Can an individual ever become "fully enlightened"? Dr Demartini debunks the theory of “full enlightenment” and the illusion that your learning is finite. He explains why it is wiser to continue on a journey of learning where you also live with holy curiosity. Discover how learning and living in holy curiosity is part of the fulfilment in life.

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Study as much as you can.

Learn as many things as you can from as many people as you can.

But beware of the pitfalls of the illusion that now it's done.

Hi, I'm Dr. John Demartini. And in all probability,

you've heard the term enlightenment.

Maybe from a Buddhist construct or possibly Eastern mysticism

construct,

or maybe just awareness in your personal development journey.

I'd like to take a few moments to go over the idea of the journey

of enlightenment.

I didn't say journey to enlightenment - the journey of enlightenment.

I want to break a few myths. In my earlier years,

back, 40, 50 years ago, I was on a pursuit of quote,

"more awareness", "more enlightened" state of mind.

And I got to study under various teachers and even gurus.

And I was sometimes initially gullible and vulnerable to

thinking that some of these individuals, you know,

lived in a state of enlightenment or something.

And in a very short period of time, I was,

my fantasy was broken and I realized to ground myself and

realized that, you know,

there's moments of enlightenment in a journey through life.

And there's not this 'I'm now enlightened. And I stay the enlightened.' I mean,

let's just put things into perspective just for a second.

I'm just going to have some fun here. Imagine a little Yogi.

Who's sitting in the lotus position,

crossing legs and sitting there with his hands to the side and he's chanting

and he's sitting on the earth, maybe at the equator,

and the earth is going around a thousand miles an hour around the earth, in

a 24 hour period. So it takes 24 hours.

And this little guru is saying, 'I am enlightened.'

And then you realize that the earth is spinning and it's doing that

365 and a quarter times as it goes around the sun,

93 million miles away, 1 astronomical unit away.

So from the perspective of the sun,

it's hard to even see the earth without a telescope. Now,

seeing that little guru going around in circles on that,

it looks kind of like a hamster in a hamster wheel.

It's trapped in a very limited construct.

It only has the awareness of what it's learned through its senses and maybe some

of its instruction,

which is limited to somebody's senses possibly and maybe imagination.

And their degree of awareness is very finite.

Thinking back thousands of years ago,

maybe we thought the earth was the center of the universe,

but today it's an infinitesimal spec.

Now take the sun and go 26-27,000 light years,

that's the speed of light,

which is 186,000 miles a second x

86,400 seconds in a day x 365 and a quarter

days, x 26,000. And that's how far we are to the center of the Milky way.

Now to the center of the Milky way looking out at our sun with all the gas and

dust we can't see it. So now from the center of the Milky way,

looking at the sun, looking at the little earth, looking at the little guru,

we realize that that individual that thinks they're enlightened is an

insignificant infinitesimal. Now, if we go around to the Virgo cluster,

which is a series of cluster of galaxies, or maybe to the supercluster,

Laniakea Supercluster,

or into the great fabric and web of the cosmos, which is vast,

we can't even comprehend. The observable universe is so fast,

it's hard to comprehend, let alone what's beyond our observable universe,

the horizon. Now,

when you stop and think about somebody who's enlightened in that,

it's a bit of a ego. I love what Albert Einstein said,

"It's wise to live with holy curiosity." That no matter what you know,

tomorrow you're going to learn something new.

So I'd like to debunk the idea of 'full enlightenment',

that's, I know that some gurus have basically said that, you know, 'Well,

I have a universal consciousness.' Nah.

That's a bit of an illusion. So I don't want to promote that.

Cause I saw that in my, in my late teens and early twenties,

I saw people doing that and I was a bit vulnerable to that myself.

And then I got to meet some of the gurus and get to know behind the scenes and

talk with them and get friends with them and find out that they're just human

beings. They're human beings. And they have moments of awareness,

brilliant awareness and moments of enlightenment,

but they're limited to what they know,

either what they've read or learned or observed or some sort of sensory things.

And our visual senses, our visible perspective,

which is the broadest of all our senses. We can see farther than

we can hear farther than we can smell farther than we can taste father than we

can touch. Just our visible,

we only see 450 to 750 nanometer range.

There's an infrared and ultraviolet and gamma and x-ray,

and there's a vast amount of universe we don't even see,

we don't even know about without telescopes and microscopes.

So when we stop and think about the finiteness that we are aware of,

I'd rather say that we have a relative awareness. When people ask me,

'When did you get enlightened?' I go,

'You gotta be joking.' I'm a human being on a journey who's studying and

maybe relative to some other individual about a particular topic,

I might have an awareness, but I'm not fully enlightened.

