Spiritual Enlightenment – Jed McKenna
―No one actually in this state would ever have decided to call it ‗Spiritual Enlightenment,‘(1) yet no other state merits such a title………Spiritual enlightenment is the state in which the self is free of all delusions; including self itself………The process of becoming enlightened is a deliberate act of self-annihilation. It is the false self that does the killing and the false self that dies; a suicide in all but the physical sense………It is not possible to knowledgeably choose or want spiritual enlightenment. To desire it is to misunderstand it.
‗Ego‘ cannot desire ‗Egolessness.‘ One does not undergo the process of awakening out of love for the true but out of hatred for the false; a hatred so intense that it burns everything and spares nothing.‖
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My Impression On Above Chapter: „Maya‟
It would be wrong to demote our experience of the world to 100% illusion. It is very real, the only reality we know. If I kick a rock my foot hurts. The solidness of the stone is real in my experience; so is the pain!
The illusion comes when we confuse the image in our mind with the thing-in-itself. The ‗Vedantic Philosophers‘ (2) of ancient India spoke of this as ‗Maya‘
(see also ego) often translated as illusion , the word is better understood as
‗Delusion.‘(3) I suffer a delusion when I believe that the manifestations in my mind are the external world. I deceive myself when I think that the tree I see is the tree itself.
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The Meaning of Life & Who Is Your Infinite I?
FOOTNOTES
1. Wikipedia – Spiritual Enlightenment;
2. Wikipedia – Vedantic Philosophers; and
3. Wikipedia – Delusion.
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