Why should I meditate?…for the sake of a better future for us all

We are now up to the last class in our five-week course of ‘Living Enlightenment’ and it’s been a tremendous journey for all of us. In the first class we looked at where we are as a culture generally, and a lot of our conditioned beliefs, and in the second where we are attempting to go on the path of Evolutionary Enlightenment. This means going from a post-modern ‘world centred’ perspective to one where we know we are the cosmic process itself and in no way separate from it. The last part of the course (classes 3-5) really look at the ‘how to’…the path itself.

A major part of this requires us to look at our own experience in a really new and radical way. It requires us to look at ourselves, and what’s motivating us, through the lens of the authentic self, and the lens of the personal and cultural ego. When we identify with these different perspectives, and really break it down together, we can see that how we see and relate to the world is always influenced in an essential way by the nature and quality of these perspectives. We went around the class and honed in on what’s it like to ‘be’ the authentic self. There is no fear or self-consciousness, losing a sense of time or any limitation, a burning desire to create something new and positive and ecstatic drive to really do it. We all could relate to this experience for sure. We all had our own flavours of it, in different talents and interests for example, but the drive to create, for example, was fundamentally the same. And then looking though the lens of the personal ego we all shared the view of limitation, a sense of unease, subtle (or not) victimisation, and their being a problem with life and us in general. The more we talked and looked together through these lenses in this way, the more clarifying and fascinating it became.

Does Heaven Exist? Living Enlightenment Course at EnlightenNext London

Last night good friend and spiritual sister Lovena Venkatakistnen and myself conducted class 1 of our first EnlightenNext ‘Living Enlightenment’ course together. This class is really a fantastic overview of what Evolutionary Enlightenment is about. We introduced the concepts of Being and Becoming as the totality of all reality divided into the unmanifest and the manifest realms, and how Evolutionary Enlightenment has a bias towards the manifest dimension. Just focusing on this in an open and interested way can really can shift the ground underneath you, and make you stop to consider deeply who we are in much deeper way – and this type of focus and consideration is the environment we were building in the class together.

A very fascinating point came up in the middle of the class where we started to look at notions of heaven. For most of us who are post modern, educated, sophisticated and relatively well off individuals, this notion of believing in heaven, or a place in the future or when we die that will be our salvation or final resting place seems quite absurd or at least not relevant. Interestingly this was the sense in the room when we started. But what was revealed, as we looked further is that we each actually did hold this belief even if we weren’t very conscious of it. A lady brought her authentic experience of feeling trapped in own her body a lot of the time, with a sense of not really knowing the way forward, and just doing the best she could do…and as she was speaking about it everybody in the room could totally relate. It was revealed that our version of heaven isn’t a place with angels, but in a dearly and deeply heal belief of a time in the future where we wouldn’t feel so trapped, and where we wouldn’t experience confusion and unpleasant emotional and psychological states. This is OUR version of heaven. I think that this has provided some good food for contemplation, so that all of us in the class can look into this in ourselves during the week to deepen and enrich our understanding of this.