Integrating our enlightened perspective with our everyday lives completes the final stage of spiritual awakening. We are now bringing our gift of awakened presence to the world.
The following are signs that one is realizing this stage of spiritual development:
1. At this stage you continue to play your part on the world’s stage without ever becoming that part.
2. There is no fear of being influenced or of losing your way. You fully engage in life without any reservations.
3. You no longer follow anyone else’s path through life since every awakened presence is a unique expression of being.
4. There are no signs or indications that you are awake; you just live unobtrusively in the world.
5. Your happiness and contentment are no longer dependent upon any external or internal circumstances.
6. You serve no one, but your entire life is one of service.
7. Your generosity is unending since you cling to nothing and are willing to share everything you have.
8. You respond authentically and appropriately to all that you encounter.
9. No trace of self or enlightenment remains. Conduct and view are in perfect balance and harmony.
10. Your presence is calm and soothing. Your way of being is pure and uncomplicated.
11. The four “divine emotions” are expressed spontaneously and effortlessly:
A. Loving-Kindness – Our perspective has changed from “self and other” to “I am the other.”
B. Compassion – It is understanding the universal predicament of the human condition;
C. Natural Joy – We rejoice in the successes of others knowing that it is essentially our successes as well. We deeply appreciate all the beauty, goodness and truth that we encounter without attaching to it.
D. Equanimity – Serenity; feeling at peace and not having to look for things to delight in or by which to be entertained. Peace does not come from the satisfaction of our desires but from the ending of our identification with any desires that may arise.
12. Everyone you meet is transformed, whether they realize it or not, since your presence is a vortex of infinite space and love.
In Zen there is a model of four levels of satori or of knowing the essential truth of life:
1. First one realizes the empty nature of all experience. However, the student takes this realization as another experience, with him as the experiencer.
2. In the second satori the experiencer disappears and there is only emptiness. However, the student will report that both the experience and the experiencer has disappeared. The non-experience is still being cognized.
3. In the third satori nothing can be claimed. Only silence prevails. It is so empty that nothing can be said about it.
4. In the last satori there is no more going back. Even the idea of transcendence has been transcended. No matter what happens in the world does not affect the student. He has become part of the organic whole of life.
One now knows that it is time to descend the mountain and reenter the everyday world.
A Zen master once said about the conquest of illusion:
We have ascended the mountain of reality and from its top we have seen the vision of things as they are. With that vision in our hearts, we can safely descend and return to the valleys where men live. For wherever we go, the vision of the mountaintop will be before our eyes and we shall see all things, even the most familiar, in the light of the eternal. We have heard the song of eternal creation and in that song, even the harsher sound of this world of illusions has gained a profound and lasting meaning. What to us appeared as suffering and evil, is seen to be as much and as necessary part of that eternal song as that which appeared as joy and righteousness. Having seen the vision, having heard the song, we can live indeed. We may now walk in time but we live in the eternal. We may behold illusion but we know reality.