What Happens After Enlightenment?

In October 2008, I came down from this place of full consciousness.

Do you stay in this enlightened state forever?

This was the mistake I made. A mistake of inexperience. I thought that once I achieved that state of all knowing and internal peace and full consciousness, that my work was done. This turned out to not be true. We are continually tempted by our thoughts and our faith is regularly challenged. We have to realize that we are still here in this physical plane. I mistakenly thought that as my enlightened awareness was leaving me that I would melt into oblivion. Nothing made sense. Huge difficulties arose. I went back to old ways. But now that I have had a chance to step back and look at the whole picture, I realize that I still have this power. I just didn't see it as it changed. Consciousness is on a continuum. We have the ability to tap into it at various places along this spectrum. We cannot stay at the very highest levels forever, unless we want to leave this physical plane. But the overall capacity, once it is achieved, will always stay with you, as long as you look for it and learn how to meditate. I have been continually blessed over the past several days with new levels of consciousness. Some of it is just a "basic" calming and mindfulness from yoga, but mostly it is many orders of magnitude beyond that.

What else can you share about what you are learning?

As I wrote above, my private journal is really long. And as I fell out of consciousness (or it became difficult to see), the whole experience has become more and more personal and difficult to share so openly here. But there are some things I have learned, that I am happy to share and mainly these tie into my knowledge of dissociation and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).

I wrote on the main page about DID being a primer for consciousness. This is true. To achieve consciousness, you have to accept everything, including the internal structure. I have since learned it's very difficult to keep that level of acceptance, especially for parts that are less "acceptable". Dissociated parts, even if "bad", are really good. They just act in ways that are unacceptable because they have no other context to hold onto. This is not so easy. But it's not so hard either.

So, in effect what I did was lose sight of the fact that I had to continue to do that work of continual acceptance of all. And also the work of closing my eyes and finding that inner peace. Meditation, inner communication and self-soothing, visualizing safe places inside, music, are all required. They are all techniques that lead to certain levels of awareness that exist on a continuum.

The other thing I learned is that memories, sometimes very bad ones, cannot always be observed. Sometimes they need to be worked on in order to ultimately accept. The trick is to not to make all that "go away" by "acceptance". Yes maybe the working on it will, in the short run, lessen the consciousness state. But we need to find a way to work on bad memories, put them away, then meditate or accept all inside and go back to a place of higher consciousness.

Related to bad memories are bad feelings. Sometimes feelings overpower us. Of course feelings are a function of what state we are in. Feelings make us human. They are good. But they don't always help us. Sometimes the goal may be to watch the feelings, in much the same way you can watch thoughts. In fact, you cannot always work to observe your feelings, but sometimes you actually have to feel them. You do it in exactly the same way as the memories: feel, put away, accept.

All of this makes things more complicated than I originally thought. That's okay.

The key is to stay on the path. Our physical beings and lifetimes of experiences are constantly causing us to stray. I believe we have the capacity to self-correct. Be mindful. If you stray, shift your focus. The path is there.