Enlightenment is a Calamity

HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING

Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...

Your identity is built upon a string of memories and their associated emotions. You carry this identity with you like a passport and everything that you experience in your life checks itself off against this passport. It is your face to the world. You use it to define yourself to yourself, to define yourself within society. Your attachment to this definition of yourself is so great, that you will destroy yourself before you will change your idea of who and what you are.



The process of enlightenment is the annihilation of this passport, the annihilation of your personal identity. It destroys all links that you have to yourself. It destroys all links that you have to the world. This why it has been said that enlightenment is a calamity; yet this fear of enlightenment is irrational and only arises from the extreme attachment that you have to the lists of qualities on your passport.

Liberation from the Wheel of Samsara

HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING

Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...

We refer to enlightenment as liberation from the wheel of Samsara; the eternal cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth. This idea of liberation implies that there is a sequence of events, a subtle pathway through the maze that leads to an exit, to freedom from the wheel. Thus the idea that some kind of action—positive actions of goodness, of generosity;will lead one to liberation.



Yet there is no perceivable causal relationship between action of any kind and enlightenment. The process of enlightenment lies somewhere at the intersection of what we would call intent and luck. Enlightenment is something you catch by running into it, propelled by a complex weave of chance and the dynamic of destiny, the intention of existence.

There is only one mind

HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING

Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...

There is only one mind. There are not two minds. There’s not one mind that is universal in which everything arises simultaneously and spontaneously, and another mind that is relative in which everything arises linearly. Mind is a singularity that operates at different frequencies.



For the person deep within ecstatic equilibrium, everything arises simultaneously with no relativity. From the point of view of the individual identity within mundane consciousness, everything’s relative. This is where the idea of phenomena arises.



There has to be a second thing to observe a first thing. A perceiver has been carved out of infinite consciousness, and the perceiver begins the chain of events called perception. Perception produces a product. That product is called phenomena.