What Is Self-Realization?

Along with enlightenment and spiritual awakening, self-realization sounds like an unattainable, if not undefinable state of being. One website makes the following distinctions:

“A definition of spiritual enlightenment or spiritual awakening is hard to pin down. This is, in part, because 'spiritual enlightenment' and 'spiritual awakening' have been used in so many ways to describe so many things, similar to the way in which 'love' is used to describe everything from a preference for ice cream to a merging with everything. And it is also because spiritual enlightenment and spiritual awakening are such rich and complex experiences that they are innately hard to define.

“Some definitions are very specific and narrow. One such definition for spiritual enlightenment is the complete dissolution of one's identity as a separate self with no trace of the egoic mind remaining. This sets the bar very high and means that very few people qualify as enlightened.

“The opposite approach is to say that everyone is enlightened, that there is only awake consciousness. In this view, it's only a question of whether this natural awakeness has been recognized or not. Of course, when a word describes everything or everyone, it loses some of its usefulness. If everyone is enlightened, then why even talk about it? 

~ What Is Spiritual Enlightenment or Spiritual Awakening? 

By the first definition, most Westerners claiming to be enlightened would be scorned as a braggart because in the end there’s no objective way of proving the person is or is not. In the West we measure everything quantitatively, by a series of criteria, which, once passed, automatically confers a rank or title. Like Ph.D or MD.

As a kind of spoof to upper class imperiousness, we also accept that a celebrity bearing a title has every right to. Was Duke Ellington really a duke? Or LeBron James really a king? Queen Latifah really a queen? Does it matter? We take things like this with a grain of salt, but we don’t play around with academic rank. Claiming the title of enlightenment would appear to be a serious matter, yet there are no criteria. No board of governors to examine candidates. Yet, some are universally considered “enlightened.” Did they acquire the title by general approbation and word-of-mouth? In the East they have long-standing traditions for recognizing the qualities associated with self-realization; we, in the West, do not. So how does a Westerner earn the title? I would think someone claiming the title would need solid grounds to claim such ineffable status. 

And therein lies the irony. The spiritually inclined among us begin a quest whose ultimate aim is self-realization or enlightenment, only to discover that what they are searching for is undefinable and unattainable.

If they’re smart, they settle for something else, some incremental state of being, a shock to the Ego perhaps, brought on by meditation, through which, over time, makes one more aware of the non-dualistic nature of existence. Is that enough? It is for me: I’m okay with living for forty years with kundalini. I'm okay with the opportunities it’s given me to know and heal myself. Self-realization is incremental, at least, it has been for me — presenting me with a series of opportunities to delve deeper into my being, to deal with blockages, negative emotion, and egoic distortions.

Self-realization isn’t a status symbol; it’s a process. Although disciples may consider a teacher to be "realized," the truly enlightened person would never make such a claim. In the end rank and titles don't matter.

“My sense of kundalini is it’s your life force. It carries consciousness. It moves through the body in ways that both clear out old patterns and transform the heart energy, transforms the throat energy, transforms the brain so that there’s a dramatic shift in how we’re identified. For me, a spiritual awakening is a shift in identification out of our old created conditioned self into a sense that we are an energy, or a consciousness, that is universally connected.That here’s one consciousness moving through all of us. We get a glimpse of that.”

~ Bonnie Greenwell

Another colleague, Corinne Lebrun, uses a clever metaphor to explain kundalini and self-realization. She says that normal people are like a piano with only three octaves. When kundalini rises, by whatever means, suddenly the person is a piano with eight octaves. Whether or not the person takes advantage of, learns from experimenting with the additional notes, is up to him/her.

Kundalini supplies the opportunities — infinite in number and discernment — you must decide which path to travel and how far you are willing to go. If you want to call yourself King, Duke, or Queen, so be it. If you want to call yourself “enlightened,” you may be missing the point.

We Prefer Listening to Doing

Jesus, Lao Tse, and Buddha didn't aim to start the religions they're associated with. That phenomenon was the by-product of their personal search for truth. The fact that, at one point in their lives, each of them went on a lonely quest for knowledge, using the tools available at the time, i.e., using their bodies as laboratories. They weren't thinking about religion or about science. Yet, the discoveries they made during their fateful retreats turned out to be the precursors of both religion and science.

He Talks; She Listens

Each of them had absented themselves for a time from their worldly preoccupations to practice a solitary meditation, and it was through this practice that they awakened Kundalini, that placeholder term we use to denote the evolutionary energy in man. Other traditions have other names for it: Chi, orgone, or life force. The names aren't important; they are interchangeable.

As Thomas Cleary says in his translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower: "From the point of view of that central experience, it makes no difference whether one calls the golden flower awakening a relationship to God or to the Way, or whether one calls it the holy spirit or the Buddha nature or the real self. The Tao Te Ching says, 'Names can be designated, but they are not fixed terms.'”

What did these men discover? They discovered a hidden sub-system inside their bodies which, properly aroused, opened the doors to higher consciousness and led them to infer an ontology for human potential beyond anything science knows today. They were doers, not talkers, impelled by what Gopi Krishna called the evolutionary impulse. An impulse to self-actualization written into our DNA. What is the mechanism behind self-actualization that they shared? According to historical research, they shared the practice of meditation. It was through meditation that they came to the discovery of the dormant evolutionary energy in every human body.

On Alert

Only after making their discoveries did they begin talking about them. First they practiced, then they talked. It was as if they were saying: Do before talking, and when you do talk, talk about doing.

These men didn't talk about religion; they talked about doing. They realized that talking was an excuse for not doing. Unfortunately, the doing part has become lost, especially here in the West.

However, if you look carefully at the religious teachings surrounding their discoveries and boil them down to their barest denominators, they amount to not much more than the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. A simple enough maxim to enunciate, but quite difficult to adhere to in practice. The very fact we in the West call our religions faiths, not practices should give some indication of what we're dealing with. In other words, traditional religion means: I'm going to talk, and you're going to listen. I'm going to give you my opinion on what you should think and believe. Never mind about verifying; shut up, listen, and believe.

Don't blame the progenitors. They didn't actually start the various religions named after them. In fact, Jesus Christ wasn't a Christian; Lao Tse wasn't a Taoist, and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist. The recruiting, party-member stuff came later, after camp followers, sycophants, and spin doctors began politicizing and formalizing their teachings, turning them into money-making organizations. It was after the fact that these religions were named for their progenitors.

Yes, there is still a residue of legitimate devotion to the initial discoveries those pioneers made about human evolution and how we might speed it up in order to avoid the pitfalls of negative emotion, greed, war, racial hatred, wanton violence. But much of their teaching about meditation has been lost over the centuries and we are left with the man-made dogmas and doctrines that have nothing to do with doing.

Yes, we love to listen; we hate to do. In the first place, DO WHAT? What is it I should do? How do I know WHAT to do? In the second place, I don't have time. In the third place, I don't have any guarantee it would work. In the fourth place, it can't be any good if I don't have to pay a lot for it. In the fifth place, it can't be very helpful if Oprah hasn't mentioned it. And so on...

Waiting for the Next Messiah

Well, the meditation methods they practiced still work and are still doable today. That's right, whether for spiritual, religious, or scientific purposes, individuals are still using their bodies as laboratories, pushing the evolutionary envelope. One thing you need to know: in this long evolutionary journey we have not yet accomplished very much. There's still much distance to cover. We are but mere outlines of our potential. Enlightenment, self-actualization, self-realization are not carved-in-stone achievements; they are milestones in an on-going process that is never completed, but keeps us continually reaching for completion.