How to enlighten yourself.

(Or how to make yourself lighter)

There is this quote from Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a 19th century English writer, poet, philosopher and theologian, that has been flowing through my mind these days:

“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”

Orthodoxy, VII. The Eternal Revolution.

What he basically means is that seriousness is not a virtue, something we have forgotten as a society today. We have made everything so heavy with our seriousness. Let us lighten up a little bit. Why not give it a shot? Whole spiritual traditions have attested to its efficacy to get you to heaven. And why hold on to what brings you down? Your pain, your guilt, the wrongs others have done to you. Let them go and you’ll instantly feel lighter, ready to float upwards.

Fra Angelico, The Death and the Assumption of the Virgin, circa 1432, 38.5 x 81.8 cm, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

In the full quote, Chesterton mentions the air of lightness around angels in pre-raphaelite paintings. How Fra Angelico represented his angels not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. “In the old Christian pictures the sky is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens.”

The opposite of this lightness is pride. “Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity.” Pride levels all things, and in that way tries to control their meaning, because pride, deep down, is hurt. Pride has severed itself off from the rest of life and thinks itself more important, and by not taking others into account, by seeing them as “unworthy” of being heard, pride is able to live in its own world, its own narcissistic fantasy. In this way, it seeks to gain back control over the world that had hurt it in its opinion. But pride will never be truly fulfilled. Because deep down there is still a conflict of self against the world, a rift between them. And one cannot be truly fulfilled with such a conflict brewing inside.

In his own words:

Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

The ground may feel safe, but we are built for flight. Let us lay claim to the true power, love, and lightness that is our birthright.

So then, “how to enlighten oneself?”

Step 1 in enlightening yourself is to realize that what you interpret as “bad” is actually good.

Your emotions are a guidance system. They tell you whether you interpret something the right way or not. If you do interpret it the right way, it feels good, empowering, free. If you do not interpret something the right way, it feels bad, heavy, emprisoning. So our emotions guide us to truth. Bad emotions are only there to guide us back towards the truth, to tell us that our perspective conflicts with the way reality really is. Often, in our times, this misconception of reality is based on the idea of lack. We think something is lacking (time, love, money) and then we use that as a justification for feeling bad. Now nothing can be lacking in being, it can only be lacking in view - in perception - because perception is by its very nature limited (you always only perceive a particular slice of existence) and existence is by its very nature unlimited (you always exist, there is always, everywhere existence).

It may be true that your dog died and that your dog has thus disappeared out of perception. But is your dog lacking? Has your dog gone out of existence? It certainly seems that way at first. But what does our Emotional Guidance System tell us when we think this? It makes us sad. What does that mean? That our perception is not in alligment with the way reality really is. Why not? Our dog has not gone out of existence because nothing can not exist. There aren’t things that can not be there. It is a contradiction in terms. This fundamental philosophical error is the cause of much (if not all) of our contemporary suffering. We really believe in negativity. But negativity (notice the word here) or lack cannot exist because it fundamentally means anti-existence (it is the Anti-Christ in Christian theological terminology).

Negativity is a concept used by our minds when we compare two things. Something can only be “lacking” compared to something else, that is, in perception, because perception is comparison. In Advaita Vedanta (a Non-dual school of Hindu philosophy) they call the world - or perception - Maya. Maya means “to measure” or “to create as if by magic.” It refers to the creative capacity of our consciousness to dream up the world. But it often also has connotations of illusion. Now the world is neither illusory nor real, both claims have some truth to them if you understand them in the right way. The world is real in the sense that it is really there, you can feel it, you can touch it, etc. You can perceive it. The world is unreal in the sense that it does not last, it changes. It has no stable being other than that of the Self, of consciousness that underlies it. That which is really Real - the capital T Truth - never changes.

All your perceptions come and go, and therefore they are not you. Perceptions can be added unto you or taken away, but still you remain. We often identify with experiences and think they are us. Experiences are not us, they have happened to us. So we don’t have to hold on to them. We can just let go of all the negativity, it is not us, and even worse, it does not even exist. Why hold on to an illusion?

So step 2 in enlightening yourself is to let go of all that heavy negativity that is holding you down.

This is what we do in meditation. In meditation we silence the mind. We let all the thoughts and impressions we have gathered throughout our days come up and be reintegrated so that its lessons can be learned and the mirrors of our minds can become clean again. This process should be repeated again and again.

So step 3 is repeat.

The more of our heaviness, the more that our negativity is surrendered, and let go of, the lighter we become. Until all there is is light love and joy. This is a simple description of how to get enlightened. I hope you will be able to let go of your heaviness to find once again the lightness and love that is our natural state of being.

Namasté