On Shame, Love, Hope, Spiritual Growth and Enlightenment

That’s interesting. I couldn’t put a title this time, I’ll do it when I finish the article.

The topics I want to write about are shame, love, spiritual growth and enlightenment.

Let’s make it a bit clearer… No, it won’t be clear… it will only be clear when the article is finished…

I have already written about focusing on Love. Focusing on the spiritual heart and living in a state of awareness, finding our deepest state of awareness, feeling the love flowing to us from the spiritual heart and surrendering to it and watching our lives change spontaneously. That’s good. I learned the theory from a good place, but in practice it was not possible to know in advance what difficulties I would have, even though I read a little bit about the inner blocks I would encounter and what kind of things they would be… it is not possible to read enough to be prepared in advance for everything you will experience, not at all, because you don’t learn the lessons you would learn by reading about them.

The lessons are learned by living them, and because you are not prepared for them, because you are given a reality that you cannot imagine in your mind beforehand, you are already making progress. Of course it is your choice to open up in the beginning… but you don’t know exactly what to open up to beforehand.

In the human mind there is a fear of the unknown, but curiosity and courage are what will overcome this fear. Love eventually finds a way to open up.

I am going to write now about one of the basic locks that I also experienced.

Years ago… my search led me to the fact that enlightenment is possible, that there are people with pure hearts, full of love, full of compassion, who have reached this state. I was able to see with my eyes and feel and realize what was possible.

At that time, I believed that some material goals would bring happiness, but at the same time I also believed that there should be a continuous development, a progress towards the truth. While the material goals that I believed would bring happiness disappointed me one by one, the things I encountered about enlightenment led me to the new goal of enlightenment in my mind. (Addendum: material goals, even if I achieved some of them, did not bring me the kind of happiness I wanted.)

This desire led me to spend a long time studying the resources I found to learn the basic approach of the work, the main theme of which is very simple in essence, but which I resisted a lot until I understood it.

I have been sharing what I have learned in various guises on this site for some time.

Lately… even though I was making an effort in meditation, even though I was focusing on the spiritual heart during the day and trying to live in a state of awareness, things were not going as I had imagined.

More precisely, at first I was entering a period where I was ascending, my energy was increasing, I was becoming more and more sure of the existence of this energy, but something was always pulling me down, after a certain point I was always entering a downward spiral.

The teaching was very clear, I was sure it was true, but I didn’t fully understand what it meant, I couldn’t get rid of the illusions in my mind yet. I probably haven’t gotten rid of all of them yet. But I will share with you something I have just realized.

There is an approach that we have been taught and which is a common theme in many of the organized religions. I don’t mean the essence of the religions, but the understanding of the people who transmit it. This understanding, unless the person transmitting it is a wise person… in many cases it takes this form:

There is a goal, there is a prophet or an enlightened person… there is his life, what he said that is passed on to the present day. But such a logic of comparison has developed that if you don’t do what he did, if you don’t do what he did, if you don’t live as he lived, you are an inferior being, you should be ashamed of yourself, you should feel guilty. (Derivatives of this)

The person exemplified here has a very highly matured state of morality, a state of being. And as a reflection of this state, he has a way of living. This reflected life, that is, if we don’t go to bed and copy what he does during the day, if we don’t worship as much as he worships, if we don’t help as much as he helps, I had the impression that we were bad, that we didn’t deserve love, and I had subconsciously taken this state of shame as a whole in the culture I grew up in.

I got this from an early age. Later, when I was following the teachings of the enlightened sage I found, I started comparing myself to him, or rather, I started feeling guilty when I didn’t walk towards the goal of enlightenment that I had in my mind without stopping and not falling down. This guilt has recently started to turn into shame. In one of our meetings, I shared with him that I had gotten to the point where I was doing meditation for one hour a day, and I wanted to add a second hour, that I felt that way. I encountered great resistance to adding the second hour.

After one hour of morning meditation, I was going to prepare food for the animals and feed them, and then I would come back and do the second hour, but I couldn’t get it to stick. I would say to myself, there are the perfect teachings, there is the enlightened teacher, but you are still lazy. A feeling of shame came over me.

This was also a period when I experienced the most intense dark feelings of my life. At the same time I was trying to realize and understand what was happening.