I have moments of relative awareness and maybe an enlightenment on a

topic for a moment, that's about it.

So I don't want to mislead somebody and I don't want people to be misled

by a fantasy of supernatural enlightenment,

because those that have tried to portray that for marketing purposes

eventually got humbled.

And most people who are gullible enough to fantasize about that got

misled and usually cost them some money to teach them that lesson.

So beware. Richard M Bucke,

who wrote a book called Cosmic Consciousness, which

I'm not saying everything in there is the most wise thing,

but it's still worth reading. He wrote it in from 190 1 from London,

Ontario, is where he published it.

And he basically took 43 of the most illuminated people in the Western and

Eastern world,

and looked at their lives and kind of defined the common denominators in

individuals and took the average age of relative awareness,

founded around age 36 most of them when they had their so-called "epiphanies"

and showed very clearly that they only had moments of awareness,

moments of relative enlightenment. There was nobody fully enlightened,

staying enlightened and living in bliss. And so I don't want to,

I don't want people to be misled by that, I don't want to promote that.

I thought that and was vulnerable to that in my twenties, early teens,

maybe early twenties, but about age 29 to 30,

I broke that. And that was a big lift because I realized,

as I went down my pursuit of relative enlightenment,

journey of enlightenment and studying philosophy and theology and physics and

mathematics and 299 different disciplines that I've studied,

even the individuals that are the leaders in their field have their biases and

blindnesses,

it's awareness and it's a dialectic of pairs of opposite viewpoints that

eventually come to a synthesis and is syncretically integrated over time.

And so yes, a body of work, of great literature, Vedic literature,

and the Shruti and you know, Western philosophies and things,

these are all valuable. You want to, you want to learn everything you can,

but you want to continue on the journey of learning and not think, well,

now it's done. I got that. There's the enlightened one.

I can now subordinate to them and minimize myself to them and put them on some

sort of pedestal.

I'd rather live in holy curiosity and continue to grow and know that whatever we

learn now, tomorrow, we're going to be able to be learning something new.

Because I think that's part of the fulfillment, is learning.

And if it's done and stagnant, it's over with,

you'll minimize yourself relative to somebody you think is exaggerated.

And I don't think that's really wise or fair to you as a human being,

to self-actualize your life.

I think that it's wise to realize that we're all human beings,

we all have different values.

We all have different areas of inquiry and we have different levels of awareness

in that path, and we can assist others in our learning,

but we can also mislead others, because we're all learning. And we have to,

we have to put, ground that, get real about it. If I say something,

just because I say it doesn't mean it's absolute universal truth.

It's my understanding at the time.

And it may evolve and the same thing for any other teacher out there.

And the same thing for yourself.

So you want to learn to stand on everybody's shoulders you can,

learn as much as you can and grow,

but don't get caught in the idea that there's done. You know,

a journey of enlightenment with moments of enlightenment or moments of relative

awareness, is I think real. And anytime you're,

depression is a comparison of your current reality to a fantasy you get addicted

to. And sometimes you can set up a false expectation of being, you know,

one way or the other, enlightened or whatever.

And then if you don't live up to it,

and then you get caught in the pride ego you know, shame,

polarization process. You know, I had this one gentleman come up to me,

I was speaking years ago, this is gosh, 35 years at least,

a guy came up to me and he said, he says, 'That was a great speech.' And I said,

'Thank you.' And he says,

'You are on your seventh,

seven tenths on your way to enlightenment.' And I thought,

'Okay, if you say so.' And he says, 'I'm fully enlightened.' And I go, 'Okay,

cool.' And I shook his hand. I said, 'Great to meet you.' And I thought,

what an interesting character.

And I thought he's caught obviously in some sort of delusion he had about

himself. And I thought,

how can you be fully enlightened if you can learn again something

tomorrow? And I think that's a bit delusional. But I think that,

live with holy curiosity,

continue to be willing to expand your awareness and potential on a daily

basis. Learn as much as you can. Prioritize your learning, select wisely.

I came across a book set by Mortimer Adler called

Syntopicon volumes one and two, which was a beautifully done,

a treatise on the greatest thinkers of the last,

oh 3,700 years, going back to the ancient Greeks, Thales,

all the way back through the Greek philosophers and

thinkers.

And I studied the Vedanta and I think it's a magnificent piece of work,

there's some magnificent literature there that Mahabharata and the

Upunishads and the Gita, you know, all the great literature,

I want to study them all, but no matter how much I've gone through it,

there's always, there's more, there's no end to it.

And there's more depth to it. And you'll have a deeper understanding as you go,

but continue to learn,

study both Eastern and Western and study as much as you can,

learn as many things as you can from as many people as you can,

but beware of the pitfalls of the illusion that now it's done.

