A great many people are seeking to be enlightened, or what is often spoken of as "awakening" or becoming "conscious.
" Some have been searching for years, but any kind of sustained enlightenment continues to elude them.
When we search for enlightenment, or struggle to awaken or become conscious, we are really saying that we are not happy with ourselves as we are now.
We feel somehow inadequate as we are now-even perhaps apologetic for who we find ourselves to be.
It's no fun to go through life feeling inadequate and apologetic about yourself, wishing you were different from the person you are.
Awakening isn't becoming different from who we are.
Rather, it's finally coming to accept ourselves.
We stop disliking the person we are.
We become comfortable with ourselves.
An enlightened person is someone who sees and embraces themselves for the person they are.
This means they have shed their learned ideas of who they are, which are the reason for their self-doubt, and are no longer in resistance to themselves in their natural state.
To be enlightened is to be in our most natural state.
It's to be like a little child, which just expects to be accepted.
It expects to be loved.
Only when others put self-doubt into the child's mind either through what they say or by their actions does the child begin to question itself.
This is why Jesus said that if we are to experience the divine presence in our life, which he referred to in the language of that day as "the kingdom of God" and "the kingdom of heaven," we must become like the spontaneous, innocent, totally self-accepting child we once were.
To be enlightened isn't somewhere we have to get to.
To awaken isn't something difficult to do.
Consciousness simply involves relaxing into a true view and true feel of ourselves.
It's actually very easy.
It's our programming during the years we were growing up and in subsequent episodes of our life that gets in our way and trips us up.
We have learned to believe this programming instead of to simply believe what our heart tells us.
Self-doubt is what blocks us.
How are we to get over our self-doubt? The answer is that we simply notice it.
We don't dwell on it.
Neither do we analyze it.
In fact no thinking at all is required.
Just noticing, that's all.
When we notice but don't get caught up in analysis and thought, the good feeling of ourselves that we once knew as a child comes to the surface.
It happens quite spontaneously, without any effort.
When nothing is blocking it, our natural state is to feel wonderful about ourselves and about life.
It's not a feeling we have to generate.
It's just there, and always has been though we have forgotten what it feels like to feel wonderful about ourselves.
Said William Blake, "For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
" To delight in life and experience the whole as holy is our natural state-is what it means to be awake.
Or, in the words of a Zen saying, "Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty.
Cooked people delight in the ordinary.
" To such an enlightened state we are all called.