I have attained the last piece of divine knowledge necessary to complete my understanding of the spirit.  I have not attained complete enlightenment, or even pre-enlightenment.  I have not practiced the art of meditation enough to achieve the divine state of bliss produced at the end of building the perfect spiritual machine.  I have simply completed the blue print.  I have only taken a few small steps on the path to Nirvana, but I now have a complete map and I understand exactly where I must go.

I will not torture you with any mystery or suspense.  I will tell you the final answer to the highest question at the very outset of this explanation.  I only hope you are not disappointed by it’s simplicity.

Enlightenment.  Complete enlightenment.  The same enlightenment that allowed the Buddha himself to enter into Nirvana consisted of one single choice.  The choice he made, by spending his life preparing to make it, was to simply let go of the self and pass into non-existence.  Non-duality. It is the only place in all of the cosmos where there is no suffering.

I will spend the remainder of this treatise explaining.

The Buddha taught that to exist is to suffer.  He was correct.  In every level of potential existence, suffering occurs.  Even in the Christian Heaven.  Even the Christian God and every other God for that matter, all experience suffering.  All the Bhoddisattvas, Gods, Angels, and all the other heavenly beings suffer endlessly.  Mostly for us.  The heavenly beings are those who have attained compassion as such that they have pledged their existence to alleviating the suffering of lesser beings.  That means that through their compassion, they suffer with us.  Their empathy compels them to share our hurt when we fail, and they feel the weight of their own failure when we hurt.

As for the Hell beings, they have gone the opposite direction, away from compassion and down the spiral of feeding an endlessly ravenous ego.  They all suffer for themselves.  In a progressive hierarchy of beings suffering in every way a being can suffer, all the way up to the king of hell.

The mission of the Buddha was to find a way out of this endless cycle of death and birth; the cycle of existence that leads to this endless cycle of suffering.  What he found I now know.  He found the choice we all make at the end of our mortal lives and he discovered the capacity to simply choose to leave… Everything.

So now, we must discuss death.  I have always used a simple tool to understand spiritual matters.  Given the disparity between the seemingly endless explanations by the endless list of religions, there really are only two logical outcomes.  Either none of them is correct and everyone is crazy or all of them are correct and the various traditions are simply the manifestation of universal truth, subjected to our individual and cultural needs.  The word of god, filtered through what makes sense to our mass consciousness.

It is my undying and greatly relieved testament this day that it is in absolute fact the second.

Another tool I have learned to use in discerning spiritual truth is to use the assault of my own beliefs when subjected to spiritually acquired information.  We are capable of generating new ideas quite rapidly, but it seems that the ideas that come from our own mind tend greatly toward the consideration of our own beliefs.  These beliefs form a box in which we comfortably place ourselves.  Our senses receive information and these beliefs filter that information to shape our interpretation of our world.  I have had the great fortune to experience a number of sensory experiences that defy this mechanism and bare testament to the spiritual world and our ability to interact with it.  Some information, it seems, if we are listening hard enough, comes from within; and instead of being filtered through the shield of our beliefs, it either adds greatly to them, or shatters them completely.  You see these beliefs all too often act as our substitute identity.  We attach to them, and when they are questioned, we hurt very personally.  So what are we to do with information that is so abundantly true, but cannot be connected to any of the beliefs we hold so close to ourselves as to identify with them.  Information so revelatory that we cannot justify citing ourselves as the source?  This for me is how I define divine inspiration.  But how do we KNOW?  For me, the best indicator has always been the occasional piece of divine information that does not agree with my deeply held beliefs.  In fact, it is the greatest testament to the reality of this information when it completely defies my deep beliefs and shatters the box in which I live.

