Man’s best teacher

A dog is not only a man’s best friend, he may also be his best teacher. A dog embodies so many qualities of the Enlightenment described by the world’s great teachers–from Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed and Lao Tzu—that it’s hardly a coincidence that dog is god spelled backwards.

All spiritual teachers put love as critical for cultivating the highest state of consciousness we call Enlightenment. The family dog demonstrates a form of unconditional love that’s hard to find in our world. Many a husband who’s turned his head a little too long to gaze at the “hottie” in a mini-skirt, has discovered how quickly his spouse’s love is less than unconditional. What if a woman gains 75 pounds? Unfortunately, that has moved far too many men in our disposable culture to be on the lookout for a slimmer (and, while they’re at it, newer) model. What adult doesn’t like to think his parents love him unconditionally? Yet, break a few laws, and even the kindest of parents have been known to disown such a child, or even turn him in to the authorities.

But it doesn’t matter how much you weigh, how many hotties and hunks yo ogle, it doesn’t even matter how many other dogs you pet, your dog is your pal forever, loving you unconditionally to his dying breath. A dog will greet you with a wagging tail and endless licks and kisses. (Does your wife or husband do that? I didn’t think so.) You can yell at a dog in anger, and h may cower away in fear, but an hour later, he’s forgiven you of your cruelty. Most spouses are less forgiving.

Consciousness firmly awakened in the present is necessary for achieving the highest states of human development. In Eckhart Tolle’s best-selling The Power of Now, he elucidated the necessity for, and advantages of, keeping yourself in the present moment, as compared to looking over your shoulder at the past, or into the future that’s not yet come.

A dog never dwells in what once was, nor is he obsessed with what may be on its way. He’s focused on the present. Even when lying down to catch some shut-eye, he often keeps one eye open to the goings on around him.

Enthusiasm, from the Greek entheos or “in god,” is another attribute of higher consciousness. If a wagging tail doesn’t remind you to stay enthusiastic, nothing will. Retrievers of the Golden and Labrador type are perfect embodiments of an enthusiasm that’s hard to top in this world. A person can throw the same ball to the same Retriever over and over again but, while the person soon gets bored, the dog never does. Each new toss is a brand new ball to fetch. His presence in the moment and enthusiasm for chasing the same thing time and again display the freshness of an awakened state of being that our great teachers have both explained and embodied.

With all these things that dogs teach us, who really are the masters? Perhaps they love to awaken us so much that we’re like our teachers’ pets.

The Buddha in his Enlightenment

The Enlightenment I’m going to speak about in this blog is much more than the Enlightenment that the great French philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire wrote about in the so-called Age of Enlightenment that helped create the idealism and egalitarianism that led to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  These two documents helped inspire a more enlightened way of looking at government throughout the world for decades and centuries to come.  They still do.

The Enlightenment I’m going to speak about in this blog is also more than the understanding of the Law of Attraction and Creative Thought that’s become so popular with the best-selling book and video, The Secret.  It’s also more than the understanding of New Age principles.  It’s the realization of living truths that were recorded more than 40 centuries ago.

The Enlightenment I’m going to speak about in this blog is more than the Cosmic Consciousness flashes depicted in the revolutionary book, Cosmic Consciousness, written slightly over a century ago by the Canadian psychiatrist R.M. Bucke.  In this seminal classic, a desert island read for me if I was limited to even just a handful of books, the Walt Whitman biographer voluminously revered the mystical glimpses of great seers, sages, philosophers, poets and the like throughout history.  The book is so important in the history of consciousness because the spiritual experiences that it celebrates are given greater importance than the ritual performance that takes place a couple of hours every weekend in America.

As important as all these different versions of Enlightenment are, Enlightenment is much, much more.  It’s only fitting in this age of 24/7 that Enlightenment becomes widely known as the all-time 24/7 state that it is, rather than an occasional glimpse or fleeting experience that it isn’t.  You may visit Paris as a tourist for a vacation: a Parisian on the other hand, is French.  And so it is with Enlightenment: a perpetual condition of transformed consciousness as much as it is of purified physiology.  Because it takes the transformation of the nervous system to consciously reflect for all times—all the time—the timelessness of the Transcendent that’s your essential nature, the ground of your inner Being, your true higher Self.