Spiritual Revolution - What is Enlightenment?

Producer Alan Swyer Interviews Steven S. Sadleir for the documentary Spiritual Revolution.

Alan Swyer: As a westerner, we don't have a sense of what enlightenment means. We don't really have a sense of what Bliss means. Those terms are far into our culture, as somebody who has been a seeker and a student, and is now a scholar and teacher. Define for me first what Bliss can mean into a westerner and secondly what enlightenment can mean to a westerner or if you don't mind?

Steven Sadleir: All those are great questions, and I don't think I have heard those questions before. Bliss is going to be-it's more of a gateway than a place. It's an aperture that opens to the degree or open to receive bliss or receive it. And I think a better word, but in the English language we have one word called love that describes many things. If you go into Spanish, you have little more leeway with it.

But in the United States, love tends to be focused on the romantic or kind of the inner personal certainly, expression of love. But there is something that is shared with another human being that when it's felt, we call it love. I call that spirit when the energy, that life force and expression of the divine move through somebody, through thought, word or action to another that is felt, that what we feel that connection we make with the other person, I think love is the word we would use to describe that. We don't often think of it as spirit because we don't think of ourselves as spirit either. And when we all do start thinking about ourselves as spirit, well have entered into the Kingdom of Heaven that lies within us you see, so that's how the prophecy's being fulfilled.

And the example really for most people in the west is Jesus Christ. I mean there's a guy that loved it, me and father are one. It's telling us the way. It's not something it isn't Hinduism or Christianity. It isn't device it at all. They're pointing at the same thing. We have an example. We have a place to go, we have refuge too if you want it.

But Bliss then is to the extent that you feel that within presence of God. It's where you feel the sense of love and that love can be as little as the inclination to have some more of it, whatever that is that felt good, a more peaceful, a more relax, it can go into a place where you just feel something shifted in you, and now there's a greater sense of clarity, happiness and peace. And then it be gets to this point where you think you may have gotten stone, like smoke some pot or drop some acid or something. It becomes very, very powerful.

And it will get to the point where there's really no one having the experience of it again. But at that point, you can't describe it. So when we're talking about bliss, which is usually associated with your other part of your question, enlightenment. It really isn't a place itself that has one definition in my mind. It's like realization itself. Enlightenment is the ending of ignorance. Ignorance had no beginning but it does have an end. Realization has no end, but it does have the beginning.

And so when you enter into an enlighten state, it's profundity, continues to expand to the degree that the mind and body can comprehended, which it never can anyway. It's just an enfoldment of the wanderers, madness which is love and self, which is life itself.

Alan Swyer: It's great.

Steven S. Sadleir

Self Awareness Institute

http://www.SelfAwareness.com

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