Kiara is currently living in Golden City. His book will be available for purchase in Australia in early 2005, and is highly recommended reading for anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the magnitude of Bhagavan and Amma and their work.

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There is an assumption that once you are enlightened you will never experience sadness, grief, anger, jealousy, or pain, that somehow you have overcome all negative thoughts or emotions. This is far from the truth. The nature of the mind is unchanged. The contents of the mind may also remain unchanged. But without the self to dictate terms, or to differentiate so obsessively between right and wrong, you experience that the ‘charge’ begins to disappear. It is a continually deepening process.

Many people associate enlightenment with tremendous states of cosmic consciousness, clairvoyant perception, omniscience, and so on. All these may or may not be associated with the state, but should not be mistaken for enlightenment. Enlightenment itself is a very simple event, and is simply the dissolution of the sense of separateness. It is the natural state in which your body is designed to be.

To become enlightened is to be comfortable with the flow of life. If you are feeling sad, you are not trying to talk yourself out of it. If you are feeling happy, you are not trying to hold on to that feeling. Everything simply is what it is, without the additional charge or carryover from past associations, traumas and conditioned patterns intruding on the experience of each moment. You become fully present with each emotion, each experience. You find, as the guides are fond of reminding people, that every emotion, when fully experienced, becomes bliss.

Each person’s enlightenment is unique. Bhagavan says that if there are 6 billion people on Earth, there will be 6 billion kinds of enlightenment. Each person’s enlightenment will incorporate qualities of their own soul’s desires and purpose. As you progress, you may discover a natural gift for healing, or a great capacity for wisdom, or a deep caring for Earth and humanity. You may experience a deep inner silence, or an all-pervading joy, or a state of oneness with all creation. These states may come and go, and vary from person to person, but there is one thing every enlightened person will experience in common. When the self disappears, suffering ends.

You will still have desires, but they won’t turn into cravings. You will still have resistances, but they won’t turn into aversions. You will still have a personality, but it will be a fluid dance of momentary personalities that come and go. As you deepen into the state, you will not feel the need to hold on to resentments, fears, and traumas, any more than you feel the need to hold on to good times and spiritual highs.

As you deepen into your enlightened state, there will be continually deeper states of oneness, peace, stillness, love and joy. You will find yourself more and more at home in the mystical realms, and also, paradoxically in the physical realms.

At first, however, the mind might throw up all kinds of conflicts, resistance, and doubt. It is the nature of the self to resist change, and this has become a memory pattern within the mind. This may well come up with great force as the mind tries to deny the experience. As you simply allow this to be, eventually a great peace will descend.

Anything fully experienced is joy. If this one thing were fully understood, your path to enlightenment would be very short indeed. Conflict fully experienced is joy. Pain fully experienced is joy. Sadness fully experienced is joy. Doubt fully experienced is joy. Anger fully experienced is joy. Happiness fully experienced is joy. Love fully experienced is joy.

When the self disappears, our need to constantly make interpretations about reality disappears with it. When interpretations about reality disappear, we experience reality for what it is, rather than what we would like it to be. Rather than constantly craving for what we define as pleasurable experiences, and constantly resisting what we define as unpleasurable experiences, we simply become the experience, moment to moment, of consciousness expressing itself through us.

Enlightenment is both an event and a process. The event corresponds with the dissolution of the sense of a separate self. Beyond this, however, there is a continually deepening process of oneness.

Moving into oneness is not all bliss. At some point you should expect to go through the ‘dark night of the soul’. This is a period of profound existential emptiness where the contents of the personal unconscious get completely cleaned out. It could be accompanied by feelings of intense loneliness, heaviness, doubt, or despair.

The ‘dark night’ is not suffering in a psychological sense. Psychological suffering involves the ‘self’, and once the ‘self’ disappears, so does the suffering. The journey into existential emptiness would be impossible if there were still a sense of personal identity left. Rather, it is like Jesus wrestling with ‘Satan’ in the wilderness, where he cleared out his personal unconscious in preparation for his ministry, or his journey into the realms of hell after his crucifixion, where he was able to clear out aspects of the collective unconscious of humanity.

Not very much can be said about this journey, since it will be unique for each individual. It cannot be lengthened or shortened. It is a necessary part of coming into mastery. Bhagavan says that eventually each of us will have to undergo this experience. As we go through this individually, it is possible that it will clear out the collective unconscious of humanity to such an extent that it will then become very easy for collective enlightenment to happen.

In the more immediate context, Bhagavan refers to three stages of enlightenment – the ability to simply witness life as you de-clutch from the mind, recognition of the inter-connectedness of life, and finally, cosmic oneness. The first stage is when the interference of the mind stops, and your senses come alive. There is the experience of a deep inner silence, and you begin to experience reality as it is. This is what most people will experience after first receiving the Oneness Blessing, once you stabilize following the peak experience. It becomes your new sense of ordinary reality.

You might also begin to experience a sense of inter-connectedness with your immediate world – with nature, and with others in the human family. Synchronicities abound and you discover that there is an underlying unity running through all life. This is the second stage.

In the third stage, you have moved beyond the sense of inter-connectedness to complete union with the cosmos. One moment you are a bird, then a grasshopper, then the emptiness of the sky. Here you experience your identity as All There Is. You are everything and nothing. “Aham Brahmasmi”, said the ancient mystics of India, “I am this whole process called the universe!”

