Guidance Overview
Connecting, Feeling, Healing, and Awakening
About Our Guidance
Modern Enlightenment has grouped guidance into 3 categories or stages: (1) Self Help, (2) Pre-Enlightenment, and (3) Enlightenment Guidance. To understand these 3 stages or categories, one must be open to the possibility that the way you currently think about your existence may be greatly limiting your innate nature as love and joy to be fully experienced, felt, and expressed.
In short, here is what happened (is happening) to each of us: (Poetically speaking) One droplet of the inseparable ocean of pure infinite eternal loving consciousness took form in a human body, and housed with an innocent yet greatly impressionable mind. Then, along the course of human development, somehow, consciousness adopted and identified itself to be merely physical (around age 3-4). For example: most everyone (mind) thinks: "I am the body. The body is me. The body is myself." Of course, everyone (mind) also thinks: "I am my mind and my mind is me. My mind is myself." Most every human being experiences life from this very limited point of view - the point of view that you are only the body and mind.
The ultimate possibility in the human kingdom for each individual is the discovery of your true eternal nature as love prior to body-mind identities; also known as enlightenment or self realization. Please understand, regardless of stages, everyone is already on their unique journey to fully awaken. The idea of stages is to merely help orient attention on a trajectory of awakening.
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Stage One: Self Help
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Seek compassionately and genuinely to understand your suffering. To do so is an expression of love.
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Self Help is usually the first place we find ourselves when life begins revealing we are not in control, and when core wounds of unworthiness manifest as addictions, painful relationships, despair, and suffering; a shift from our current patterns to something resembling self improvement is typically catalyzed by some kind of loss. This category or stage is usually one consisting of: support groups, psychotherapy, counseling, self improvement, possibly changing religions, trauma treatment, addiction recovery, and attending seminars or workshops on boosting self esteem. Interestingly, although pain and fear of losing control and self image drives people into self help, self help actually maintains the illusion of control, personal identity, and suffering. There is still strong identification with body and mind at this stage, and the root of motivation is deeply personal. This stage is primarily about feeling and healing even though ego discovers new comfortable patterns and illusory habits of security to maintain its illusory self, and suffering.
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Read more on Self Help
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Stage Two: Pre-Enlightenment
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Opening to the possibility that all beliefs are distortions of reality is a loving gesture to truth.
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The Pre Enlightenment Stage is placed between Self Help and the Enlightenment Category because it symbolizes your acknowledgment that Self Help has its limitations yet you are still resistant to fully surrendering to truth of existence. In this stage, typically you begin: (1) questioning that what you have been taught about life may not be accurate, (2) realizing belief systems about family, society, religion, and culture are not entirely consciously oriented toward spiritual well being, (3) discovering mind processes are causing great misery, (4) considering there is another way to exist in human form than through your current mental habits and behavioral patterns, and (5) becoming open to the possibility to some type of spiritual awakening.
In other words, you have a glimpse that you no longer want to believe what you have been trained and conditioned to believe, and your heart wants to do something different with life. A deep longing to discover and experience your own answers arises as you seek deeper spiritual options. You consciously set course to discover your true nature while reclaiming your autonomy to feel and express yourself, authentically. This stage is primarily about feeling and healing, yet with profound understanding to awaken. Pre-Enlightenment typically includes some combination of yoga, meditation, nature immersion, self inquiry, letting go/surrender, grieving, embracing humanness, reading books on spirituality, seeking spiritual guidance by a fellow human being, dropping self destructive habits (addictions), and becoming open to the possibility of complete transformation.
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Stage Three: Enlightenment
To lovingly seek the illusory one who is fictitiously suffering reveals nothingness - infinite eternal love.
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The stage of Enlightenment guidance is highly impersonal and more along the lines of transcending mind and dissolving self images; and, to see the illusion of suffering thereby effectively eliminating the idea and belief of suffering by revelation there is no finite separate self, i, or me. Consciousness merges back unto itself revealing truth - its eternal nature; thus, ending duality and the illusion of a separate self; also known as Self Realization, God Realization, Enlightenment, etc.
In short, (and although everyone is underway already unconsciously on their individual journey of awakening), one typically becomes aware when they have become open to the ultimate discovery of existence - also known as the distanceless path or journey of enlightenment.
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Read more on Enlightenment
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Considerations and Concessions
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There really are no stages - only life unfolding spontaneously eternally beyond judgment.
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Yet, we use the idea of stages to help focus and offer direction. We could also say that all three stages are happening simultaneously, although we use a linear point of view to direct attention to stages/issues which may need lovingly tended to.
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Please understand that ALL Enlightened Guidance speaks directly to your true nature. Therefore, no matter if you feel you are in the Self Help Stage or Pre-Enlightenment Stage, use Enlightened Guidance along with whatever else you are doing since it offers the direct path to awakening.
Know that what is happening in any stage, ultimately, is an unmasking, a dissolution of the veils of conditioning which are distorting our view of realty. In other words, we are restoring unbiased recognition of our Universal Self - pure awareness - consciousness; which means: there is nothing to add or obtain in order to discover our true nature. The inherent capacity and possibility for every human being is realization of your true eternal nature as existence itself - pure love. We use guidance from those awakened beings to help direct us towards clarity and truth - even though we are already that which we are seeking - pure love and grace eternal.
Please note that Enlightenment Guidance is EFFECTIVE in every stage so take a moment to consider all options.
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Seek with compassion, tenderness, softness, openness to possibility,
and grace - knowing stillness, love, and peace is all that is.