Enlightenment as Christians.

Enlightenment is a term that is thrown around with far too much brevity. We are enlightened by food (maybe just me), by friends, by family--seemingly anything that starts with an "f." In reality, enlightenment is a tough and arduous process that many Christians ignore, thinking that it's a completely Eastern idea. That only the Buddhists have to worry about cutting the chain of rebirth, realizing oneness with Him, seeing His face, and then ceasing to exist.

To start, Christian enlightenment differs from beginning to end because we do not believe in rebirth. Life is a one chance, one shot, thing... However, we also believe that we are reborn into Christ, into the body of He who Sacrificed Himself thus making our reincarnation exist in our single life as opposed to it occuring over many lifetimes until we hit it, until our souls have suffered enough, for long enough, that we finally cease to exist.

Before we can be reborn in Christ however, we must see the face of God--there is always something that compels us into enlightenment. As Dr. Ravinda Kumar stated in the article, "We are all Gods in the Making," from the Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies in October 2006, "Seeing God is a very important event. On successful culmination ofmeditation through a "seed mantra," the Deity of the mantra appears before the disciple." A "seed mantra" could be a worship song or a repeated phrase during prayer. That is why, 9 times out of 10, at a summer camp, the call to Christ is usually held on or around an all-worship-night so that everyone sees or feels God and no one feels alienated because they feel something deep within their core.


After we have seen God's face we have a choice: we go deeper and accept what we've seen, accepting that God and you are one, or we reject it. If we reject it, then we are voiding ourselves in the Nothingness.

But if we accept it then once and for all, we have cut the chain of rebirth, and we are dead to sin and Alive in Christ. Our ego is reborn as our Holy Guiding Spirit. We are setting into stone what will be of us.

And all humans face this choice. Everyone has their chance to see the face of God [citation needed--i know this exists, the bible says it somewhere] and thus we all have our point of rebirth. Some will choose away from God while others will choose into God.

And some will be reborn multiple times in their lives, shifting like beached whales until they settle on God or Nothingness.

And if you choose to deny God, your journey towards enlightenment ends there. Your fate is cast. You have no need to seek God's face.

But for Christians, it goes deeper. We can't just see the face of God, choose Him, put a Jesus Fish on the back of our car and call it a life. We must constantly be seeking God's face, constantly seeking repentence and minor-rebirth. In the vein of seeking God's face, it is the reason that most churches have pictures of Jesus or stain-glass windows purveying what God looks like. You see that and you say, "oh! I get it! Sign me up!"

For Christians who are reborn multiple times in our single lives, we must constantly be re-routing and repeating these first two steps, like a worn path, so that we may continue to remain dead to sin and Alive in Christ. Because, in truth, no matter how much one becomes in enlightened, there is still always temptation and there is always something worth getting you down.

So we cycle, we orbit Christ as our Sun as we move around him, and our planetary path and rotations are what keep our lives going. We turn around and around--that's why life sometimes seems so cyclical. It's because we are living out our past lives and our future lives in this one life with one set of people.

We should no longer fear death because we already are dead. This flesh, this body that you see, is nothing but a shell and I am nothing but the Father. My acts are not my acts, but I am the only one to blame. I try and not repeat what has happened before, but that is simply how life works--repeat.

I've felt before that I'm caught in a still life portrait, going nowhere, and never doing anything. I'm just an apple in a bowl caught in its forever-ripened state.

Now I understand why: it's because that's what this life is: it's the consistent waiting and rebirth until we reach the final stage of enlightenment.

Death, that great enigma that needs no more said on it than what's already been said by millions of poets and writers and essayists and sitcoms and movies, is not something we're supposed to be scared of, it's supposed to be something we embrace. It is the final moment where our flesh and our sin finally ceases to be, and we become wholly one with the Father. Is that something to be afraid of? When we die, we cease to be forced to live out this shell of a life in a still-life cycle rounding the Son.

And that's okay by me.