in this
world. The five tenets describe the position that you need to take in order to
perfectly cage the ego, and they simultaneously describe the natural state of
the inherently free authentic self. If you are enlightened, if you
have become one with the pure egoless passion of the authentic self, this is
what your actions are going to look like—naturally, spontaneously, and effortlessly.
And if you want to become enlightened, if you want
to become one with the pure egoless passion of the authentic self, this is what
you have to do—through intention, will, and effort. If you are sincere
in your desire to become an agent for the evolution of consciousness, these
five tenets must be lived without conditions, at all times, in all places,
through all circumstances. In this way, whether carried by the spontaneous
ecstasy of revelation or driven by the force of your own intention, your actions
will consistently reflect the clear perception of the enlightened view.
The First Tenet:
Clarity of Intention
The first tenet is called Clarity of Intention, and
it places the outcome of the spiritual quest directly in your own hands.
In the teaching of evolutionary enlightenment, the
individual is ultimately responsible for his or her own development. You may
say that you want to evolve, that you want to become liberated or enlightened,
but whether or not that aspiration bears the fruit of transformation is
entirely dependent upon you. The bottom line is that if you truly want to be
free, nothing will be able to stop you. Clarity of intention is the foundation
of the spiritual life, and it states that your desire for freedom, your impulse
to evolve, has to become more important to you than anything else in this
world.
Wanting to be free more than anything else is not
a feeling; it’s an action. It is a conscious position you take in relationship
to every choice you make. Without the clear intention to be free, no amount of
spiritual practice will change you in the long run. Your success depends
entirely upon your conscious choice to be free in every moment. Ultimately you
will reach a point where you no longer have a choice, where your own freedom is
recognized to be a choiceless obligation. Then the authentic self, which is
already perfectly free, will have become the dominant force in your being and
therefore the first tenet will no longer be something you are struggling with.
But until you reach that point, clarity of intention needs to be consciously
cultivated.
When you begin to contemplate clarity of intention, you are
likely to discover, as most of us do, that you don’t really want freedom more
than anything else. You may want to experience the liberating bliss of higher
states. You may even have glimpsed the absolute nature of reality from the
perspective of consciousness itself and felt compelled to respond to that
revelation. But when you attempt to bridge the gap between that higher perspective
and the reality of your life in the relative world, the ultimate challenge of
spiritual freedom reveals itself. You recognize that to become a living
expression of that higher perspective demands nothing less than everything.
The serious contemplation of the question, Do I want to
be free more than anything else? will inevitably catalyze a profound
confrontation with your relationship to life. It will bring to light deep and
powerful structures that usually remain hidden—the authentic self’s unbridled
passion for freedom and the ego’s fierce resistance and inertia. The first
tenet makes it possible, once and for all, to freely choose which of those will
determine your destiny.
Clarity of intention is simple, but its implications are
radical and profound beyond measure. If you want to be free more than anything
else, you don’t have to depend on higher states; you don’t have to wait for God
to save you; you don’t have to hope for grace to descend. In a truly courageous
soul, this tenet will forge a strength and independence of spirit that in and
of itself is liberation. Clarity of intention is the foundation of the
enlightened life and the key to the evolution of consciousness itself, because
it places your freedom entirely in your own hands.
The Second Tenet:
The Law of Volitionality
The second tenet, The Law of Volitionality,
states that if you want to be free more than anything else, you must be willing
to take absolute responsibility for your own self.
Living the second tenet is no easy task. There are many
influences that come together to make up the self: personal history, cultural
conditioning, biological instincts, and perhaps even the karmic imprints of
previous lifetimes. There are the fears and desires of the ego and the
evolutionary impulse of the authentic self. But what makes it possible for you
to take responsibility for all of this is the recognition that, in the end, you
are always choosing to be the person that you are. You are making
conscious and unconscious choices in every moment that determine what actions
you will take and what impact you will have on the world around you.
The power of the second tenet entirely depends upon
accepting the fact that on some level, we all always know exactly what we
are doing. It boldly declares that if you want to manifest the revelation
of wholeness, nonduality, and enlightenment in this world, you must actively
take responsibility, right now, for everything you are doing in the
present moment, for all you have done in the past, and for the conditioned responses
that arise as a result of things that others have done to you.