The point I am getting at is that this most recent revelation regarding the nature of enlightenment has completely shattered a great deal of beliefs I have clung to for decades.  The best example will be my relationship with the Mormon Church.  As an inquisitive teenager, my scientific mind grew increasingly dissatisfied with the doctrine I was taught and the answers I wasn’t getting.  I felt betrayed by the repressive culture and developed a serious disdain for the organization that lasted until this morning.  One of the biggest arguments I held against this religion is precisely how they describe their expectations for death and the afterlife.  They break it down into five realms.  The three kingdoms of heaven; Celestial, Telestial and Terrestrial; what they call Outer Darkness, and finally Hell.  My issue was taken with their description of the requirements and rewards of making it to the highest, Celestial kingdom. You must live a clean life according to the gospel, be married in the temple, pay your tithing and maintain weekly repentance of your earthly sins, leveraging the atonement of Christ.  If you fulfill these tasks, you are granted entrance into the kingdom of God where you dwell in his presence, the presence of your deceased family to which you are eternally sealed, and are even granted your own Godhood; given the power to create your own world or worlds.  It sounded utterly absurd to me.

Once I’d left however, my research was plagued with familiarity.  This is actually what resulted in my conclusion that all religions had to be at least partially correct.  Every religion seemed to hold these common themes of compassion, sin, reward, God or Gods, repentance, prayer, meditation, self-discipline, but the most fascinating were how consistent the myriad descriptions of the spiritual transition from life to death were. In summary, you physically die, your life flashes before your eyes, you pass into darkness, you are judged, based on this judgement your next path is determined, we pass through light to arrive in our new life.

This is where the final piece of my spiritual puzzle was placed, more specifically in the judgement process.  I have seen clearly that there is no judge of our behavior but us.  There is no St. Peter and no God to wag their finger or shake their head in disappointment as they review the actions of our lives.  It’s just you.  The catch is that it is just your spirit, unhindered by the psychological errors that arise from our attachment to a physical body and brain.  The trick is that this spirit is no longer solely attached to your own perception or your will to survive.  We know that the ego is anchored at the base of the Limbic System of the brain.  This psychologically rooted ego does not come with you into the afterlife.  For clarity, this ego is quite different from the spiritual attachment to self that keeps us trapped in Samsara.  The psychological ego is only responsible for creating a delusion of individuality and is concerned with preserving our mortal life.  I would be easily convinced that this instinctive structure was built through evolution by the manifestation of the deeper spiritual self-attachment.  In this regard, they are related but different in that the Limbic Ego is unable to consider or process spiritual information.

Why does all this matter?  It’s all to do with judgement.  You see, the reason your life flashes before your eyes after you die isn’t just to give you a chance to reminisce before you lose it forever.  It is your Karma.  As you take the sum of your life’s information to the spirit world, you relive your life with the added capacity to not only abandon your limbic ego impulses, but in leaving that ego behind, your spirit is able to connect with the effect your decisions had on others.

I’m sure so many have caught on by now and had the thought “Oh great! I can just decide to go to heaven!”  It’s not that simple unfortunately. Take a moment to consider the amount of sorrow you have felt.  Now the amount of sorrow you may have caused.  Multiply that by 3 just to be safe.  I promise you have hurt a great deal more people than you know.  The strength they showed in hiding it from you is no excuse.  Imagine facing a lifetime worth of mistakes and feeling every moment of pain you’ve caused to the people in life that were subject to your actions.  Now this is the question.  How would you judge your life?  Would you be able tell God to his face that you deserve celestial glory? Listen to your deepest impulses now.  Don’t attempt to think your way through it.  You will be given no time and no space in which to quell your shame with excuses and justification.  You see your life and everyone in it.  You feel a lifetime of emotion, both yours and the people you’ve effected, all at once.  If, at the end, you are ashamed, at best you come back and try again.  At worst, you descend into the existence of a lower life form, at the very worst, a hell being, but still all are given the opportunity to resolve your karma.  If you endure this test and are honestly proud of your life, you may deem yourself worthy of any manner of heavenly reward.

This I know to be true as this revelation has shattered my disdain for the Mormon Heaven.  My eyes pried open by the truth that it is entirely possible and of no threat or detriment to anything or anyone.  Despite the many holes in their doctrine, they’ve got the essentials of the spirit world as accurate as any other.  My only continuing argument is that with their incomplete doctrine they are left unprepared for this spiritual transition.  Their spirit will find chaos in the lack of familiarity with the process, and that’s where we come to meditation.

