believing you’re enlightened is yet another ego trap

Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering

Do we question our motives when it comes to matters of spirituality, especially of enlightenment? What are people usually, or mostly, looking for in the spiritual sense? Why be so obsessed with enlightenment and finding the ultimate to everything? The answer to this seems rather obvious. Most people want security, and if they can’t have it then at least they want a sense of security. This means they need to know that there is stability, reason, and order in an existence that seems quite the opposite. With this in mind, the ego can be quite sated by attaching itself to the prowess and accomplishment of what it deems to be enlightenment.

Thanks to the explosion of social media, the old image of the carnival barker has been resurrected in the guise of spiritual masters and gurus all over the internet, and they’ve come into your house, appearing on your laptop. But instead of selling you snake oil, he or she is selling enlightenment — the ultimate spiritual prize, reward, and pinnacle.

There are a lot of prominent people pretending to offer what they themselves do not have to give. In fact, no one can give it, because no one can have a realization on your behalf. Anyway, one appearance and endorsement from Oprah blesses them as experts on enlightenment and guarantees them an army of followers. This isn’t to cast aspersions on Oprah who sees herself as doing a good deed for humankind, but as with all things, buyer beware.

Beneath the wayward enlightenment teachers’ words and facade of sincerity is a promise made with conviction — the promise of delivering security by way of spiritual enlightenment, which is permanent bliss and the end to all our earthly problems. But enlightenment has nothing at all to do with security. It is only the egoic self that seeks security and craves to end its suffering. This may be the motivation to seek some sort of awakened state, but security only belongs to the insecure sense of self.

the prize of security
Now let’s revisit at the nature of the sense of self and why security is such an important prize for the ego…

We humans are thinkers, worriers, planners, and schemers. We are part of an entire world that shapes our actions and thoughts, yet in our hubris we are conditioned to believe that we can control things, because we fancy ourselves to be the center of our world. This belief is founded on a motive that is without a peer: the need for security.

Even our many forms of meditation are predicated on the ego taking control. Spiritual teachers instruct their followers to sit quietly and force their minds to be quiet, be positive, focus the attention on the now, refrain from judgment, and so on. All of these puts the egoic self in the center of things, giving it the impression that it is the doer as the mind remains occupied with all sorts of ideas, thoughts, memories, instructions, admonitions, prescriptions, and so on. This is in an effort to achieve or obtain something greater than itself. But because the egoic self is limited to its own ability, it cannot find what is beyond itself, so the whole exercise is an absurdity.

a happy ego is a still an ego
If and when moments of quiet or insight occur, if they occur at all, the ego emerges pleased with itself and believes it has reached enlightenment. On and on it goes, because all the effort and self-aggrandizement only shows that the self has retained the idea of separation from all other beings and things within consciousness: There is the me that is enlightened and there is the other who is not. But the problem is that the me is really personal and differentiated. Can you see the problem here?

there is no ‘i’ in enlightenment
There is no “I” in enlightenment (except for the way the word is spelled). The very sentence, “I am enlightened” is an oxymoron. The “I,” which is the self, is ever-present and has not been dissolved, as evidenced when it goes around making such claims. The only one who proclaims, “I am enlightened” is the egoic self. The ego has accepted an idea about itself and is pleased with its accomplishment. There’s no escaping this. Thus, believing you are enlightened is nothing more than a trap set by the ego that suggests, “Look no further, I’ve found the Holy Grail of spirituality! Now I must tell the world of my greatness. I am cured of all my humanness.”

there’s no path or process
Enlightenment is not a process resulting from time and thought; it is seeing what has always been here right now and the realization of what you are as that which is fundamental and irreducible.