Today, with rising unemployment rates, it's probably difficult to find anyone who's willing to work for free. Most job-seekers are driven by the need for money. They need money to pay for the necessities of life such as, clothes, food, shelter, entertainment, and so forth. These are the things that motivate us to sell our life hours for money.
There are some people who believe they are willing to work for free, because of their commitment to enlightenment. For those of us who believe this way, we are thought by others to be a little kooky. And, perhaps, rightfully so.
Some of us are painfully misguided by our concept of enlightenment and what it means for us to exist with others in the world. When we take the time to think about it, working for free or working for a higher awareness seems painfully naive for those providing for their families. Yet, if we look a little closer at what enlightenment means, we are able to see that naivete is based on our beliefs.
By working to achieve enlightenment, we must also change the criteria we are using to evaluate our lives. This requires us to go beyond the comparisons and evolve to another awareness about power and success. At this level of awareness, we use a criteria that clearly delineates the utilitarian value of enlightenment in our personal lives.
To work free is analogous to working without expecting or attaching ourselves to the results. We are working for the sake of working. This type of working is different from just working in a mindless sense. Now it's connected to working with an enlightened consciousness.
As enlightenment-seekers, we just work. In some cases, our work is more theoretical than we desire it to be. Sometimes we forget what we are doing because we become unclear about the meaning of enlightenment. Enlightenment becomes abstract, intangible, imaginary, and far away. It exists in another place like we think about Heaven and Hell.
For those of us working on achieving enlightenment, we struggle at times to make sense of what this actually means. A few of us, overcome with enlightenment fervor, believe it means just what it says: a fully awaken person. So we will ourselves to believe when we are writing, conducting workshops, public speaking, meditating and praying, we have no expectations about the outcome of our work. We are just working.
Nevertheless, like it or not, we are working with expected results. To illustrate this perspective, let's use the example of preparing for an empowerment workshop.
To prepare for the workshop we must do the marketing, including various types of advertisement, rent the facility, develop workshop handouts, and so on. We do this because we want to get people to attend our workshop. This means we are attached to the results of the workshop. In other words, we are not just working. We are working to have a successful workshop.
Meanwhile, to understand the concept of "just working," we must go to another level of awareness; the awareness found only in intuitive consciousness. At the intuitive consciousness level our awareness of life beyond words and deeds becomes clearer. Now we're able to clearly understand how to work without expecting or trying to control the results from our actions.
For most of us, if not all of us, intuitive consciousness is something we talk about, but know very little about. While we believe it exits, we cannot prove it the way we prove the validity of mathematical equations. In other words, it's epistemological unprovable, especially in a manner we can accept. So, in the main, we are left with our beliefs about the existence of something, intuitive consciousness, which is similar to our beliefs about the existence of Heaven and Hell.
Meanwhile, where do we get the beliefs that intuitive consciousness, heaven and hell exist in the first place? Yet we work everyday to achieve entry into or escape from these places.
Similarly, to discover intuitive consciousness, we must be prepared to do things that will clear our minds to become aware of things we previously believed didn't exist. This requires us to search deep within our beliefs to find the clarity to free ourselves to travel to unknown levels of awareness. There, deep within the bowels of our unconditioned thoughts, we will discover the existence of intuitive consciousness.
In intuitive consciousness we are fully awake. We clearly perceive life beyond suffering, aging, and dying. We are no longer using a victim criteria to interpret our actions. We see life beyond the arbitrary benchmarks we use to evaluate our progress during the different societal epochs of the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and so forth.
For now, let's acknowledge we are attached to controlling the results from our work. And we continue to do this because this is our level of awareness now. This acknowledgement provides us with the opportunity to search for enlightenment, without clearly knowing exactly what enlightenment means.
Now our work is devoted specifically to the search for a different awareness than the one we are currently using to define who we are.
For additional information on enlightenment, please read "Seeds from the Ashes" on http://www.amazon.com/
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