Many find meditation to be a mysterious tradition, and just as few understand what the goal is.  I myself began a meditation practice in hopes of acquiring super natural abilities.  I understand now that though these abilities are a side effect of this esoteric practice, they are not the goal.  To clarify, in the most simple terms I can relay, meditation is simply practicing for death.  The methods are many, but most focus on the same goal of quieting the mind and descending through progressively deeper states of consciousness.  As this lengthy process occurs, you will encounter yourself in ways you would never imagine.  At the first levels, you will suffer a barrage of endless random chaotic thoughts.  This is the first witness of what your mind is actually doing.  Like a thousand monkeys screeching and swinging uncontrollably through a tree, the untrained mind is a place of utter chaos.  As you learn to focus, the thoughts quiet, then they slow.  Your mind becomes more like a gently rippling lake; each thought is a wave to be smoothed with deeper focus.  Then in your first months of regular practice, you will find your first experience with a still mind.  Like a lake of perfectly still water on a windless morning, you will find your mind capable of profound peace as you rediscover it’s ability to reflect reality as a perfect mirror.  Over years, the masters of meditation continue to discover ever-deeper states of mind, so deep that one can even pass into the heavenly realms.  One of many stories of the Buddha describes his dedication to self-discipline so much that when passing into these heavenly realms, he would choose to descend into the hell realms and subject himself to immeasurable suffering so as to challenge and chasten his ability to focus his mind beyond the reach of even the most violent torment.  He sat silently observing his thoughts as his flesh was repeatedly ripped from his body, scorched and burned.  His mind was trained to focus so well that he was able to dispel the torment of his senses into complete dismissal as no more than illusory perception to be ignored.  It was this same mind, as he sat in deep meditation beneath a tree that at last discovered that deepest state of mind possible.  He found the darkness we encounter after death, and the place where we make our final judgement.  In the darkness, he perceived a choice that none had before.  He realized that in the complete renunciation of self; in casting away his attachment to his own existence that he had the choice to exit the endless cycle of birth and death.  He perceived this place of non-existence, called Nirvana, the only place in the cosmos untouched by suffering.  In this moment, he committed his spirit to dissolution.  When he returned to consciousness, he brought with him the weight and promise of his decision.  His suffering in his life, dissolved with the knowledge that there was an answer to his greatest question.  Armed with the knowledge of such a facet of existence, the myriad manifestations of the material world were in fact rendered completely immaterial.  In this, his mind and spirit became invincible to suffering.

With this in your mind, I ask you to accept the gravity of your own responsibility to yourself.  I ask that you dedicate your mind to a practice of discipline and compassion.  With your focus on these two attributes, you will realize a life worthy of a smile in the darkness.

“There be those, too, whose knowledge, turned aside
By this desire or that, gives them to serve
Some lower gods, with various rites, constrained
By that which mouldeth them. Unto all such-
Worship what shrine they will, what shapes, in faith-
‘Tis I who give them faith! I am content!
The heart thus asking favour from its God,
Darkened but ardent, hath the end it craves,”

-The Bagavad Gita – Chapter VII “Of Religion by Discernment”

“8 Wherefore murmur ye, because that ye shall receive more of my word? Know ye not that the testimony of two nations is a witness unto you that I am God, that I remember one nation like unto another? Wherefore, I speak the same words unto one nation like unto another. And when the two nations shall run together the testimony of the two nations shall run together also.

9 And I do this that I may prove unto many that I am the same yesterday, today, and forever; and that I speak forth my words according to mine own pleasure. And because that I have spoken one word ye need not suppose that I cannot speak another; for my work is not yet finished; neither shall it be until the end of man, neither from that time henceforth and forever.

10 Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written.

11 For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them; for out of the books which shall be written I will judge the world, every man according to their works, according to that which is written.

12 For behold, I shall speak unto the Jews and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the Nephites and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the other tribes of the house of Israel, which I have led away, and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it.

13 And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews.

14 And it shall come to pass that my people, which are of the house of Israel, shall be gathered home unto the landsof their possessions; and my word also shall be gathered in one. “

-The Book of Mormon – 2 Nephi: 29; v8-14