As long as you're green, you're growing, as soon as you ripen, you rot.

So don't ever think it's done and don't ever buy into the idea that somebody

else is done,

because that's a bit of a delusion that I think they may be thinking.

I think some people just because you go into a meditative state,

I've been in a meditative state many times,

I've been doing meditation for many years,

and many times you can go to a point where you're not aware of any boundaries

in the universe and everything else,

but just because you're having that experience doesn't mean you're now

encompassing the entire universe. You may imagine it to be,

but that's just your imagination.

You're not letting temporary sensory

experiences distract you from being present, and being present,

but remember, even your language is finite,

even those syllables you use are finite,

and the letter in letter characters are finite.

So your language of communicating what you even experienced is finite.

So just put it into context and humble,

I think it's wise to humble ourselves and humble our teachers and allow

ourselves to continue to be on the journey to enlightenment

or journey of enlightenment, not to enlightenment, but of enlightenment,

and allowing ourselves to have a moment of light,

occasionally along the journey. I wish I could say that I, I live day by day,

every moment of every day in this blissful... No, that's not real.

I've met enough gurus and from India and places in the world that people want to

believe that, but when you actually get to know them, I met many of them,

they're just human beings.

Just know that don't exaggerate other people and minimize yourself and

sacrifice, you know, reality for some illusion.

Honor yourself, identify what you see in other people that you admire,

within yourself and wake it up and then appreciate them for showing you

something that you've disowned in you. At the level of your soul,

nothing's missing in you. At the level of the senses,

things appear to be missing in you. The things that appear to be missing in you,

are all the parts you're too proud or too humble to admit you have.

That's one of the reasons I teach the Breakthrough Experience,

which is one of my signature programs, taught at like 1,127 times.

And I introduce the Breakthrough in that program, the Demartini Method,

the purpose of that method is to help you become accountable and grounded

and not infatuated or resentful or proud or shamed and not

emotionally polarized.

So you can actually be more poised and present and empowered and purposeful

and prioritized in life. So you keep living on that journey to enlightenment,

instead of thinking it's done. The second you think it's done, you get proud,

or the second you think somebody has done something else, you get infatuated.

And the second you do,

if you infatuate with somebody and minimize yourself to

and exaggerate yourself, which is inevitable afterwards,

you're not being yourself.

You're only being yourself when you're actually have reflective awareness.

And that is, the moment of, that's a moment of enlightenment,

a moment of awareness. When you take two particles,

an antiparticle particle and join them together, you make light,

you take the positive and negative aspects of our nature,

the emotions and put them together, you make a moment of enlightenment,

a moment of grace. That we can have. But we don't stay there.

In another 15 minutes or so,

we'll probably be off to the next perceptions that we're going to learn some

more, the next judgment possibly. And yeah, don't be fooled,

be wise. That's what the Demartini Method was for.

The Demartini Method was designed to help you be accountable methodically as a

science to help you have an increasing number of moments of enlightenment

along your journey of enlightenment.

And I think that's the real essence that we have access to in our life.

So I just wanted to share something about that journey and put it in

perspective.

Imagine the farthest reaches of the universe looking back at our earth and

seeing somebody thinking they're done and they're fully aware.

I think that would be the height of folly.

And allow yourself to have a universal perspective and not look,

you know,

from a very small finite component and give yourself permission to wake that

up. Now, I realize that some people will say, 'well,

we already are universal and we're just living this,

in this ego that's stopping us from seeing that', that's true,

but annihilistic tendency

to annihilate your ego is also foolish,

because if you think you're going to get rid of that,

the very people that think they get rid of it, 50 years later,

they still there with it. So that's not,

no one's going to annihilate their very reason for their existence and no one's

going to annihilate their thing and become part of the ocean except in their

illusions of their imagination because they're quoting things that state that

about it and, but the reality is, while you're in this body, wisely

use it.

And don't fall prey to hallucinations and illusions

of supernaturals to distract you from being the magnificent you right

here in this natural world. We do have a pretty amazing world.

I'm not a doomsdayer or a boomsdayer. I'm not thinking that they're, you know,

the world's going to be enlightened in the moment and I don't think that the

world's going to end and that kind of stuff. I think we have to be grounded,

have an understanding about science, study philosophy, study religion,

if you want, mix them all together on your journey of enlightenment.

And I just wanted to share those ideas with you.

I hope that you can consider using the tool,

the Demartini Method to help you on that journey,

because I'm certain it can help.

And until our next adventure together just know that

give yourself permission to continue to expand and aware the holy curiosity.

And yeah. There's no reason to ever have to stop that. Why, why,

why not inspire be inspired by learning every single day?

I don't see any reason why it needs to stop.