Journey to Enlightenment Part 01

Author(s): Chitrabhanu, Chetana Catherine Florida, Nirmala Hanke, Raksha Penni Helsene
Publisher: Create Space

Page 40

March 1998: Be an Original Thinker
Dear Members and Friends of the Lighthouse,
If you have listened long enough through your meditations you will eventually hear and experience and know everything you need in order to become enlightened. If you have only listened on earth with your physical ears, you will be continually confused from "hearing" many contradictory statements. From hearing that religion is good for you down to what cereal is best for you each morning, from the sublime to the ridiculous, whether in the media, in books, or in person, people are always telling you what to do, what to think, what to believe. Whether consciously or not, people tell us from their thoughts and experiences what to believe and what not to believe. So whoever has the most persuasive argument (so to speak), wins our attention and gets our vote about what is the best: for us. Soon afterward we believe that what we are doing is best.
But how do we really know it is the best? We don't! We have been convinced by what someone else has heard or read or experienced: it sounds good so we adopt what we have heard as our own. So, if we have listened to philosophers, historians and spiritual teachers, we will have learned a lot about their thoughts and experiences in life. We learn too, from their commentaries and translations of Plato, Socrates, Des Cartes, the Upanishads, The Rig Veda, The Torah, the Koran, and the Bible. If you remained open to embrace and incorporate all that you heard from others, as well as all you have read in books yourself, you would be living in a state of mass confusion with the truth being sandwiched in between.
When a healthy person is in a state of confusion, even with all the information the mind has collected, the mind will still be restless to find out what the truth is. If we were to repeat again and again the process of listening to others and reading everything we could, we would still be looking for the truth. Why? Because the personal experience is missing: the interaction between what you heard with your head and what you experienced through your heart. Before anything can be truly recognized as "your truth” it must be not only heard in the mind but most importantly, experienced in the heart and mind.
We all love to hear about “Love”. From other people's experiences to what has been written in books, as poems, as prose, as songs. Love catches everyone's attention.
This is because the experience of love is already felt in everybody's heart, whether a little or a lot, from the least to the greatest extent. Love is the experience of the heart. When we say we don't feel loved, it is because we have felt love before. Just as we can feel love, we can also feel unloved because we have experienced being loved at some time or other. So, it becomes our personal experience that there is Love. Throughout all of history, love has been written about, talked about and experienced. It is a Truth!!
On the Wings of Light and Love - 41