Enlightenment means freedom from karma. Karma is created
every time you act out of unconsciousness, ignorance, and selfishness in ways
that cause suffering to others. For most of us, karma is a powerful force—the
accumulated momentum of literally countless actions. The momentum of karma is
what makes the personal world of ego and unenlightenment appear so attractive
to us. The authentic self in each of us is compelled to become enlightened and
perpetually evolve, but the ego is driven by the need to always be in control
and ever remain the same. And it is the choices that we make in every moment
that determine which part of our self will be creating our destiny. Each time
we act out of ego, karma is instantly created.
There are few human beings who truly aspire to be
absolutely responsible for themselves. Most prefer to see themselves as
unconscious victims of the forces within and without. As long as you allow
yourself to be victimized by your own conditioned responses that arise as a
result of past wounds and traumas, it is inevitable that sooner or later you
are going to wound and traumatize others, and the momentum of your own karma
will only increase. But when you renounce the victim position, you finally take
the weight of your karma upon your own shoulders. You bear it so that no one
else has to suffer. Heroically, you choose to liberate the world from your own
miserable ego—and if you care about the evolution of consciousness, you will be
in a position to make a significant contribution.
In an evolutionary context, the individual is aspiring to
become liberated so that the authentic self, the evolutionary impulse, is free
to act, to respond, to transform this world. The authentic self has no past; it
has no karma; it has never been wounded or traumatized by anything that has
happened to the historical personality in time. It is egoless by nature, and
when it meets itself in others, a state of ecstatic intimacy and perfect trust
emerges that brings heaven to earth. But in order to be a vessel for that
miraculous emergence, you must be living the second tenet to such a degree that
the conditioned and irrational responses of the ego are always contained. Then
the multidimensional complex of energy, consciousness, and contradictory
impulses that you are will become the expression of an integrated whole that
not only ceases to create karma, but begins to generate an entirely new and
positive momentum as it moves forward on its evolutionary trajectory.
The Third Tenet:
Face Everything and Avoid Nothing
The third tenet is the ultimate form of spiritual practice.
It tells us that if we want to be free we must be willing to Face
Everything and Avoid Nothing at all times, in all places, under all circumstances.
Most forms of spiritual practice are ultimately about the
cultivation of awareness, and facing everything and avoiding nothing means
cultivating a capacity for awareness that is profound. The ego is deeply
attached to self-image and is always manipulating its environment in such a way
that it will only see the reflection of itself that it is seeking for. The
ego’s tendency is to avoid, deny, and reject any information that it receives,
from the outside world or from our own internal experience, that would in any
way contradict that self-image. So as long as we are identifying with ego, we
will choose to be blind to the less wholesome aspects of our self, and
inevitably will act out of those conditioned and unconscious impulses and wreak
havoc all around us.
The liberated relationship to life is one that is free from
ego. It is only the ego that has a self-image to protect, and that image
creates a barrier, a wall that shields the self from too much reality. The
authentic self is already free, radically unselfconscious, and only interested
in what is real and true. It has no image to protect and no motive to avoid
anything. So the reason to practice the third tenet is to shatter the ego’s
defenses in every moment. Facing everything and avoiding nothing is the
practice that removes all obstacles to the spontaneous, uninhibited emergence
of the authentic self.
Only an individual who truly wants to be free will be
prepared to abandon the pretense of the ego and to see things as they are. Only
one who strives for transparency, authenticity, and emptiness of self, and who
is deeply motivated by the impulse to evolve, is going to be able to face
reality in this way. Anyone else, in the end, will find that they are too
invested in maintaining the pretense of a separate self to even begin to
practice the third tenet in earnest. But as we begin to identify less and less
with the fears and desires of the ego and more and more with the evolutionary
passion of the authentic self, we will experience less fear, hesitation, and
resistance to seeing what is true. We will find the strength and the moral
courage to be able to bear whatever we need to bear in order to face everything
and avoid nothing, at all times, in all places, under all circumstances. Why?
Because we want to be free more than anything else. We want to
liberate the self from the grip of ego so that consciousness itself will be
free to evolve through us. Our capacity for this degree of awareness and
self-knowledge is completely dependent upon our intention to be free, because
in that we align with the pure passion of the authentic self, and the very
motive to avoid is transcended.
The Fourth Tenet:
The Truth of Impersonality
The fourth tenet is called The Truth of
Impersonality. It states that ultimately every aspect of your own
personal experience can be seen from a perspective that is completely
impersonal. And it is from that vast universal perspective alone that true
liberation can be found.
