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There’s a difference between being spiritual and enlightenment. Being spiritual – which is what most people want – is being a person that is really at ease, being a person that experiences a lot of relief, a lot of expansion, a lot of freedom. Fewer people desire actual enlightenment, which is relief from being a person. It is the ease and the peace and the freedom from being a person.

So just consider the difference. Ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing in life – especially the things that are of a ‘spiritual’ or meditative nature. Are you doing these to satisfy and please the person or are you doing these things to actually realize that you’re not the person? Ultimately that’s the only space or state in which your peace and your happiness can remain unaffected, can be solid.

To not investigate who is the one that is seeking enlightenment or expansion is to sustain this illusion of the ‘spiritual-heroin junkie’ that just goes to get his or her fix. And then the person or the body feels better for a little while. But it doesn’t last. The person functions like this because it’s built on a fundamentally flawed delusion: that you are located somewhere, that you are the body, that you are separate from All That Is. That sense of separation is created by nothing but a series of beliefs, a sequence of assumptions.

Ask yourself: Who is the real you? Who is the you that is there when you’re sleeping? When you’re dead? When the body stops functioning? Do you really know yourself?

Enlightenment is not a particular state of Consciousness, though it includes all states of Consciousness. There are higher levels of Consciousness that include and transcend and master the lower realms of Consciousness and you can explore all that if you desire. Awakening is to be aware of the one who is seeing. Enlightenment is to maintain that awareness until it becomes more and more natural and it becomes harder and harder to go back into the assumption that you are a person.

There is an automatic veil that comes over your consciousness, usually each day when you wake up in the morning. And you have to start all over again, you have to get the ‘self-aware engine’ going again. You wake up in the morning and there you are – a person waking up. As the day goes by and you practice and you have moments of awareness, it starts to build a gradual undercurrent and usually by the end of the day you become clear and lighter in your consciousness. There is less of an automatic assumption of who you are and more of an actual clarity and a sense of freedom. If you extend all this into the night you can become a lucid dreamer. Or if you deliberately practice this in the morning, when you are in the in-between sleep and waking state, you can get the engines going quicker and maintain the engines more consistently with fewer gaps of forgetfulness. The veil becomes more and more transparent.

The most important thing is who is the seeker and why is he here. Enlightenment is not a state of Consciousness, it is the ideally constant remembering of who is looking. It is the awareness of yourself. Not yourself as the body but yourself as that which knows, as that which sees, as that which IS.