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Enlightenment and Emotionlessness

- Enlightenment is a long process, not something that can be achieved instantly. One can have a brief "glimpse" of enlightenment through self-realization, lasting from days to months, where they feel emotionless. - After this initial experience, emotions will return strongly as the ego fights to not be dissolved. One must experience and surrender to all their emotions, like compassion, anger, and fear, to fully dissolve the ego. - True enlightenment is rare and usually the initial insight is incomplete. People may claim to feel other's suffering or be deeply emotional, but this does not indicate full enlightenment or surrender; it just means being slightly more in touch with their own suffering

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41 views2 pages

Enlightenment and Emotionlessness

- Enlightenment is a long process, not something that can be achieved instantly. One can have a brief "glimpse" of enlightenment through self-realization, lasting from days to months, where they feel emotionless. - After this initial experience, emotions will return strongly as the ego fights to not be dissolved. One must experience and surrender to all their emotions, like compassion, anger, and fear, to fully dissolve the ego. - True enlightenment is rare and usually the initial insight is incomplete. People may claim to feel other's suffering or be deeply emotional, but this does not indicate full enlightenment or surrender; it just means being slightly more in touch with their own suffering

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sid
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Yes, pretty much.

In authentic enlightenment you don’t become thoughtless, you


become emotionless. The confusion between the two is a big spiritual misconception.

Here’s the thing though. It is not possible to become enlightened instantly. It’s a
long path, it’s too much to take. The only thing that can happen instantly is self-
realization - the recognition of the unreality of your persona. When that happens,
you are often times given a kind of a “glimpse” into the ultimate state, when you
feel like there’s no free will, things just happen, and you become empty inside and
emotionless. This glimpse can last a few days, a few weeks or even a few months.
You may not like it, get freaked out, or miss the emotions (your ego does those
things, not you).

But it never stays like this forever after the initial truth revealing event. There
is just too much suffering, too many tears, too much pain and fear that we
routinely carry inside of us. So after this short-lasting experience emotions
invariably come back, in heightened intensity, which often times can be absolutely
overwhelming. There could be a flood of compassion, tears for humanity, anger,
fear, lots and lots of stuff. Ego has been seen for what it is (an illusion), but
it’s not going away without a fight. All these emotions are to be allowed,
surrendered to, if the ego is to be ultimately dissolved.

If the initial insight is complete, there will be no way out of this process. You
will cry all your tears, and have all your fears, experience all your anger, all
your hatred, and along with that, all the love, all the compassion, and all the
beauty that exist in you, as the polar opposite of the unpleasant stuff, to
ultimately arrive into the fully enlightened state where emotions don’t arise, and
everything is just what it is. That’s a long road. As someone once said, “it took
me no time at all to get enlightened, but then it took me 12 years to get over it”.
This is also what Osho meant when he said “in my vulnerability, I have become
invulnerable”. You open up to all your vulnerability, all your pain, all your
suffering, and you accept it all to disappear, to become completely invulnerable in
unity. You accept all your pain until there is no more pain. Pleasure is just
another side of suffering, and love is just another side of hatred. So, yes, in
complete enlightenment emotions don’t arise.

But it rarely happens this way. In the absolute majority of cases, the initial
insight is very incomplete, often times quite shallow, so the period of being
emotionless is taken to be the “shock” of enlightenment, and the consequent
heightened emotional sensitivity is taken to be the desired, “true” enlightened
state. People become proud of how deeply feeling they have become, they wear it as
a badge of honor. The reality is, they just became slightly more in touch with, and
attuned to their suffering. Sometimes, when emotions don’t “make sense”, ego goes
as far as to announce it now feels other people’s suffering (how else will it
convince you that it doesn’t exist anymore? wink-wink, hehehe). This isn’t
enlightenment, this isn’t surrender. That’s merely how it begins. In enlightenment,
the surrender is absolute, and the peace is absolute, also. It is a much more
vulnerable and painful process than such people lead you to believe. They just want
to think they are enlightened now, that’s all there is to it. The reality is, the
depth of vulnerability exposed in authentic enlightenment is quite striking. When
surrendered to, things that used to arise an emotional response are seen to be so
petty, you can’t even say they “barely” register, they don’t register at all. You
just stop seeing them.

A dozen or so other responses to this question is a good illustration of this


dynamic. As I mention elsewhere, most people speaking of enlightenment aren’t
enlightened, and there aren’t many authentically enlightened people on Quora. Also
notice that in some of those answers, people are dismissive of such descriptions,
and there’s also a tendency to pathologize them. This is understandable. Ego is
always fearful of what it doesn’t understand, and it always wants to see itself as
superior. That’s its nature.

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