The impersonal view reveals to us that the separate self-sense,
or ego, is nothing more than an illusion of uniqueness, created moment by
moment through our compulsive habit of personalizing almost every
thought, feeling, and sensation we have. The truth is that the human experience
could never be a personal affair. Most of the highs and lows we go through and
compulsively claim as “mine” are in fact shockingly impersonal. From the
biggest perspective, all human experience can be seen as being part of a process—an
evolutionary or developmental process that is moving forward in time. Our own
personal experience of that process in all its many dimensions—inner and outer,
gross and subtle—is ultimately a very small part of an infinite unfolding.
Thoughts and feelings that arise in individual consciousness reflect emotional
and psychological structures or habits that have slowly developed over hundreds
of thousands of years.
If you step back and begin to look more and more
objectively, in light of this greater context we exist within, you will slowly
but surely begin to recognize for yourself the impersonal nature of all
of your own experience. In that recognition, the personal dimension will
suddenly become completely transparent to you. This insight, even if only
temporary, will completely undercut every belief you have about being a unique,
individuated entity who lives in some separate bubble, mysteriously isolated
from everything else that exists. You are a process. Dare to face this
and you will become transparent to yourself.
The personal is simply the veil that creates the illusion
of separation that is ego. And it’s a mighty illusion. It’s powerful and
profound. Most of us live our entire lives behind that veil, never stepping
beyond it except perhaps in brief glimpses of higher states. But if you are
willing to face into the truth of impersonality, and have the courage to see
through your own personal self-sense, you will discover the utterly impersonal
nature of the authentic self, which is who you really are. And as you embrace
the impersonal perspective, your identification and allegiance will shift
dramatically from the personal concerns of the ego to the impersonal passion of
the authentic self, which cares only for the future of our collective
developmental process. To the authentic self, the personal is irrelevant. If
your allegiance is with the authentic self, you may still experience the
personal dimension—the ego’s fears, neuroses, and irrational compulsions—but
you will miraculously find that you have the emotional, psychological, and
spiritual strength to be able to handle it. Why? Because you know that you are
only a very small part of a vast impersonal process. When you pull away the
veil of the personal, you discover a radical objectivity that liberates you,
right now, to consciously participate in the highest level of that process,
which is the evolution of consciousness itself.
The Fifth Tenet:
For the Sake of the Whole
The fifth tenet, For the Sake of the Whole,
recontextualizes the seeker’s fundamental relationship to the spiritual path.
It describes the evolution of the very motive to be free.
When we embark on the path, most of us naturally want
freedom or enlightenment for our own sake. This is why we begin with the first
tenet, which says I want to be free more than anything else. But if we
sincerely pursue that one-pointed aspiration and authentically develop and
mature, we will find that eventually our motivation begins to shift. As our
understanding and experience grow, we realize that the desire to be free is not
a personal matter. Indeed, to the seeker who is becoming a finder, it becomes
more and more apparent that we are all part of a vast evolutionary process, and
that the aspiration for freedom is nothing less than the expression of the
evolutionary impulse itself within the human heart and mind. In this, we
recognize that the pursuit of enlightenment could never be merely for our own
liberation. The movement of spiritual awakening is part and parcel of the
cosmic process of development, and the purpose of enlightenment is ultimately to
bring the light of awakened consciousness to that process itself.
Fourteen billion years ago something burst out of nothing,
and the highest expression of that miraculous surge of becoming is found in the
human being’s emerging capacity for higher consciousness. Consciousness is not
the possession of any particular individual. But it is only through particular
individuals that consciousness can evolve. So the goal of evolutionary
enlightenment is for the individual to become liberated from the fears and desires
of the ego so that he or she becomes an open channel through which
consciousness itself is free to develop and express itself in this world.
The fifth tenet says I want to be free not for my own
sake but for the sake of the whole. When this becomes our spontaneous
response to the longing for liberation, something very significant has
occurred. What began as a freely made choice has become a choiceless
obligation. Our fundamental motive has evolved from one that is self-serving to
one that is not separate from the very motive behind the expanding universe—the
pure passion of the big bang, the God impulse, which is our own authentic self.
When that pure passion becomes our own passion, human life
becomes ennobled—it becomes the holy life, the spiritual life, a life of
meaning and value. We discover that we have come home and have found our place
in the whole matrix of the cosmos. We know who we are and why we are here. As
long as our fundamental motive is personal and self-centered, life will never
deeply make sense. But when we embrace a motive that absolutely transcends the
personal, every moment becomes infused with a powerful sense of purpose. That’s
the death of the ego. All our petty self-concern is radically displaced because
we are no longer living for our own sake but are now living for the sake of the
whole, consumed by a passion to be utterly free so that nothing will inhibit
our ability to participate wholeheartedly in the evolutionary process.
