3.11 What is the second stage of enlightenment?

By actual realisation, through your own experience, of the mind’s inherent stillness, you have attained the second stage of enlightenment. The purpose of this section is to round out your experience and to point out the way ahead. You may choose to rest at this point on your journey, or you may find yourself proceeding with the exploration of reality, as taught in chapter 4.

You have realised the mind in its natural state – settled, serene and utterly still. This is an experience of unparalleled ordinariness. It is quite unremarkable because it is simply the Act of witnessing this.

The ancient and time-honoured simile for the mind in its natural state cannot be surpassed for its accuracy of description. The mind in its natural state is calm and still, like an ocean without a wave. You have won the right to live the rest of your life in a sea of serenity.

As you have discovered from your own experience, thoughts still occur endlessly while the mind is in its natural state. Through meditation you have developed the ability to be indifferent to the rise and fall of the mind’s impressions. Having realised the mind’s inherent stillness, you are indifferent to the movement of thoughts.

Your mind is now capable of discriminating between reality as experienced through the limitations of the individual sense of ‘I’, and that same reality as experienced through the absence of the sense of ‘I’. Up to this point in your meditations, you have lived, loved and worked on the inherently illusory basis that the individual sense of ‘I’ is the natural focus through which this is experienced. The exercises taught in the next chapter will awaken your mind’s inherent ability to experience this through the absence of the illusory individual sense of ‘I’.

The transpersonal explorations of the nature of reality, which begin in chapter 4, utilise one-pointedness of mind. A one-pointed mind is capable of meditating on one thought at a time for as extended a period of time as is necessary until understanding develops. Through developing this ability, the true, final and absolute nature of reality will become irrevocably known to you.

The true nature of this is that it is the externalised and objectified thought process of the one, unified, all-embracing, transcendent mind. Your relative and illusory individual sense of ‘I’ is an inseparable component of that. The purpose of the meditative system taught in this book is to consciously re-unite you with that, and so enable you to know each thing separately and yet simultaneously to know all things as one.