What Do We Mean? Part 1

Last updated on: December 1, 2013 at 9:50 pm by Dr. Marc Gafni

What Do We Mean? Part 1 2013-12-01T21:50:36-08:00 Dr. Marc Gafni

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Let’s begin to understand what we mean by the Democratization of Enlightenment.

In other words, once we bring Eastern and Western enlightenment into a higher integral embrace by disambiguating the confusion between separateness and uniqueness — and therefore integrating the best intuition, insight and spiritual breakthrough understanding of both Eastern and Western enlightenment — we can begin to have a genuine conversation about the democratization of enlightenment. This is because every human being is a Unique Self: every human being is a True Self, and every True Self is unique. There is no True Self in the manifest world which is not unique. Once we embrace uniqueness as the expression of individuation (meaning the personal face of essence that is you; God’s signature written all over you; God appearing in you and as you, as Unique Self) — once we embrace this uniqueness, we’ve removed the counter-intuitive sense of enlightenment which creates an obstacle, telling the average human being who experiences his/her own uniqueness to reject their uniqueness.

So we now understand that human beings have an intuition which embraces uniqueness, and that this intuition is correct. And we now understand that an enlightenment teaching which tells the human being to leave his/her uniqueness behind (because it conflates separateness and uniqueness) is incorrect, or at best partial.

So we can begin to invite the democratization of enlightenment, which says that because you can, you must; because it’s possible, you should. The democratization of enlightenment says that enlightenment is actually a genuine option for every human being, and that every human being has the ability to clarify his/her egoic identity, and to access an actual, first-person experience that one is part of the seamless coat of the universe.

You can point towards it, you can experience it, and then you can experience your full unique expression of that, your Unique Self. This unique Self can feel that, “Wow, what calls me in the world is my Unique Self, and I can actually give up jealousy, and I can give up the contraction of trying to be like you, and I can give up hatred, because the only person I’m actually in genuine competition with in the world is me, and the only best I can be and the only ultimately stunningly beautiful I can be is by being the best Me that ever was, is, or will be, which is my Unique Self, which is the higher expression of my individuality post-realization of True Self. I actually don’t experience myself as small and contracted and I’m trying to figure out my typology to figure out how to navigate this brutal world. No, I actually experience myself as part of the Ground of Being, and then I embrace, rejoice and delight in my unique expression as being part of the Ground of Being.”

That is the birthright of every human being. The birthright of every human being is to know that they have a unique story. Their Unique Self is expressed in a unique story, a sacred autobiography — and that story deserves to be lived. That story deserves to be told. That story deserves to be received.

The core of the democratization of enlightenment is the realization that every human being is a Unique Self with a story to be lived, received and told, a story that has infinite adequacy, infinite dignity, infinite worth and value. This is the democratization of enlightenment — of Unique Self enlightenment — because that’s the essence of what enlightenment is: the democratization of possibility that every human being can realize in their own first-person that they participate in essence uniquely, and therefore be freed from the oppression of a raging ego, from the oppression of grasping, from the oppression of a felt sense of mortality that my egoic personality structure will crash when I die.

A person can actually transcend that Separate Self experience and experience their unique infinity, and the joy, power, and love that comes from participating in the All and letting it express in the only way that it can: uniquely through my unique gift. My unique gift creates my unique obligation to give that gift in the Kosmos. That is the obligation. It’s the core spiritual obligation of every human being. That’s the cornerstone of a World Spirituality.

The cornerstone of a world spirituality is that while we draw from the great traditions and all of their insight, we also draw from the modern traditions of psychology, of democracy itself (democracy being a modern tradition, part of modern gnosis), and we draw from the postmodern traditions that recognize evolution and the importance of context. So we draw from the best of premodern, modern and postmodern in forming a World Spirituality. At the very core, World Spirituality is enlightenment, and particularly the Democratization of Enlightenment.

To be continued in Part 2…

Democratization of Enlightenment

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Integral Embrace of East and West, part 2

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