Enlightenment Intensive and the Mind

I’ve said many times, the Enlightenment Intensive is no different to your ordinary life in respect to the mind and it’s mental impressions that you bring to the retreat. 

In daily life, the mind you have is the obstacle to your self realisation.   And at the Enlightenment Intensive retreat you bring that same mind with you.

It’s the mind and it’s mental impressions that troubles you and keeps you separate from Absolute Reality, God Consciousness, Enlightenment or whatever word you use to refer to the Numinous. 

The essential difference is that at the Enlightenment Intensive there is a structure that keeps your attention focused on self inspection of who you are while also encouraging openness and honesty in relating to others in respect to what you discover about yourself.  

   Ordinary daily life doesn’t generally hold you to such high standards of relating, communication and self reflection. 

Ordinary daily life doesn’t consistently remind you to not blame, criticise, evaluate or gossip about others …or to take responsibility for what is arising in your consciousness.  In this respect it is unique as compared to your daily life.

   The Enlightenment Intensive structure is designed to facilitate a crisis, a healing crisis.  Such a crisis comes about as a result of your endeavour to consciously, directly know your Self.

A crisis is something you think you can’t get through.  During the course of an Enlightenment Intensive many times you will encounter various mental and emotional impressions and phenomenas where you think you can’t succeed in your goal of knowing your true self. 

You may feel confused, bored, blank minded, fearful, uncertain, emotionally upset or overly sensitive.  Your mind, which you are identified with thinks the cause of this problem or crisis is outside of itself and not the source.
 
The mind, problem solves, and thinks it could be the environment and ‘looks’ for an answer.  You have thoughts like: “it’s not warm enough or it’s raining too much or the facility isn’t adequate or I don’t like the food or the bed isn’t comfortable.” 

You look for something in the environment as to the cause of your problem of not knowing who you are.  If it’s not the environment then it could be the enlightenment dyad technique or the other participants or the retreat facilitator. 

You have opinions like they’re not spiritual enough or they talk too loud or cry too much or a thousand other excuses in order to justify your error of blaming and criticising of others for your feelings.  

But blaming others will not work to relieve you of the distress you feel nor will running away remedy the existential crisis of no knowing who you really are. 
   The key to getting through a healing crisis of this sort is to keep doing what got you into the crisis and that is, the enlightenment dyad practice and your courageous self reflection combined with honest communication. 

Facing yourself honestly and telling the truth to another is what precipitated the crisis and that is what will bring you through the crisis into liberation.  Not everyone recognises this because the mental impressions arising in the mind is trying to solve the enigma of a personal identity that has no answer or it tends to make others the source of the difficulty or it tries to change the environment in order to relieve itself of the conundrum of self enquiry.  You could call that approach the typical strategy of an ego centered universe.

   The Enlightenment Intensive is structured to facilitate the revelation of your true self which is at odds with your ego’s inhibition for telling the truth.  This confrontation brings on a healing crisis.  In actual fact the crisis of identity in respect to who you are is already active and in play when you come to the Enlightenment Intensive. 

I’ll continue this sharing in another video presentation.