Imperialism is alive and well in the 21st century.  

It exists wherever hugely powerful institutions vie for the right to colonialize the consciousness of the human being.

Political systems, institutional religions and multinational capitalist entities all compete to dominate the bodies, minds and activities of every human being on our planet.

Our minds are structured from birth to respond to the appetites of the so-called “free market.”  Our bodies are being appended by devices created by the marketplace that demand our attention, our compliance, our obeisance.

Technology no longer exists simply to improve the quality of human life.  Science almost exclusively serves its profit beholden masters.  Lacking expectation of profit, the institutions of science and indeed, the institutionalized support of knowledge & culture for its own sake, fade into memory.

The human being alone must reclaim the sovereign terrain of personal consciousness.  We must not allow the oligarchs of capitalism, the tyrants of religious extremism and the political agendas of nation-states to colonize away all hope of a personal consciousness that embodies the human being’s constant search to freely learn, grow, consecrate and perpetuate minds and bodies that are capable of exploring the entire topography of human potentiality.

 Enlightenment exists as an extraordinary gift for persons to explore, cultivate and develop the art of human being.  Enlightenment can be both a pursuit and an accomplishment that allows an individual to act in the world with the greatest possible freedom and independence.

Certainly, the word “enlightenment” can indicate differing expectations and outcomes for particular traditions.

In several ensuing posts, I will explain how I am using the term enlightenment, and what it means for the project of reclaiming the sovereignty of personal and transpersonal human consciousness.

For me, enlightenment is nothing less than a fundamental reversal of the foundation for personal consciousness. Typically, we believe that the content of our minds and the events of our lives constitute the nature of personal identity and provides the ground for human behavior.  We believe that the content of our minds, emotions, feelings, sense of personal history, beliefs, opinions–even our awareness of time as a chronological phenomenon, establish the foundation for our “personalities.”  We believe that our sense of well being, how we feel about ourselves and the world, is the effect caused by our mental self-perceptions, our personal feelings about the events of our lives, our successes, failures and everything else that dominates the space of our personal consciousness.

Meditation and the various disciplines of tantric and yogic science can be instrumental in developing and establishing a quality of consciousness that is grounded not in activity, but in silence, not in temporal chronology, but in absolute stillness.  It is possible to establish silent stillness as the predominant character of personal consciousness.  

This new ground of dynamic emptiness initiates within the space of the mind a profound quality of unconditional contentedness.  We begin to realize that all personal and social activity play on the stage of this perfect ground of tranquility.  When our personal consciousness plays upon the stage of absolute silent stillness, no longer are the events of our lives, our relationships, our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, the determiners of our personal satisfaction.  When our minds and bodies are grounded in profound relaxation and stillness, we are free to act with a quality of freedom unequaled by any previous experience of personal being.

And this is only the beginning…