Using the Mind to Avoid God and Calling it “Enlightenment”

by Lucia Sweetland

Creating an Idol

What happens when we feel so inept in God that we seek another way of becoming enlightened – outside of God? We can take God out of the equation quite easily, just by creating an idol in our minds and calling it God, convincing ourselves that this is true. Why would we do this? Perhaps we believe that the way back to God is too painful or difficult. Most of us tend to run from that which we feel we cannot face. This is why for so many of us our inner child wounds don’t get healed. We can kid ourselves that if we don’t consciously feel any pain or anger, then there isn’t any, yet an unhealed wound does not heal through neglect or denial, nor does it heal because our imagination says it is healed - because we are pretending or wishing that it is not there.

We can actually create a pseudo-spiritual path of the mind that convinces us that we are not only healed and at peace – through reason, but on the path to enlightenment, and maybe even already enlightened. The mind can also create spiritual experiences that seem real and that reinforce our ideas and our desire to be healed without actually dealing with our buried feelings and our wounds and the negative beliefs that created them. All the while our true feelings, our heart’s desires and yearnings, our creative impulses, our spiritual light, is trapped inside of us, subservient to, and suppressed by, the mind. The fact that we can suppress and deny vital parts of us can be easily seen throughout the world in the way we live, habitually and even compulsively paying homage to intellectual pursuits, material conquests and empty entertainment. Meanwhile, inside of us our wounds fester and eat away at us - the prevalence of cancer in our world being an outpicturing of this.

Willingness to Look Within and Feel God's Presence

What does it take to heal? It takes awareness and a willingness to look within; it takes courage to face what we have denied, and most of all it takes love, love for something other than us - not other than who we really are, but other than the pseudo-identity that most of us work so hard to defend and uphold. What puts us on this path of healing? Usually a traumatic experience in our lives, because we wouldn’t face our pain otherwise. Perhaps we have an inkling of the freedom that awaits us once we have healed, but the terror of facing our unexpressed emotions, which after all, were suppressed because they seemed too difficult to deal with, is immense. We live in a world where people routinely try to block out hat they are feeling, what is going on inside them, by sitting like zombies in front of televisions or computers, by overworking, or over-scheduling their lives, or by eating or partying themselves into oblivion. Why would we need to do this if we were not terrified of our inner life? Is this way of “life” joy; is it happiness; is it fulfillment – is it even living?

It’s not that fulfillment has to be experienced in an outer way, but usually our outer lives reflect what is going on within us. In other words, sitting like a zombie in front of the television is a pretty clear indication that we feel a need to be distracted from ourselves. What a time waster! Yet the average American watches more than 4 hours of television a day! If we allow for 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of work, that leaves only 4 hours each day for such things as nurturing our relationships, reading, journaling, exercising, and creative hobbies such as gardening, photography, singing, playing a musical instrument, cooking, painting and handcraft, let alone spiritual devotion.

Yet it is possible to spend quite a few hours on spiritual devotion a day in the way of spiritual study and not be doing anything that enriches us or helps us grow spiritually, if what we are devoted to is an intellectually-based “spiritual” teaching that promotes using the mind to create a false god who encourages us to bypass our feelings and wounds in order to reach enlightenment, or the ascended master state. What kind of master becomes so by avoiding anything? What does avoidance signal if not fear - or at least insecurity? Well, the false god is insecure because it is not real, it is actually the ego glorified by intellectual reasoning, created to uphold the self-serving idea of a path of enlightenment – so-called “mastery”, through avoidance and denial. When Jesus said that the kingdom of God was within us, he did not mean within our minds, he meant within our hearts.