2.7 What are enlightened forms of behaviour?

The overcoming of your ignorance of the true nature of reality is your primary duty if you are seeking enlightenment. Overcoming ignorance both of that, and of the true nature of this, are, in the final analysis, the snuffing out of ignorance of one’s own nature. Conditioned by space, time and karma, that works throughout your life to effect your freedom from the ignorance caused by self-imposed limitations.

Without exception, every thought and activity of an unenlightened person takes place in a fog of ignorance obscuring the true nature of each moment experienced. Once you have attained the fourth and final stage of enlightenment, you will have awoken from your ignorance, as you awaken from a dream realising that what passed before was only the product of the dreaming mind. Once enlightened, you will have the capacity to experience each moment just as it is, free from all burdens and free from all stress and sorrow.

Only by transcending the illusion that you have individual and separate existence can you succeed in transforming the ignorance and suffering of your mind in its conditioned state into the triumphant freedom and release from all burdens which are characteristic of mind in its fully enlightened state. This is a key feature of all fully developed Eastern or Western implicate technology systems. All models of reality which transcend the illusion of mere objectivity teach that, when understood in their true nature, the experiences, the object of experience and the act of experiencing are one.

The key distinction between the enlightened and the unenlightened person is the enlightened person’s realisation, based on direct experience, that the sense of  ‘I’, the experience of separateness and individuality, is only relatively real and so is illusory and that the true and absolute nature of reality is an indivisible unity. Chapters 3 to 6 of this book teach a step-by-step method enabling you to break out of the ignorance of your true nature which binds you to suffering. The teachings in this chapter prepare you by encouraging you to adopt enlightened forms of thought and behaviour.

An enlightened person knows from experience that reacting to the needs and desires of the individual sense of ‘I’ leads only to entrapment in  illusion. Acting on ‘I want’ and ‘I need’ brings only endless action and reaction within the self-balancing system governed by karma, which we experience as everyday life. Every activity based on an ‘I’ thought incurs either positive or negative karmic consequences and so perpetuates bondage to the illusion which sustains and underlies conditioned existence.

On the unshakeable authority of direct intuitive experience, the enlightened person knows that the obscuring fog of ignorance clears when the apparent separateness of all things is transcended. Acting from a level of being which transcends ‘I’ thoughts, the enlightened person functions as a conscious component of an inherently unified and harmonious system. All actions of a conscious component of reality are achieved without individual effort or volition and incur neutral karmic responses. The enlightened person experiences karma as a courteous and helpful guide through the unfolding of this, not as an implacable governing force dictating the events of one’s life according to one’s thoughts and actions.

The priceless benefits of enlightenment, a state of mind detached from pain, sorrow and all constraints of space and time, can only be realised through freedom from attachment. True freedom is freedom from attachment to any and all aspects of this, while accepting the inevitability of the processes of conditioned existence. Every enlightened person knows with utter certainty that only the body is born, ages, suffers and dies and only mind in its enlightened form is always free.