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Traditional Enlightenment Teaching
Last updated on: September 23, 2013 at 4:44 pm by Dr. Marc Gafni
Traditional Enlightenment Teaching 2013-09-23T16:44:01-07:00 Dr. Marc Gafni
Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.
If we understand enlightenment to be an essential transformation that changes the game, that creates compassion and love and mutuality between people, and a sense of participating together in the larger One, in the larger destiny of an emergent; and if we understand that this is a realization verifiable in first-person, that you can actually feel it, touch it, taste it, experience it, and that it’s available through practice — then why isn’t everyone running to become enlightened?
Why isn’t everyone dropping everything else and saying, “Oh my God. Enlightenment is the antidote to the pain. This is the antidote to the sense of ennui, to the sense of desperation, to the sense of loneliness, to the sense of brokenness”?
Let’s put it in marketing terms. If this is so awesome — if this product of enlightenment is so fantastic — why is no one buying it? Or why is it at least a marginal, peripheral product which is not in the mainstream? Enlightenment is a peripheral conversation. Mainstream serious people don’t talk about enlightenment. Why is that?
What is there in the cultural intuition, what is there in the human psyche, spirit, in the embodied human that rejects this enlightenment teaching? Again, if it’s so great, if it’s so transformative, if it’s so heart-opening, if it so blows your mind, why doesn’t everyone want it more than anything else in the world?
And THAT is the question we need to address to our enlightenment teaching, which I explore in this video. Let’s see what there is in the enlightenment teaching which is so counter-intuitive, so in violation of one’s essential I — one’s essential identity – that it’s almost in toto rejected across the board.
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