This is no different than the elevation of Yeshua to God status, the seeking of heaven, or believing that killing infidels will earn you seventy-two virgins when you get to paradise. This distortion renders such enlightenment practices as nothing more than sophisticated spiritual heroin, as its users use the glamorous self-image of seeker-hood and juice off the very real spiritual states they’re attaining, but with fundamentally unhealthy and avoidant motivations. All of this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the reason to seek Buddhistic enlightenment in the first place. It’s not a way to have a more relaxed lifestyle, to experience bliss, to alleviate suffering, to reduce conflict, or to create world peace.  

As offered in Barron’s Enheartenment, Buddhistic mental body enlightenment is not about obliterating the mischievous ego that is the source of all of our problems, it is about healing the fear of its loss by coming face to face with the very real reality that from the mental body perspective there is no “I” experiencing anything, but rather that experience has us. This awakening is a terrifying process of deconstructing a false sense of relating to self and everything else. The oneness bliss state is a side effect on the way to this awakening as the deconstruction of differences between self and other melt away. It is neither the ultimate destination, nor the Ultimate Reality, nor the goal of transcendental enlightenment practice. Identifying it as any of these things will only keep you further from What It Actually Is and keep you hooked into a sophisticated drug addiction as you unwittingly medicate your emotional pain held in the unconscious of your very real Self. 

Because of this, any methodology that advertises any kind of good feeling state as the reward for all your hard meditation work is distorted at its foundation, and in the bigger picture damaging to individuals who practice it. This is because the drug-high of the bliss-state is so powerful it can be used to numb out huge wells of suffering that Buddhistic practice is simply incapable of addressing. In the absence of effective methods to address emotional based suffering, the use of Buddhistic enlightenment practice to transcend our emotional wounding has been understandable, but it is time now that we recognize that it has failed. Not only are exceedingly few people enlightened, but those who are display obvious play-outs of untouched emotional wounding as said. One only needs to scratch the surface of a sagely teacher’s personal life to see the evidence for this. Daniel Barron, as part of his paradigm of Theohumanity, created a rigorous practice called Emotional Body Enlightenment which he offers is a necessary pre-requisite before beginning nondual practice The depth and breadth of this paradigm cannot be covered here, but suffice it to say that there exists in earth today ways of healing our emotional wounding so that we can healthily approach nonduality without using it as a designer drug. 

Certainly many Buddhistically influenced people will read this article and say its author clearly is inflammatory, unmindfully creating conflict, and that we all need to work toward understanding each other peacefully. The fact is that rarely do significant advancements in the evolution of consciousness happen without conflict. New world-views always create great disagreement as was the case with Yeshua, Muhammad, Moses, Galileo, Gandhi, etc. Even the teachings of Siddhartha Gotama challenged other religions at the time so deeply that he was subject to murder attempts. So clearly, the founder of Buddhism was as much a revolutionary as the other prophets throughout history and not the bliss-suffused, dispassionate character that has become the archetype of the modern neo-Buddhist. This exposes the most glaringly obvious distortion inherent in Buddhism today: if the Buddha had been a Buddhist, there would never have been Buddhism. Gotama was a man of passion! Perhaps, though, Buddhists have themselves observed the enormity of this contradiction within their own paradigm and are so blissfully enlightened they saw it only as dualistic maya so simply “let it go.” Transcendence is exceedingly convenient that way: you can let go of any aspect of it that doesn’t work for you, without having to examine your criteria for what does or doesn’t work or your unconscious motivation for transcending it in the first place.

 In summary, what is needed now is a model that allows us to not only easily see through the distortions we have inherited from the teachers before us, but a process by which we can actually embody undistorted living. Only by shedding the false gods to which we cling to medicate our suffering will we be able to abide with the Living God Itself. Such a model is now offered by Daniel Barron and his paradigm of Theohumanity. Only by healing our emotional based suffering, the reason we had to grab on in the first place, will we be able to exist without these false gods. Muhammad said, “There is no God but God” and many teachers have agreed, but no spiritual teacher in our history until now has offered an actual process that is specifically designed to heal the reason we clutched to false gods in the first place and lovingly burn to the ground all the false aspects of ourselves in service of the spring loaded truth of our Authentic Self below. To the degree we exist as a false self, we can only experience a false god. The time of belief- and transcendence-based spirituality rooted in negativization of the Self is over as it has ostensibly failed. It is only our false self that has been the problem, and only because we’ve not understood what to do with it. 

We are not pathetic human beings here to escape to a “higher” spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings who have incarnated here to have a human experience. Our humanity is divine in itself and neither needs to be saved nor transcended, both of which only recapitulate the invalidation of our emotional humanity from childhood and stagnatively perpetuate our suffering. As long as we bring our personal pain to the doorstep of some Aspect of God, be that the bliss of oneness, the Absolute, Essence, the Merciful Allah, Christ the Savior, Yahweh, etc. we will be avoiding what is our (and not God’s) responsibility to heal. Until and unless we do this, our experience of the Divine will always be distorted by our need for It to carry our pain like the parents we never had, and it is this distortion, this false godification, that is the root of millennia of spiritually justified insanity that we as a species can no longer endure. 

As an intrinsic element of Theohumanity, Daniel Barron’s Emotional Body Enlightenment practice is the first dharma to offer an emotional healing process inside a spiritual paradigm, Theohumanity, that can metaphysically and experientially reconcile the existence of individual Self, Nonduality, and the Living Maker. It offers a process to lovingly deconstruct the false self that is the creator of our false gods, but it is not to be believed in. Those who are called to experience it will determine for themselves what is true.

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