Just as belief in the sun, and knowing what word to call it is not necessary to feel its warmth, belief in such things/concepts/entities as God, Jesus, Buddha, Nirvana, and Heaven is not necessary to experience enlightenment. The awakening of awareness leading to complete liberation is experienced directly. It could be experienced by someone who never heard any of those words, who was deaf without a translator, and illiterate, not able to be taught in words or to access language through text in any form.
The journey of awakening develops in as many individual ways as there are individuals. There are, however, some similar phases or revelations which many people have a tendency to experience, so it is not unusual or without value for people who have become spiritual teachers to refer to these in words. Parables and analogies are often offered. Writing a poem about a sunrise is a way to point at the experience of having witnessed a sunrise.
If the tone of a teacher’s description ever invites you to “believe in” anything, it is not because belief in anything is ultimately necessary––in fact belief in many things seems to fall away with awakening! A plant doesn’t need to “believe in” sunlight for its leaves to go about the process of photosynthesis. It doesn’t need to know the word, or to understand the chemical equation, either! A spiritual teacher may invite a student to temporarily “believe” that there is something analogous to sunlight in order to help the student’s separate-identity-centered experience of reality to expand a little, to help put it in contact with that which is already happening but which the student is not consciously aware of. “There is such a thing as sunlight. Your eyes are still closed, but see if, for a moment, you can feel it’s warmth penetrating your skin.” That is the nature of many spiritual teachings. That which is being taught about is not hidden from the student any more than the sun is being hidden from the person who is standing eyes-closed outdoors on a bright summer day. The teacher says, “Trust me, there is a sun, and it is real, and you are standing in it. It is all around you and penetrating you with its warmth and light.” Once the eyes are open, there is no need to “trust” that the teacher is “right” or to “trust” that the sun is “real”, the realization of truth is experienced directly.
Two of my favorite books, A Course In Miracles, and Gary Renard’s writing about it in The Disappearance of the Universe, and another book which uses more psychological than religious vocabulary, Take Me To Truth: Undoing the Ego, by Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira offer many words: labels, concepts, ideas, and explanations for the reader to entertain. Ultimately, these writings are designed to take you to experiences that are beyond words. Some of the theoretical framework offered is to appeal to the self-organizing mind that imagines itself to be a separate entity struggling to live in a world which seems to be chaotic and in need of managing and interpreting. These teachings speak in language meant to appeal to that level of awareness in which one seems to find oneself stuck.
As a student experiences changes of his or her perception, the need for those explanations or ideas may fall away completely or come to be seen as only temporarily useful scaffoldings. Part of the quality of the awakened experience is comfort with residing in “not knowing” as opposed to having a sure mental grip on anything. Part of the weight that is lifted as “enlighten”-ment is realized is the weight of all the beliefs, stories, and explanations that one thought one needed to maintain in order to be a good person, a smart person, a wise person, a spiritual person. Mental efforting, especially to try to manage one’s experience, dries up or goes by the wayside. It turns out there is no need to try to maintain a set of beliefs or any particular explanation or understanding of anything. There is no need for the project of maintaining a separate self that thought it needed to do these tasks in order to be safe, or realistic, or effective at making the world a better place. As reality sets in, as awareness of the sun is fully opened to, there is no more searching for such answers, explanations, or directions, because the belief about needing them is resolved.
There may, however, be dawning awareness, revelatory awareness, “ah ha” moments. The person experiencing a sunrise with eyes wide open may read the sunrise poem again and think, “Ah! Now I see what they were talking about!” Upon experiencing healed perception there may be moments of realizing, “Oh! This is what people are calling God, Christ vision, Buddha Mind, Nirvana, Heaven.” And frequently, upon realizing the glow intimately, directly, experiencing it beyond words, one may find oneself feeling drawn, or guided, or inspired to write a poem (or a book) or speak out in such a way as to point the way for others to see.
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