Spirituality and Enlightenment: The Secret to Bliss
Written by Scott Petullo
The ultimate goal of many spiritual seekers is to find enlightenment, which is another way to say awakening to spiritual awareness or illumination. A tall order, but with discipline it’s possible to make serious progress on your spiritual path.
“I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery. It’s a journey of recovery. It’s a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It’s already there.” Billy Corgan
We’ve found those words of wisdom to be true. As teens in 1981, we recall listening to the song “Spirits in the Material World” by The Police on their album Ghost in the Machine. To us, it meant everyone is a spiritual being having a human experience.
As you mature and your spiritual heritage (soul) emerges, you begin to recover the wisdom you were aware of on the other side, but temporarily forgot. The recovery process would be helped along if every parent encouraged their young children to explore any memories of the other side or past lives (which many children recall up to about age seven), but the memories are usually dismissed as a child’s imagination. Unfortunately, the veil of forgetfulness is further fostered by society; rarely do friends, family, teachers, and neighbors encourage you to go within and rediscover your true essence underneath a lifetime of programming.
We’ve been interested in non-religious spirituality for as long as we can remember. The dead-ends we encountered in our younger years, exploring various spiritual paths, disciplines, and methodologies, piled up like leaves in autumn, but the journey was worth it. Most of the fruitless avenues were heavy on hope and inspiration, and light on reason, or were too superficial to be taken seriously.
Over the course of more than 30 years we’ve managed to identify several reliable spiritual disciplines. Our long-term findings involving meditation, past life regression, psychic perception and comprehensive astrology and numerology lead us to this conclusion: a permanent state of enlightenment, a blissful one where you are completely free of all fears, defenses, and biases doesn’t exist. The secret to enlightenment is that you must work at peeling away the layers of your inner nature (such as through meditation) to make progress and you probably wouldn’t still be incarnated if you didn’t have more to discover.
The reason you can’t completely free yourself from your fears, defenses, and biases is because you can’t control your subconscious mind. It will think what it wants, and you’re powerless over it. However, you can detach from it through meditation, and work with it with tools such as hypnosis and subliminal audios.
Be wary of those who say they never get irritated, upset, angry or experience other “negative” human emotions. It’s not spiritual or normal to project a phony “I’m always blissful and peaceful” facade. Stay clear when that repressed beach ball of emotions finally bursts through the water’s surface while they are under pressure or stress.
Spiritual seekers eventually realize that you can encounter more wisdom in your own backyard than you do in some exotic location on the other side of the planet.
As Harry Nilsson belted out in 1971 on Jump Into the Fire, “You can climb a mountain, you can swim the sea, you can jump into the fire, but you’ll never be free.” We’re not sure exactly what he meant, but those words remind us that true freedom, and spiritual satisfaction, are found within, not elsewhere.
“Music is mediator between spiritual and sensual life.” Ludwig van Beethoven
The most illuminated people you’ll ever meet frequently don’t look like the “spiritual” type. A construction worker, military colonel, waitress, and nurse, for example, may be far more spiritually adept than a priest or a beads, crystals, and caftan wearing author of the spiritual best-seller.
On your journey of enlightenment, wisdom comes from within, and music, prayer, quiet reflection, walks in nature, and regular meditation are all effective ways to remember it.
