The Embers of Enlightenment

Jeremy Bruce
Aug 24, 2017 · 4 min read

If you’re just beginning out on the path of awakening, you’re going to be filled of all sorts of ideas about what enlightenment is going to feel like for you once you get there. As a companion to those ideas, you most likely have a whole bunch of projections about the other people you meet along your spiritual path, the fellow practitioners, teachers, gurus, lamas, and what it must feel like for them to be where they’re at.

One of those ideas you probably have is that after many years of practice you won’t have problems. Or maybe you’re mature enough to realize that that’s really kind of a silly idea, so you’ve refined it to believing that you will still have problems, but you’ll relate to those problems differently, and that will result in those problems feeling less weighty.

We’re getting somewhere, but that’s not really it either. You’ll still have huge problems, and they might even become more weighty, it’s just that you will have developed some compassion, some patience, some spaciousness, and some wisdom about how to work with those problems.

In terms of your state of mind, even when you reach that phase of practice where you have constant witnessing with long stretches of non-dual resting, you will often get completely knocked off your focus by some pattern or other that arises. Or even, you’ll get sucked into a whirlwind of noise and distraction which can happen just in the normal course of living a life in the world with family, work responsibilities, traffic, and whatever. You will reach actual low points, and you will have your level lowered many times to the point where you feel totally not like the enlightened person you thought you had transformed yourself into.

But actually, when an enlightened person gets their level lowered by life and feels like a “regular” person for a day, two days, a week, they are fundamentally different and are still capable of amazing things.

I picked up an analogy from an old Jewish spiritual book on this matter that encapsulates it so well. Think of a pile of wood. A person not engaged in consistent spiritual practice is a pile of wood that has never really caught fire, everything is so solid, so dense, no transformation of energy can occur.

As you begin to practice meditation, it feels like you’re sitting out in the rain with a match, or a lighter, or rubbing two sticks together, finding it hard to start that fire up.

But if you spend time around enlightened beings, and throw yourself in to practice completely, you feel the spark ignite, and your karma starts to burn away really quickly, and the path begins to make sense. You start to see that there is no path, and it’s not about anything outside of you, but it’s an internal path to discover your Heart.

Now, you’ve been burning and burning and you feel you’ve made serious progress. But then a gust of wind so strong comes and blows out the flames. It looks like you’ve returned to normal.

The enlightened person and the regular person both look like solid logs, nothing much happening. They’re both just standing in line at the pharmacy buying Mr. Clean foaming pads to scrub their tubs with. They’re both eating A&W hamburgers. They’re both depressed, anxious, riddled with guilt, chronic pain, or problems at work. But that’s just on the outside, and I suppose a little on the inside as well.

But any minute, the enlightened person, because of the depth of their practice can burn bright again, with little or no effort. Spontaneously, their practice will blossom again, they’ll be infinity, their problems evaporate, and those two days of disconnection become fuel for the further deepening of their practice. When they were standing in line at the pharmacy there might not have been any flames, but underneath the embers were holding all of that potential energy, just waiting to burst forth with as much predictability as the initial gust of wind that blew out the flames in the first place. The embers are still there, and very hard to extinguish.

The heat of the embers is the true measurement of your progress, not the heat and intensity of the flames. The embers sometimes burn hotter than the flames. And the flames can have a high degree of variability and if you have too many flames and you lose control of them, your spiritual practice might get out of control.

Even when the enlightened person is suffering tremendously, they feel the warmth of the embers of their Heart. The faith and the confidence that there is only one taste, there is nothing actually happening, there is just this.

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Jeremy Bruce

Written by

Meditation teacher @theinnervehicle

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