What Is Enlightened Recovery?

A feature article by an Alumbo member, Feb 27, 2008         

What is “Enlightened Recovery?”

The last thing this world needs is another term, or category, or kind of recovery. We live in a world in which the human mind has divided life into billions of categories, terms, phrases, names, programs, disciplines, religions, belief systems, philosophies, methods, paths and other things. The mind is insanely fragmented.

And that is the problem. The mind can only see its fragmented dream. This is a dream of self-centeredness. It cannot see the whole. So enlightened recovery is directed at seeing the whole of life, which means seeing reality for what it is.

Enlightened recovery is not another term or method to be added onto this long list of fragments. The term “enlightened recovery” is pointing to something much, much less than anything you have ever known through belief or thought. It is the absence of the notion that you must add anything to who you already are. It is presence itself. It is the waking up from the dream of thought, from the dream that you are a person separate from the rest of life who must add something to yourself, in order to be more fully yourself. This truth is so radical that it changes you completely. You realize yourself as freedom, love, peace, joy, and beingness. You do not find these things. The addict mind believes it must "find" what it is looking for, because it is under the grand illusion that it is separate from that which it seeks. This illusion keeps the seeking in place. This is the problem. This is the dream. So enlightened recovery is directed at helping you see who you truly are, beyond this dream.

Addiction means to be identified with a thought-based self which constantly seeks more to add to itself. More future, which means more thought.

An addicted person adds more and more to himself, in a futile attempt to escape the reality of what is in this moment. He is constantly seeking more money, drugs, alcohol, clothes, cookies, sex, work or whatever his vice is. And when (and if) he gets clean, unless he realizes his true nature in this moment, recovery itself becomes an attempt to add more to himself--to achieve a more spiritual self. There is no such thing as being more spiritual than another. That is ego. There is only one spirit. Whether it is a drug, or a more spiritual self, seeking is seeking. In that sense, everyone is an addict, some are addicted to heroin, some to work, and others just to thought itself.

Humans are addicted to thought. Period. They are addicted to the constant movement towards future that thought provides. The content is different from one addict to the next. The content of the thought may be "I need more beer," or "I need more money," or "I need the latest, greatest I_Phone." Although the content is interchangeable and is different from one addict to the next, this underlying seeking movement towards future is the same.

The dream self's very fuel is more, and so long as it perceives that it must gain and attain more (which is always the case), there will be a fear of incompletion or a sense of "not enough" experienced in this moment. More pointedly, the sense of "not enough" is inextricably tied to the "need for more." They are flipsides of the same coin. As long as you are looking to thoughts of future for a more complete self, the sense of "not enough" is here, and as long as the sense of "not enough" is here, you will look for a more complete self in thoughts of future. This is much like a rat on a wheel. Going nowhere. It is disturbingly self-centered loop, which continues repeating and perpetuating itself until you step out of it, and come into the present moment fully.

ADVERTISEMENT:

“Enlightened recovery” is not the addition of yet another belief system, thought process, method or program. That would simply keep the rat spinning around the wheel. It is, in fact, the negation of all seeking, all grasping, all spinning, and all chasing.

Enlightened recovery is not a new path. It will not take you farther down “your path.” It is a realization that there is no path. There is no “your path,” or “my path.” It is seeing reality for what it truly is, and seeing beyond the dream self, which is just a self-centered interpretation of reality. It is the realization that the path is just another drug to which the self has attached. It is seeing the time-based "me" as a dream of thought, and realizing there is only life, which is always now, and that you are that life.

Enlightened recovery is the realization that you are already free, and that the only thing obscuring this truth is the constantly moving mind, trying so hard to escape this moment. Whereas the ego believes through thought that it must keep working towards some future event (a high, a fix, a promotion, financial security, a lottery jackpot, even spiritual enlightenment), enlightenment allows you to see that you are already whole in this moment. This is why enlightenment is negation. It is about negation of all the false beliefs in your head which have led to a life of suffering and, if you have identified yourself as an “addict,” to a life of painful addiction.

Enlightenment, then, is waking up out of the dream that you are thought, or that thought can in any way tell you who you are, or give you what you ultimately want. What is seen from this awakening is that all of life is One, and that any separation whatsoever--between you and me, between this path and that path, or between you and your path, you and your happiness, or you and your recovery--is illusory and created completely by thought.

In this realization, you realize that your mind-made self is 100% illusion. So the idea that you are a separate self who can find fulfillment by adding anything to yourself through future (whether it be a drug or a “more spiritual self”) is 100% illusion. “More” is only ever “more thought.”

And so recovery, if it is just keeping your mind busy, on some self-created mind-made path, is like a drug. With drugs, you seek escape. And through the time-based spiritual search, you are seeking escape.

True spiritual awakening happens when it is realized that there is no “you” separate from life and so “you” cannot escape life, despite all your efforts. Life is always now, here, in this moment. Through presence, you become at one with the space of now. There is nothing to be dependent on because nothing is separate from you--separate from this space of now. The mind cannot grasp this. Presence knows it. Awakening involves the realization that you are not a concept or label or thought. All dependency, escaping, and identification with concepts are barriers to true spiritual awakening. The good news is that these barriers cannot survive in the light of your presence.

"Enlightened recovery" just means presence.

You are here, at one with life, because you realize you are life. You cannot "add" anything to a life which is already here, and already full. In presence, you are fully at one with whatever is arising. If thought, frustration, anger, or fear arises, you are present with that fully. The only thing which would make any of that into a problem is resistance which is thought-based.

Presence is being fully here, in the now. Each step, each thought, each emotion, each movement, each breath, each word, each person, each situation, each craving, each obsession arises within this space of now. Presence means realizing on a level much deeper than thought that you are not any of these things which arise. You are the opening or space in which they arise.

This liberation devours all questions, all seeking, all searching, all dependency, and all suffering.

Email this page to a friend Display printer-friendly version Rate this item / View member comments Report irrelevant / inappropriate content Return to the Alumbo! home page