What Is And Is Not Enlightenment

The first and only California Enlightenment Master's Training Course conducted by Charles Berner was held July 11-29, 1977. The recorded and transcribed lectures by Charles were edited by Lawrence Noyes and published in a 1977 manual called, The Transmission of Truth: A Manual for Enlightenment Masters.

In 2005, a revised edition was published by Mona Sosna under the title, Consciousness of Truth: A Manual for Enlightenment Intensives. A free copy of that publication can be downloaded from my web site: http://www.selffoundation.com/Downloads/EIManual.pdf


The chapter below is from the original 1977 publication.

Chapter 1
What is and is not Enlightenment

There is no error more common in conducting an Enlightenment Intensive than accepting things for enlightenment which in fact are not enlightenment, This is the most common and most serious error made by Enlightenment Masters.

This Enlightenment Technique has spread all over the world, with varying degrees of accuracy. Some people have varied it quite a bit, usually because they had different goals and did not know it. They were not striving for enlightenment experiences but instead were striving for phenomena, that is, they were trying to get some sort of experience; whether it was enlightenment or not didn't matter. Or they simply didn't know the difference between phenomena and a direct experience of Truth. Or they weren't able to tell the difference between an insight and a direct experience. Some people were only ending up with definitions:

"What is Life?"
"Let's look in the dictionary, 'Life is a growing process.'"
"You satisfied with that?"
"Yes."
"Ok. You're enlightened."

It is very valuable to work with words and ideas and get them squared away, but don't confuse that with enlightenment experiences. Having a very good, clear-cut definition of what a word means, or tagging the right word onto a clear idea, is very often taken mistakenly and innocently by people as enlightenment. It is not enlightenment.

Insights are even more often taken as enlightenment experiences. Someone suddenly sees something he has never seen before and it is quite exciting and he feels benefited by it because of the feeling of "Oh, now I SEE." But that in itself is not necessarily an enlightenment experience.

The difference between an enlightenment experience and an insight is primarily that an insight is had through a process and an enlightenment experience is not. An insight is had through the process of thinking and perception, of going through a mental procedure and arriving at a conclusion through logic and reason. The result is an insight. The very word describes it. It is an in-sight, an internal seeing, a perception, People say, "Ahhhh, I feel it,' I know it,' It's true:" Insights are beneficial to people and they are one of the greatest thrills that they'll have in life but they are not enlightenment. Many people in the therapeutic world, especially the humanities, have accepted insights as enlightenment experiences and they are not. It is a degradation of the word enlightenment and the tradition that was begun famously by Buddha for people to take definitions and insights as equivalent to enlightenment. You should not fall into that error. It is a major error.

There are two ways to deal with this matter of determining what an enlightenment experience is. One is to develop the capacity to determine what an enlightenment experience is and to be able to be conscious of that in someone else. This is accomplished by your own experience. You must first have the subjective experience yourself and that leads to the capacity to detect this in another. We will try to train you in this capacity in this course, although it is not that easy. Secondly, there is another way to solve the problem, and that is to not make the determination. It will make you a weaker master if you can't tell, but you can still master Enlightenment Intensives. The Enlightenment Intensive technique and format are so powerful that people will get enlightened anyway, even if you can't tell. So you have an easy out. It will make you a weaker master because you won't know when to change their question. If someone is trying to directly experience who he is and you can't tell when this has actually occurred, you're liable to say, "All right, that's good enough, go on to "What is Life?", when all he's had is an insight. He accepts the insight as an enlightenment experience and goes on and becomes an Enlightenment Master and the degeneration process has begun already.

You could deal with the situation by saying, "I'm letting you go on to this other question, but that's not saying you've had an enlightenment experience." But what if they did have an enlightenment experience and you couldn't tell? Then you've cast your uncertainty over the whole situation and in any case it won't change their experience one way or the other. Your comment doesn't change whether it was an insight or an enlightenment, but it makes it more difficult for them to communicate, especially if they have any respect for you and your being in the elevated position of mastering the Enlightenment Intensive.

