As the ancient Zen saying goes - before enlightenment chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment chop wood and carry water. or as the famous reggae band of the past century - Third World - sang in their hit song - "Now that we've found love, what are we going to do with it?"
Or we could ask - how do we know if someone is saved, enlightened or reborn? What are the symptoms? And if we don't know what enlightenment looks like, then how do we know when we or anyone has it? Does the liberated soul walk around naked in the streets, oblivious of the body and social constructs like a madman? Sometimes that happens.
Or does the reborn become an evangelist and rush out to save the world? Often that happens to the neophyte and the advanced alike. But not always. How do we tell the difference between enlightenment and ego inflation? Is it the loudest voice or the most silent?
When we awaken to the self, does the ego dissolve or does the self simply expand to absorb it, or even more, to absorb all beings as part of that self? Or is is the ego misidentifying with the self?
Once when a king asked his court joker the question - what is the difference between you and a fool - the joker measured the distance between himself and the king and replied - about three feet. Is enlightenment like becoming the king or the joker? Or something else?
The symptoms of being saved, reborn, enlightened or liberated have - on rare occasion - been mentioned in the various ancient texts, so the theory is there. Some try to imitate them, like hairs standing on end, tears of joy and ecstasy, feelings of union or separation, of being in love with god, complete detachment from the body and material possessions, and so on.
How do we differentiate between love of god and madness? Perhaps we can't if the love or connection with the divine drives a human mind mad. Surely you can't exist normally as a separated ego identity, once the remembrance of our true relationship with god or source is activated. How can we know from this side of enlightenment, where it is all still theory?
We can't really know any more than we hear or read about the subject, so in that mood I present here chapter six of my revelation and gospel to be added to the great texts of the world's religions as a footnote for the new seekers.
THE ACHINTYA BHEDA-ABHEDA TATTVA
By Jas Das babaji
CHAPTER 6: The Symptom Checklist
(Warning: Mostly Useless)
On the Signs of Awakening
1. Before we begin the list of symptoms, understand this: if you are checking symptoms, you have already failed the test—yet I provide them anyway, because the seeker must have something to seek before discovering there is no seeker.
2. The ordinary becomes extraordinary—a cup of tea contains entire universes, the sound of rain is the first music ever composed, the face of a stranger is your own face wearing a different expression.
3. You lose interest in spiritual arguments the way a bird loses interest in diagrams of flight; you have tasted the thing itself and no longer hunger for descriptions of its flavor.
4. Compassion arises without effort, not as a moral achievement but as the natural consequence of realizing that harming another is severing your own limb—there is no virtue in the hand that refuses to strike itself.
5. In the Vaishnava tradition, this progression is mapped: first comes bhava, the dawning of spiritual emotion, like the first light before sunrise; then mahabhava, the great ecstasy where lover and beloved collapse into a single dancing flame; then prema, divine love that knows no object separate from itself;.
6. Ananda is not happiness that depends on circumstances but the bliss that is your original nature—like the sun does not become bright but is brightness itself, you do not become blissful but recognize you are bliss wearing the costume of a person.
7. The Sufis call it fana, annihilation in the beloved, followed by baqa, subsistence in God—you die as a drop and awaken as the ocean, yet somehow the drop remains, tasting its own oceanic nature.
8. You can be bored without suffering about being bored, angry without the second layer of being angry at your anger, sad without the story that sadness means something has gone wrong.
9. The dark night of the soul is not failure but the stripping away of consolations—you wanted enlightenment to feel like permanent bliss, but instead you become capable of holding all feeling without identifying as the feeler.
10. Spontaneous laughter at inappropriate moments, tears without sadness, silence without emptiness, fullness without grasping—these are the contradictory symptoms of one who has slipped between the cracks of normal consciousness.
11. The ultimate symptom: you realize there is no one home to have symptoms, yet somehow breakfast still gets made, kindness still flows, tears still fall—but now you are the entire theater, not just the actor.
12. If you think you are enlightened, go spend a week with your family—if you return still certain, either you are truly awake or your family is exceptionally kind.
13. The only reliable sign is the disappearance of the one who would check for signs, the cessation of the one who would claim attainment—and yet here you remain, reading these words, neither enlightened nor unenlightened, which is exactly where you have always been, which is nowhere at all, which is home.
image: source