1.8 How can you measure your progress along the path leading to the final stage of enlightenment?

The natural tendency of the unenlightened mind is to seek proof or confirmation of the teaching. Where a person’s mind is relatively underdeveloped, there will be a correspondingly strong desire to seek objective proof. Not only will such an attitude probably fail to lead to the desired evidence, but it will also fail to lead to enlightenment.

The reason for this is straightforward. In common with all other fully-developed models of reality, Implicate Technology teaches that the true nature of reality can only be understood through realising by direct experience the absolute, final and all-embracing subjectivity which informs and comprises perceptible reality. A dependence on mere objectivity is an essential part of the illusion preventing you from knowing directly that conditioned existence is an organic and integrated unity.

If you are to transcend the illusion binding you to non-enlightened states of mind, you must transcend your mind’s mistaken tendency to regard the world as being comprised of objective phenomena. Equally, do not make the mistake of thinking that the world somehow exists only in your imagination. Remember always, reality is this: that people and places, things and events, the individual sense of ‘I’, and even the thought passing through your mind as you read this – all of this – is the thought process of the all-embracing, unconditioned, unqualified, universal and only mind, made manifest in conditioned form.

All the contents of a dream – people, places, things and events – are known on waking to be the product of the dreaming mind. What was experienced as real during the dream is known, on waking, to be merely a product of the dreaming mind. Similarly, when the absolute and impersonal subjectivity of mind in its unconditioned state is realised, then this is truly understood in its illusory nature, like awakening from a dream.

To seek proof in a form objectively demonstrable to others is to miss the point of enlightenment. If you are to realise the freedom of the final stage of enlightenment, you must learn to lessen your dependence on merely objective ways of understanding reality. Any proof must be of a kind to cause you to develop reliance on impersonal and autonomous subjective processes if it is to lead you towards understanding the true nature of conditioned existence.

This section introduces two examples of autonomous and impersonal subjective processes. Their occurrence on the path to enlightenment is common, and, at first, dramatic and exciting. In the end, as your mind progresses in understanding through experience, you will realise the transitory and illusory nature of these experiences and leave them far behind.

Not everyone will have these specific experiences. The final stage of enlightenment can be attained without, for example, any recollection of previous lives. You will spontaneously have those experiences which are relevant to the needs of your own developing nature.

All your experiences are a function of the activity of karma: their purpose, appropriate to your needs to develop in understanding, is to collect you towards a true and clear experience of reality. Resist the temptation to be beguiled by such experiences: to become dependent on their appearing or not appearing is to seek out fool’s gold. Learn what these experiences have to teach you, then leave them behind.