I debated long and hard whether or not to use the term master. I finally settled that it should be used, that these people should be trained well enough so that they know what they're doing. So you need to know what enlightenment is and how to detect that state in another. It is not an easy requirement. In fact, it is the most difficult part of the course, which is why I decided to start with it. The mechanics of the course you can learn, and you can even pick up some skill in the methods and techniques and gain some familiarity with them. But we will have to work very hard on, one, your understanding of the definition of enlightenment, and two, your having an objective certainty of it. Of course the best thing to do is have an enlightenment experience yourself. Once you've had that, half the battle is won. Nevertheless, I'll still do my best to give you a verbal definition of enlightenment.

Enlightenment is impossible to define. It can't be done. But we can take some words and point in that direction. I use direct experience as the definition of enlightenment. One could have a direct experience of anything. It could be of a rock and then you'd be rock-enlightened. If it was of a tree, you'd be tree-enlightened. If it was of yourself, you'd be self-enlightened. So the kind of enlightenment only refers to what was directly experienced.

It is difficult to understand what direct experience is because the word "experience" denies what we're trying to say. If you could have an experience that was not an experience, but nevertheless ended up with what that was, then this would be an enlightenment experience. Enlightenment is not really an experience at all because experience is always a process, something that takes place. When you look at the wall there is the process of seeing. There is light bouncing off the wall which goes into the eye and strikes the retina; the nerve cells in the retina feed the information to the brain and it's passed around to four or five subcenters of the brain and it ends up in the interpretive centre as a visualization of a wall. That is a process. Therefore looking at the wall is not a direct experience; you are only experiencing the wall through the process of seeing. There is also the process of reasoning; "What could a wall be? I've been told it acts as some kind of barrier and I know what barriers are like, so therefore it must be like that. It's a material thing, so it's a barrier that is made out of material." In this way you come to a conclusion of what a wall is. Logical thinking, reasoning, remembering; these are indirect experiences by the way I've defined the term because they occur through a process.

Here is an example that is closer to a no-process situation: you know where the bathroom is in your house. Do you have to go through a process to know? Maybe you went through a process to find out, but now that you've got it, you've got it, You know where the bathroom is. You don't have to think, "Now I remember, I go down the hallway and to the left." You just know where the bathroom is. Also, you don't have to figure it out. And you don't have to ask anybody else, which is another process. That's like saying, "You tell me who I am. OK, now I know who I am." If you accept it that's all right, but you still have to go into the bathroom yourself. When you do, you know where it is and you no longer have to go through a process of working out where the bathroom is, although you went through a process to get there. You are now in this state of processlessness. You just know where the bathroom is, like you know what your name is. You don't have to remember. Direct experience is similar to that kind of thing.

In Sanskrit the word "anu" means "after"; "bhava" means "what it actually is", or "the thing itself experienced", or "consciousness of it." So after you've become directly conscious of what something is and you're in this state, it's called anubhava. There's no word for enlightenment in English which refers to an experience which is without an experience. So what do we mean by the word direct then? It means no process. The experience takes place but there is no experiencing. But right up to this state of no experiencing you could be touching, have emotions, mental concepts, and they may even be correct, but they're not direct. Watch that one closely'.

In the state of enlightenment there is no difference between that which one has directly experienced and the one who is enlightened. There is no difference. They are in union. There is no separation between the experiencer and the thing experienced. They are the same. Nor is there any sense of having come into that experience. The process which one has been going through up to enlightenment is no longer applicable. One has no sense of having arrived at it. It is the absolute itself. And that absolute is the individual himself. There is no difference between him and the Truth. In yoga it is called "samadhi" or "union'. There is no sense of, "Now, I'm in union with it." If there's a series of "I'm in union with it," that's not enlightenment. There is also no time sense of, "Now I know what I didn't know before." It's that "I've always known, I just didn't know I knew." It's just what is. It's not a matter of having found out. It's the eternal Truth itself. When a participant has that, then he has enlightenment.

