What is Enlightenment?

What’s up in the evolution of consciousness at this time are 3 components, a kind of holy trinity, what I refer to in my teaching and writing as:

1. The Democratization of Enlightenment,
2. As an emergent World Spirituality based on Integral principles, and
3. As Unique Self consciousness, or Unique Self enlightenment.

These 3 emergent structures of thought, emergent structures of being and becoming, and emergent structures of consciousness are interrelated; they are a holy trinity, which are inseparable from each other.

What is the Democratization of Enlightenment? What is it that is so essential to the evolution of consciousness at this moment in time?

There’s Democracy on the one hand, and Enlightenment on the other: the Unique nexus of these two powerful, earth-shattering mind-bending, heat-rending ideas – ideas that change the very nature of how we engage all that is. And when you merge them together, something new, and larger than the sum of the parts, emerges.

First, let’s ask: What is enlightenment? What does it mean, at its core? First, the word describes a certain attainment of consciousness. But I want to say it more simply: enlightenment is sanity. That’s the core of it. To be enlightened is to be sane. Meaning, to know who you are, to know your true nature. To be located in correct identity. So, insanity means: mistaken identity.

So, the gap between my being Marc and my being someone else is infinitesimally small relative to the gap (or the difference between) my unenlightened consciousness (view of myself) and my enlightened, or ‘true’, self – who I really am.

Before I realize the true nature of all that is, my identity, I experience myself as a separate self, an egoic personality, and I experience that as the sum-total of my identity. Who am I? I am a skin-encapsulated ego, a separate discrete unit. And that is a case of mistaken identity.

When one deploys the faculty of perception, through genuine repeated experiment/practice, I find that, in my very essence, I’m indivisible from the larger whole, fully part of the seamless coat of the universe. Physics today points toward this intuition – that it’s all one seamless expression, a grand gesture, of the One.

This arouses a sense of mutuality, shared destiny, connection – this is the experience that blows the mind of the small self, and moves us beyond the limited identity of the false self, as we access true self: the true nature of all that is. That is the first-person experience, validated through practice, of the interior subjective space of the I; I participate in the loving, compassionate consciousness of All-That-Is — that’s enlightenment.