The experience of oneness with the universe is known as ‘samadhi’. At first this experience of samadhi may be very fleeting. In order to hold this experience, every nerve cell in the physical and subtle bodies becomes infused with kundalini energy, and it may take some time for the body to integrate these heightened frequencies.

There may even be occasions when the person appears to ‘die’ for short periods of time, as the functions of the body become short-circuited. In the early stages of enlightenment, a person may experience peak states of samadhi, but this will not last long. As you progress, you experience increasingly longer states of cosmic communion interspersed by ‘ordinary’ reality.

The ancient yogis describe four stages of samadhi. The first stage is known as savikalpa samadhi. There is the experience of oneness with the universe, vibrant bliss, and an activation of the subtle senses. Various inner gifts and abilities may open up. This downpour of new energy is refreshingly ecstatic, but can be quite overwhelming to the nervous system, which eventually returns to a more operational frequency. This is the peak state many people experience when they first experience the Oneness Blessing.

As the nervous system becomes adjusted to the heightened flow of kundalini moving through the body, it eventually becomes ready for the next stage of samadhi, known as nirvikalpa samadhi. Here the consciousness gets drawn upwards into a unified state of consciousness, while the physical body goes through an extreme shift. Remaining for hours or even days in catatonic states resembling death, every cell of the body becomes transfused with light. This is a relatively non-functional state, however.

Eventually, you move to the third stage of samadhi, called sahaj samadhi. The nadis and cells of the physical body have now become accustomed to the heightened frequencies of enlightenment, and it is possible to live in the permanent state of unified awareness while being fully functional in daily life.

Bhagavan remarks that the enlightenment he gives is intended to be fully functional, and is therefore attempting to modify the nervous system so that people require less time in nirvikalpa samadhi and move sooner into sahaj samadhi. This is the state that Masters such as Jesus operated from. It also requires that the unconscious mind be completely cleared, and the adept may consequently go through a prolonged ‘dark night of the soul’ before this state is permanently anchored.

A fourth stage of samadhi has been relatively rare in human history. Known as 'soruba samadhi', the physical body is now so infused with higher energies that it has literally become a body of light. The mind is now in complete service to the soul, and the adept is now capable of bodily experiencing any dimension of space and time. This stage is sometimes known as ‘ascension’, and is the state that ascended masters such as Babaji, Kuthumi, and St. Germaine exhibit.

These masters have chosen to remain close to the Earth dimensions in order to assist humanity, and still appear in physical bodies when needed. There are also many stories of siddha masters in south India, as well as Tibetan adepts, who have taken the ‘rainbow body’, and simply disappeared in a flash of light. Ramalinga Swami was a well known example of this from the past century. The work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was also related to this.

An avatar’s job is to make possible what hasn’t been possible before. The world is a dream in the mind of God, and an avatar’s job, as a divine incarnation, is to exhibit certain states of consciousness in order to open up the same possibilities for the rest of humanity. This is what Bhagavan’s mission is. Over time, as more and more people experience these possibilities within their own bodies, it will lead to a mutation within the genetic structure of the human species. For readers familiar with the metaphor of the ‘hundredth monkey’, this is the potential that Bhagavan sees for humanity as we prepare for collective enlightenment.

All consciousness is a field. The Mind is a field. The Enlightened State is also a field. Rupert Sheldrake, a British biologist, referred to these fields of consciousness as ‘morphogenetic fields’, or ‘form-generating fields’. These are the fields that have shaped our evolution, shaped our memories, shaped our biological forms. Every time one of these morphogenetic fields gets reinforced, it gets stronger. Every time someone ‘unplugs’ from these fields, it gets weaker.

What this amounts to is that every time one more person unplugs from the matrix of the mind, the Ancient Mind becomes weaker. Every time another person becomes enlightened, the morphogenetic fields of Enlightenment become stronger, making it easier for everybody else to also become enlightened. These two fields are in a ‘see-saw’ relationship with each other. Soon will come a time when critical mass will be reached, swinging the entire human consciousness into the state of enlightenment. Once this happens, a new species of humanity will emerge.

There is a very interesting study done by an American psychologist, David Hawkins, who has written a fascinating book, ‘Power vs. Force’ on this theme. Using the science of ‘kinesiology’, he devised a ‘consciousness scale’ going from 0 to 1000. On the bottom end of the scale were highly charged emotions such as guilt, shame, terror, and rage, and their corresponding states of consciousness. On the upper end of the scale were love, joy, and various states of enlightenment.

Hawkins discovered that one person who was vibrating at the higher end of this scale could offset thousands, even millions of people, who were vibrating at the lower end of this scale. He also affirmed that one Avatar vibrating at 1000 could offset an entire Planetary Mind hell-bent on extinction!

I certainly believe that Bhagavan vibrates at 1000, or at least very close to it. It is based on this principle of resonant fields that Bhagavan says mass enlightenment can happen. When a person becomes enlightened, their consciousness makes a huge leap on this consciousness scale, which directly affects all consciousness in the surrounding area. When the numbers of enlightened people reaches a critical point, the morphogenetic field of Enlightenment will counterbalance the morphogenetic field of the Ancient Mind, making it possible for a mass enlightenment to take place within the matter of a few months.

There is nothing in life I can think of that is more exciting or meaningful than this!