You can't judge by symptoms. There are symptoms that go along with the enlightenment experience, but you can't go by symptoms to determine whether or not enlightenment has occurred. Sometimes there are all kinds of flashy side effects with an enlightenment experience. Sometimes there aren't any at all. And you can't go by verbal answers because anybody can learn the answers. Answers don't make you enlightened and they don't make you not enlightened. Just because you don't know the words doesn't mean you haven't had an enlightenment experience it just means you can't talk about it very well. Then how can you tell? Through no process at all. In other words, you can tell if someone else has had an enlightenment experience in the same way that you have an enlightenment experience yourself: through no how at all. Having a direct experience of another is the only way to tell whether or not that other is in a state of direct experience. There is no other way to be sure about it. In fact, there is no other way to be sure about anything, anytime, except by enlightenment because anything else has an element of doubt and an element of certainty to it. Doubt and certainty are conditions of the mind and do not exist in enlightenment.

This is a difficult skill to teach. Being an Enlightenment Master involves a lot of contact with other people and this is one form. But as I said, even if you don't fully gain this ability here in this course, you can still give successful Enlightenment Intensives. You will learn in this course how to drill yourself and eventually gain this capacity. In the mean-time you can still give intensives even though you can't always tell what enlightenment is in another person because you don't have to know and you don't have to comment about it. You can say, "Are you satisfied?" and the person can say, "Yes, I'm satisfied," He may say, "Well, am I enlightened?" Then you may say, "I don't know, Are you?" You can always get around it that way.

I tested it extensively to see if you can run an Enlightenment Intensive without ever committing one way or the other about it, and you can. I ran two Enlightenment Intensives that way just to experiment. I would not give any indication as to whether or not someone was enlightened. It slows things down a little bit and they kind of wander around in a fog sometimes but it doesn't make any real difference. After I satisfied myself of this I just did anything I wanted to at the moment.

You should know that there are not different kinds of enlightenment. There is not one kind of enlightenment experience that you get on Enlightenment Intensives, another kind that you get in Zen, another that you get from Yoga, another kind that Buddha had, and another kind that Jesus had. There are not different kinds of enlightenment. There is only one kind of enlightenment. There are different magnitudes of enlightenment and different things you can be enlightened with regard to, but there is only one kind of enlightenment and that is the direct experience of Truth, and that's it, It's not possible that there are two Truths. If you've had a direct experience, you've had a direct experience, that's all there is to it. You can use different words than someone else might use to try to describe it because enlightenment is actually, ultimately, indescribable. However, even if you can't describe it you can still do a rather good job of communicating it. You can communicate the enlightenment experience, but you cannot describe it.

So, there are degrees of enlightenment but only one kind. The enlightenment that people have on your Enlightenment Intensive is the same kind of enlightenment that Buddha had. There is no difference at all. Perhaps Buddha was more deeply enlightened but that is the only difference.

Once you have had an enlightenment experience you can never, ever, lose it. You may or may not be able to apply it very well in life. But an enlightenment experience is never lost under any circumstances. One's ability to apply it in life may get smashed up in the succeeding days and weeks after an Enlightenment Intensive because one is not around friendly and understanding people. But if you've had an enlightenment experience it is never lost, because enlightenment is eternal, independent of time. Therefore the potential to apply it to your life is always there. If a participant loses what he got from an insight, a conclusion or a feeling, it's because it was not an enlightenment experience. Enlightenment experiences are permanent and absolute. Once you are directly conscious of something, you can't be not conscious of it. You can think you were, and find out later that you weren't. But once absolute consciousness is obtained, that is that.


What is and is not Enlightenment
Study Questions

1. What is the most common and most serious error made by an Enlightenment Master?

2. What is the difference between an insight and an enlightenment experience?

3. How can a master determine whether a participant has had an enlightenment experience?

4. Define enlightenment.

5. Can a master determine whether a participant has had an enlightenment experience by observing symptoms?

6. Are there different kinds of enlightenment? What is the difference between the kind of enlightenment experiences one might have on an intensive and the experience of Buddha?

7. What would be the effect of telling someone on an Enlightenment Intensive that they had had an enlightenment experience when they had not?

8. What part do verbal answers play in a master's determination of whether a participant has had an enlightenment experience or not?

9. Explain why it is impossible to lose an enlightenment experience.

10. How would you handle a participant who insists that he has had a direct experience but who, in your estimation, has not?

11. Is it necessary for a master to be able to tell if a participant has had an enlightenment experience? If he cannot tell, what effect will this have on the intensive?