What am I?
Have you enjoyed the peace of a quiet mind, but are frustrated by the inability to stop it at will? Do you suffer over what you desire but don’t have? Do you have a sense you should “let go” of certain things, but cannot? Are you intrigued by the idea of enlightenment but don’t know where to start? Or have you meditated for years but feel like you’ve hit a limit?
We see (mental body) enlightenment neither as a state to achieve, a transcendence project, nor the realization that you don’t exist. It’s what happens when you heal the fear of not-being.
Spiritual maturity in Sagehood gives you an enduring meta-perspective, the ability to live in the moment without effort, and access to inherent stillness and spaciousness that are the hallmarks of the Divine Yin.
What is that? That’s what you find out when you fully experience that you’re not what you’ve always thought.
An Enlightened Self?
What Zen sees as the final destination, we call “mental body ensoulment” as only one-third and not all of consciousness evolution.
Most eastern teachings require you to transcend your humanity, whereas we see Sagehood as a path to emotionally process a fear included in your humanity.
This means you can be an enlightened sage without having to deny your real, soul-level individuality. Especially for westerners, the requirement to give over one’s individuality is problematic and prevents awakening–not because it isn’t real, but because it is.
Rather than aiming to experience that there is no self, Edenity orients toward the experience of the self as a verb rather than a noun. This is your soul.
Our mental body enlightenment practices serve to help you experience a very real aspect of your soul that doesn’t fit into your mind, by emotively processing the terror of the loss of the noun-ified self.
Rather than this delivering you to a flat, dissociated state of consciousness that is seen in so many enlightened people, it’s a bandwidth of ensoulment completely compatible with living an individualized and lushly emotive human life (Personhood) as well as having an abiding, loving relatedness with the Divine Yang (Sainthood).
Can You Relate?
We have collected and simplified some typical questions and concerns we hear over and over again. Maybe our answers will help you a bit. And if you want to go deeper into a topic, listen to the appropriate episode from our podcast “The Heart of Soul”.
This is unfortunately a common modern tragedy. Edenity doesn’t see such awakenings as the entire solution. We have a new picture for how nonduality fits into all of reality that allows emotion and no-thingness to co-exist.
Listen to “The Heart of Soul” podcast episode 33Edenity resolves this issue by giving you the experience that you as soul are essentially a verb, rather than a noun. In traditional Zen, you’re supposed to lose yourself completely. In Mental Body Ensoulment, we offer a way to lose one version of yourself and find another.
Listen to “The Heart of Soul” podcast episode 34We honor that feeling. Oneness is a blend of Sagehood and Sainthood that isn’t a completion of either path. It’s common for people to get stuck there, and avoid the challenge of Notness on one path and the integration of Divine Will on the other.
Listen to “The Heart of Soul” podcast episode 54All of those at the same time, in one way, but not the way they’ve traditionally been taught, because otherwise they couldn’t fit together. The lofty goal of Edenity is simultaneously being a mature person, an enlightened sage, and a God-realized saint.
Listen to “The Heart of Soul” podcast episode 29We don’t see emotions as negative, nor humanity something to transcend. Real healing imparts a natural transcendence, but we don’t see transcendence as a goal for maturity.
Listen to “The Heart of Soul” podcast episode 13Nothing! That can’t be done for very long and is a misunderstanding of the practice. Meditation in its purest form is about trying to find the meditator and experiencing that it can’t be found.
Listen to “The Heart of Soul” podcast episode 6A Birth of Self, Not a Death
It’s not uncommon for serious meditators to encounter the fear of not-being, but unless it’s specifically targeted, the tendency for protection mechanisms to veer away from that fear and toward transcendence is subtle and inevitable.
Edenity doesn’t see transcendence as healthy or productive. It gives your already overwhelmed and hurting protection mechanisms a powerful, dissociative tool to avoid discomfort. This ultimately dead-ends, potentially delaying real healing for lifetimes.
The difference between healing fear and transcending self may seem minor, but it’s actually radical. Healing the fear of not-being delivers you to a deeper version of your soul that abides with the Yin Aspect of the Divine which integrates into who you are as an ensouled person. This allows you to be both “in” the world and “not in” at the same time.
The integration of the Divine Yin into what you are imparts a natural, healthy transcendence that requires no will or energy to maintain and supports your alive expression of an ensouling self.
Effortless Being
As Sagehood backlights all of your dualistic experience, it imparts a structural meta-perspective that reduces projections, attachments, and existential suffering. Most importantly, it does this without creating an enlightened protector using will and energy to do so.
When what you essentially are and the Divine Yin is your ground of being rather than an existential fear-based identity, everything changes. You won’t have to try to live in the moment, let go, or disbelieve illusory thoughts. You won’t be able not to.
An Evolution of Enlightenment
It’s our truth that the tide of the Divine Yin is currently rising, resulting in more people than ever waking up to Her. At the same time, traditional forms of Buddhistic enlightenment are less and less supported by Life. That means that awakening people are not only unable to transcend their emotions, but their awakenings cause those feelings to be even more acute. This causes tremendous confusion and suffering.
What’s needed now is a way to receive the Divine Yin that honors the personal heart as well, so we are not flooded by Divinity but can learn to swim with it in the waters of our own soul.
Over 2500 years ago, the Buddha made one of the most significant discoveries in the history of consciousness, but in our picture it was also incomplete. Edenity serves the evolution of his gift by identifying the soul-I as the enlightening one, creating a bridge between duality and nonduality, self and God, wisdom and love.
Mental Body Ensoulment allows one to invest personally without attachment, feel emotion without flooding, and perhaps most importantly, creates room for abiding with Divine Will in Sainthood.