Wes Annac, Contributor
Waking Times

Sometimes, we reach a point where we want to feel more connected with the Christ within; more connected with our essence, and when this happens, we might have to ask ourselves a few essential questions.

One of them is if we’re making choices throughout our day that are in alignment with our wish to be more connected. Are we helping ourselves live a lifestyle that’s truly inspired by spirit, or does the idea of staying connected only sound good at the surface?

Oftentimes, we’ll find when we take a serious, discerning look at ourselves that even though we think we want to be more connected, we still aren’t making choices that help us stay aligned. We’ll find that continuing to falter in some areas of life is what causes us to feel distant from love or spirit.

It’s safe to say that enlightenment (or spiritual evolution in general) is one of the hardest processes we’ll ever go through. It requires us to seriously and scrupulously examine everything about ourselves that keeps us from attaining our goal, and by the end of it all, we’ll have lost as much as we gained.

We’ll have gained more in the sense that we gave up our materialistic desires for something much better, but like Adyashanti and a few other teachers have told us, enlightenment is a destructive process. We’ll be uplifted by the end of it all, but we’re in for some pain if we aren’t willing to release our grip on the aspects of life that hold us back.

If there’s anything we’re unwilling to release, we’ll have trouble on the enlightenment path. In order to understand ourselves as God, we’ll have to be willing to transcend everything that keeps us from understanding our godliness, and it can definitely be hard.

The hardest part about it is watching the world continue its misaligned ways while we try to better ourselves, and this is where the most pain is usually felt. It’s hard to enact so many disciplines while the world continues to be hedonistic and uncaring, but it’s an unfortunate part of our spiritual growth that we’ll just have to accept, however hard it can be.

There’s a solution to the world’s problems, and we’re it. We’re the solution we’ve been waiting for, but in order to heal ourselves enough to heal the world, we’ll have to cease contributing to the aspects of our society that seem designed to keep us in lower, subservient states of consciousness.

Without becoming self-centered, we’ll want to examine everything about ourselves and determine what serves our spiritual growth and what hinders it. We’ll want to stay as open-minded as we can, as often as we can, but we won’t want our open-mindedness to lead us to things we know will hold us back.

We’ll want to let as much love flow out of our expanding minds and hearts as we can, and we’ll want to make sure everything we say and do is genuine and aligned with our vision. We’ll want to do away with limiting self-talk, like “I’m only human. Bickering and being unhappy are part of my nature. I’ll grow out of them someday”.

The goal of enlightenment is to basically stop being human; to rise above simple humanity into an omnipotent state of mind that’s free of the pains, worries and stresses that seem to come with being human. Yes, there will be times when negativity seems unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean we should feed it.

Anything less than mastery will cause us to fall short of our goals, and we’ll know we’re falling short of them because we’ll feel unhappy; as if something’s missing that we just can’t seem to find. Something is missing in most cases, and it’s the devoted spirituality and godliness that come with enlightenment.

Most of us are reaching a point where we can’t stand the way the world is right now and we want to make a change, but the best way to make this change is to make it from within.

We can’t expect the external world to change until we’ve made some crucial inner changes, and as long as we accept certain aspects of society or tell ourselves it’s all ‘normal’, we’ll continue to be divided and controlled from within.

It’s obvious that a change needs made, and we have to be the ones to make it. We have to be willing to shed and transcend every bit of limitation or humanity that keeps us from enlightening ourselves, and anything less could cause continued dissatisfaction.

Overall, we’ll want to take things easy and stop taking life as seriously as some of us have. I know this sounds contradictory to what I said above about taking enlightenment more seriously, but both realities are possible.

There are a lot of serious issues plaguing the earth right now, but the enlightened seeker is calm and still in the face of it all. The seeker who’s embraced pure nothingness has it all figured out, because in nothingness, we discover Source.

Source is found when the mind’s as still as it can be and we’ve transcended our surface perception to the best of our ability, which requires calm, patience and an array of other masterful qualities that some of us are currently unable to grasp.

Most of us are afraid of pure silence, stillness or nothingness, because our minds have created situation after situation, circumstance after circumstance and identity after identity to keep us distracted. We’re so enamored with the distractions we’ve created that all-out stillness sounds impossible or undesirable, but it’s all we need to enlighten ourselves.

Maybe we should ask ourselves how we feel about being completely still and silent. Yes, a lot needs done and said to change the world, but what’s better – changing the world with a noisy, spiritually unaware perspective or a still, masterful one?

It isn’t necessarily complacent to want to change the world from a still perspective. Some people automatically assume it is, because in their mind, the idea of being still while the elite keeps us oppressed spells treason to their planet, and that’s the last thing they’d want to do.

Changing the world is absolutely possible with a still, enlightened mind, and in fact, it’s a better way to do it. It doesn’t cause complacency or inaction – it boosts our awareness but allows us to address the situations that need addressed with a balanced perspective.

It’s easy to want to stay connected, but it’s harder to do the inner work that’s required. As contradictory as it might sound, the best way to stay connected is to keep the mind open and silent, and when we try it, we might be surprised at how easy our creativity and our meditations flow.

They’ll flow so easily because we’ll no longer be concerned with making them flow, and our mind will be too still and content to worry about it.

Limitation fades when we can quiet the mind, embrace stillness (and the nothingness that comes with it), and repeatedly examine ourselves to make sure we stay aligned, and this is the challenge we face at this crucial time in our collective evolution.

It’s up to us to decide if we’re up for it, and while most of us readily assume we are, we’ll find that there’s more diligence and inner work required than we expect. If we can stay dedicated and continue to detach from the mind’s overbearing influence (thereby using it the way it’s meant to be used), however, the end result will be paradise.

About the Author

Wes Annac is the author of The Culture of Awareness.  The Culture of Awareness features daily spiritual and alternative news, as well as articles I’ve written and more. Its purpose is to awaken and uplift by providing material that’s spiritually inspired and/or related to the fall of the planetary elite and our entrance into a positive future.

Wes can also be found on Facebook (Wes Annac and The Culture of Awareness) and Twitter.

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