The insight I had was this. Because I wasn’t meditating, because I wasn’t sitting on the bed and formally focusing on the spiritual heart and practicing mindfulness, I was unconsciously stopping focusing on love. So almost because I wasn’t focusing on love, I stopped focusing on love, or rather my subconscious was directing me to do that, the blocks that had somehow developed in me from childhood had created this kind of orientation.

Besides that, I had already lost a lot of motivation to pursue various worldly goals, believing that they would bring happiness. I only had a few habits left to keep myself busy, playing games, following the news and so on. They were like salt water. I was trying to support the animals, but even that was becoming difficult, but there was a flow of gratitude and love back to me from the animals. I started to interrupt even that, but I never stopped.

When there is no love, even the idea of living in your hut in the field with a view of the sea in the greenery is not attractive. Having billions of dollars, going to Mars, traveling the world, having a family, etc… none of that is attractive. Everything is boring.

Boredom, feelings of shame.

In society, it starts with, you don’t work, shame on you. They try to put you into a mold, if you don’t fit into that mold you should be ashamed. That’s where the circle of shame starts. Then you spend a lifetime running after things that are not yours, but that you adopt as yours. (Addendum: I don’t want to judge what is happening in society, I want to identify what is happening, but I have been hurt a lot, and this is an expression of that)

It is not everybody’s story, but it is the popular story, the story that affects the masses. If you start waking up in it, at first you feel a conflict, between what comes from within and what society imposes on you. But you think those thoughts are your own; gradually you begin to realize that they are imposed, that they come from outside. But sometimes you don’t understand for a very long time, because you are too possessive.

After a certain stage you start discarding almost all ideas, because none of them bring happiness.

It doesn’t have to happen in one life, but I’m trying to explain and share what happens when you reach that stage.

I have the same thing… the idea that everything is losing its meaning, that the only thing left is the effort for enlightenment, and I cannot achieve it, and I have found the most solid sources… and with that there is complete despair, shame. Because the nafs is not yet purified, the other desires have not disappeared, but now I realize that they are like salty water that makes me thirsty or that they are not the solution.

The solution was very simple. No matter what happens to you, you can focus on that love, it is always there for you, it is your true nature, and as you focus on it, as you live in a state of awareness, your life continues to unfold, you learn the lessons, your happiness deepens, your peace increases… you learn to swim in these fluctuations.

The thing called shame is such a thing… it’s a state where you think that what you are going through should prevent you from feeling love, that you don’t deserve love. It’s a program in your subconscious. It’s like a program to turn down the valve. The valve controls love, which is your life energy. If the valve is turned all the way down, you’ll probably die on the spot, I don’t know if that’s possible, but the valve can only be turned down enough to keep you alive. Then you just crawl on the ground 🙂 

It’s all a program, but once you believe in those patterns, if you don’t understand what’s going on, they keep on working.

Now, as you are going through this period, a new hope for life has appeared in you. I feel it strongly, because I realized that there is no necessity, no absolute reason for me to withhold love no matter what.

What the sages say is that we are perfect, we are light, we are love. That we are one with God. So when we focus on love, in a way we become ourselves. There is nothing we need to improve, we are already perfect. When we focus on that, everything else goes where they are going as temporary creations. They open the way they are going to open. The whole creation is created by God from one hand. And we discover ourselves in it, our oneness with it.

In the previous article I talked about the state of awareness, but the approach should not be to focus on this formless awareness and close our eyes to creation.

The merging of the state of awareness with the state of love, the awareness of love, is what gradually opens up life and guides us to heavenly experiences, cleansing us from hell if there is any. Focusing on love, surrendering to the will of God… By staying in the state of awareness, it is necessary to penetrate into the human being in every dimension, to penetrate into the human experience we live, to wake up to every stage of it.

If there is to be an enlightenment, it starts in the now, it starts by focusing on love and living with the consciousness that we are. It continues with the same basic approach from the first step to the last stage. In the meantime, the human being we are in is gradually filled with this love and their human faculties begin to mature. So we start to enter paradise on earth. Even though at first we don’t even realize what we are doing, we are actually doing it.

The enlightened sage focuses on the same love and lives in a state of awareness, but now he is so centered there that an awareness that is one with life itself, one with the Creator, pervades his entire life. The state of focus is now the natural state.

