Sunday is Message Day on the blog. Monday through Friday we look at contemporary events and day-to-day occurrences at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality…but on Sunday, we reserve this space for a specific teaching derived from the material in Conversations with God
Through the years I have given hundreds of talks and written scores of articles revolving around this material. Every seven days we will present in this space a transcript or reprint of one of those presentations. We invite you to Copy and Save each one of them, creating a personal a collection of contemporary and uplifting spiritual thought which you may reference at any time. We hope you will find this a constant source of insight and inspiration.
This week’s offering: The fourth in a series of Sunday pieces taken from the transcript of a talk on the nature of Enlightenment and how to achieve it, before a live audience in Ashland, Oregon in July, 2004.
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I, too, like the Buddha, like Jesus the Christ, like Paramahansa Yogananda, like Maharishi, chose to seek enlightenment. And like all of those other masters, I tried everything. First I tried orthodox religion. I said my rosary faithfully everyday, because there was a formula that you could use to have God answer your prayers. There was a litany, there was a process that if you said the rosary a certain number of times you could depend upon a certain outcome, we were told. I tried fasting. I tried meditation. I tried reading every book I could get my hands on. I took est. I learned transcendental meditation. I learned transactional analysis.
I walked down many paths, many, many paths. And then one day I had an out-of-body experience. Now that was interesting, because I wasn’t trying to do this. This was not something I was trying to do. I was trying to produce outcomes with my fasting. I was trying to produce outcomes with my meditation. I was trying to produce outcomes with my rosary and with my disciplines, but those were not bringing me where I wanted to go. But here was, just simply trying to get some sleep. I just fell asleep. But in that experience, I flew out of my body quite involuntarily, just left — and I knew that I had left. It was a conscious awareness. I was not in my body and I knew I was not.
I won’t take time here to explain to you or describe for you my experience, although I can tell you it was very real, and it is very real to me to this very day. I’ve had three such experiences in my life, two since the original one. And every one of those experiences brought me to the same place: a space of absolute—capitol “A”—awareness. Kind of like an AA meeting: Absolute Awareness. And when I returned from my very first out of body experience, I was left with two words that blew my mind. Would you like to know what they were? Nothing matters.
Nothing matters! What an amazing message for my soul to receive from the unified soul that is all of life. Nothing matters? And yet, like the est training, like transcendental meditation, like my venturing into the work of Paramahansa Yogananda, it changed my life. And here’s the message behind the message:
If nothing matters intrinsically, then I am free to declare what I choose to have matter to me. But if something matters intrinsically…that is to say, if something matters to someone other than me, to someone else—shall we say God…then I had darned well better figure out what that is, I had better figure our what matters so much to God. Because if I don’t figure out what it is I will be the thing called “condemned;” or, at the very least, “unenlightened.”
But God said to me in this out-of-body experience, “Neale, nothing matters.” Therefore, you are free to make matter what you choose to make matter in your life. And I mean that in two ways: not only to “make matter,” but to make something into matter, to cause a thing to become matter. That is, to “make it matter” in your life, to manifest in physical reality something that is pure matter out of physical energy, out of invisible physical energy. To turn energy into matter.
Gosh, I have become so enlightened that I can sometimes barely explain what it is I am trying to say. You know you are enlightened when you can’t even articulate what your thoughts are. Either that or you’re totally crazy, one or the other. Wouldn’t it be funny if enlightenment and craziness were one and the same? (laughter)
So here is what I have come to share with you on this occasion. If you think there is a path to enlightenment that is the only path, the best path, the fastest path, the one that everyone has to know about by 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, you will suddenly find yourself feeling pressure, stress, and upset, and your ego will be deeply involved in convincing as many people as you can that that’s what’s so.
Suddenly you will start acting not like a master at all, but like someone who is under a terrific amount of pressure and stress, because it will suddenly matter to you whether I “get” what you are trying to tell me. If you are not careful, you will even start having quotas or goals. You’ll have to get a certain number of other people to agree with you every week, or every month, or every year. And if you don’t meet those goals you will think that you have not done a good job. And yet, you have done a good job if you simply love without expectation, without requirement, without needing anything in return.
Enlightenment, when it is all said and done, has nothing to do with what you do with your body or your mind. It has to do with what you do with your soul. If you simply love everyone whose life you touch endlessly unconditionally with nothing needed or wanted in return, you have become enlightened and you have shown everyone whose life you touch how they may be enlightened as well, as fast as with any other system that exists, (snapping a finger) like that.
As fast as transcendental meditation (snap), like that. As fast as joining the Self-Realization Fellowship (snap), like that. As fast as taking est (snap), like that. And if you learn to love yourself unconditionally, as well as everyone else, you can heal your entire body without lifting a finger.
(Next Sunday, Part V in this series on How to Become Enlightened.)
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You’ve been exposed to the concepts and principles from the Conversations with God material. Now the time has come to integrate this New Spirituality into our daily lives.
Come to Portland, Oregon, Friday night, February 1 and be the first to experience how to turn these spiritual truths into a functional reality! Join me on this special evening as I speak from my new book, Happier Than God, and engage in a lively dialogue with audience members in a “Q&A” session, followed by a book signing.
That’s this coming Friday evening in Portland, Oregon.
You may pre-register at:
www.regonline.com/SNSTakesFlight