4.6 What does it mean to realise the unconditioned state, in a psychological sense?

As taught in chapter 3, in reality, every experience of your life is bounded by a specific configuration of the ten conditions. The specific details vary from life to life, and from situation to situation. What remains constant is the influence, on your life, of these ten conditions at every moment.

The successful outcome of attaining the psychological stage of enlightenment involves transcending the relatively illusory limitations of your personality. Put simply, you go beyond your emotional and intellectual conditioning. You are able to exist, in your daily life, in a state unconditioned by your previous emotional and intellectual constraints.

This is a state of clarity, serenity and quiet joy, where you are centred in the midst of conditions, becoming increasingly free of the thrall of your needs and desires, accepting reality as it unfolds to your awareness. The world is as full as ever of people and things you need and desire; only now you become increasingly freed to react or not, in any situation, according to your intuition. Your life is no longer as constricted by the emotional pressures and intellectual preconceptions of your personality; instead, by a process of natural, spontaneous growth, you are developing an unfolding vision of yourself and others as components bound by implicate laws to the unified process that is reality.

From the transpersonal point of view, this is experienced as a great release from life’s burdens; the burdens may still be there and have to be endured, but one’s attitude to them has profoundly altered. Through a growing feeling of reconciliation and harmony with all that happens, one experiences the movement of responsibility for the direction of one’s life to a force both within and outside the self. It is a feeling of free dependence, based on a calm acceptance of the harmony inherent in reality.

This free dependence on reality is your birthright. It is yours simply by committed daily practice of the meditation, coupled with sustained effort to understand your life in the context of these teachings. In this way, within a hundred days, it is possible to attain the first, or psychological, stage of enlightenment.