The beginning and the end of the path actually have the same orientation, only at the beginning there is a lot of noise, and at the end the noise is replaced by a state of complete mental peace, serenity and love, as far as I can see in the sage, as far as I can intuit and as far as I can understand from where I am today. (Additional note: Comparing our own morality with the morality gained by the enlightened sage and withholding love at points that are not similar puts us in a vicious circle, because in order to gain that morality we need to accept ourselves as we are, to love unconditionally, that is, we need to stay in a state of awareness while focusing on love, and in this way we need to allow love to mature us. The morality of the enlightened person is to remain in that state of love. That’s the real morality, the morality that is supposed to be what the sage does, but actually it’s the inner state of the sage that needs to be recognized as the one to emulate. On the other hand, there is also the method of imitating what the sage does with the intention of reaching his inner state. Here the sage’s behavior becomes the teaching itself, a kind of object and tool of focus, a discipline. But actually, the main goal in this approach is for the student to capture the inner state of the sage while imitating the behavior. If the student neglects the inner state and only imitates the apparent behaviors, then the awareness of the inner state, the awareness of love, is not developed, it cannot show the targeted development).

There is awareness, which is pure emptiness, and then there is all-encompassing love within that. I have not yet been able to see this love as all-encompassing. I experience it from the perspective of an unenlightened person, that is, as a flow from my heart. Sometimes the state of unity I feel gets stronger, stronger, then my writing takes shape accordingly. I try to share with you as much as I can, that’s how it comes from my heart to share…

The more we are filled with love, the more we are filled with this energy, the more we start expressing ourselves with the awareness of unity, with the awareness of love. So we are always aware, but we may be filled with love, or we may be feeling very, very little love, our energy may have dropped, our life may have become hell. So we may have forgotten our essence. (Later addition: Even if the energy is low, the soul can be quite mature, because even a single block can lower your energy, and once you have learned the lesson, love will start flowing into you more abundantly, so even if you are at the bottom emotionally, you may actually have gotten rid of many blocks, you may have made a lot of progress and you may not be aware of it yet).

Nobody can take away your original perfection. So I am not going to say don’t lose hope, I am going to say you can find hope if you focus within. If you are wondering why you can’t find it, accept yourself as you are, allow yourself to be as you are right now, don’t withhold love from yourself, leave it alone, it will show itself to you anyway.

In the movie Superman, the hero has an S on his chest. I remember in one of the last movies it was said to symbolize hope. We were focusing on the center of the chest to find the spiritual heart, and we feel love in our heart when we live, right? So that’s the connection between hope and love. Love… and I’ll add one more thing.

It is actually the acceptance of yourself as you are, leaving this blog, this and that and everything else, that will save you from your troubles. To love as you are, to experience unconditional love. It is your free will to find out that this is so by experiencing it yourself. It is not something that is given to you from outside, the state of breaking all your chains. Let me tell you the story of a baby elephant tied with a rope around its leg, and when it grows up it can break the rope, but when it grows up it is held captive because it realizes that it cannot break the rope. The moment you realize that you can break the rope is the moment you realize that love is within you (in other words, the moment you realize that love is never withheld from you, or rather that you are love and everything else is an illusion that covers it). I’m shutting up now, I’ve gone on too long, but maybe I’ve gone on too long to write that I’ve gone on too long, maybe I’ve gone on too long to write that you have everything you need, some wake up at the beginning, some in the middle, some at the end.

Footnote: Before writing this article, I shared a quote on Facebook that came to my mind at that moment.

Live as if you will never die.
Love as if you will die with the next breath.

Logically, it is a very true saying. The moment you feel love now, in this breath, it’s over. You will never die anyway, even if the body dies.

Here’s the interesting thing. When a friend of mine liked the quote and praised it, I felt shame again. Because I was not in a state of love at that very moment… it made me feel as if I didn’t deserve to say it, a remnant of the shame mechanism in my subconscious… It’s such a thing… when you make love an ideal, then the shame starts… but when love ceases to be an idea and you feel it directly, when you focus on it, then you start living as if you will never die. In your subconscious you will have these thoughts (not necessarily the same as mine), they are imprinted on you from your past in the world… if you go into the state of love at that moment, they lose their effect/ you start to see them for what they are.