Why do I keep putting off spiritual enlightenment? Is it because I fear that there won't be 'me' as I know myself now to enjoy a new life of love, confidence, bliss, and unshakable peace?

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Let’s be blunt shall we?

You’re not “putting off” enlightenment. You’re simply nowhere near spiritual enlightenment and it’ll be at least a half dozen more lifetimes before you’ll even be anywhere near starting the non-dual journey.

See, these are what we in the biz call ‘rookie questions’. Those without any actual experience in the subject matter read some descriptions and worry about the claims made. Oh boy have I heard them all.

One of my favorites to scare off the sillies is that enlightenment kills your sex drive. See, sex is an identification, and you lose all that when you’re enlightened so those who get there just are totally uninterested in sex.

It’s a TOTAL load of crap, enlightenment merely makes you uninterested in bad sex, not in all sex, but that doesn’t stop it from being a fun one to scare people with.

The fears of enlightenment interact very interestingly with the traits of enlightenment that get desired. Confidence, peace, bliss, vs losing whatever ‘me’ happens to be at the time, particularly the aforementioned sex. The idea is that you give up one set of things in exchange for a better set of things.

The connection between what’s given up and what’s granted in return is imagined and comes from pure ego. People have been taught that sex is bad, so they imagine the ultimate spiritual advancement means eliminating sex. Ego is when the mind gets ruled by the body and the body’s simple desires. This crowds out reason and more interesting ways to consider things. You want sex, wanting things means you do bad things for them, so it must be the wanting that’s bad.

So the mind is ruled, not by sex, but by the desire to be better by excising sex from life! This is how you, eventually, get preachers who hide sexually abusing altar boys by preaching against homosexuality! A certain aspect of existence gets branded, for political reasons, as bad, and then it forces people to act against natural instincts.

All of this is what the Buddha railed against. It’s not discarding the self or anything silly like that that causes one to be enlightened. ‘Discarding the self’ is almost always a front for whatever silly thing is considered morally unkosher at the time. Which always happens to obscure actual morally bad things that you really shouldn’t do!

The Buddha was interested in methods, in techniques, that provoked a particular state of being. Not a state of morality, a state of being. This form of existence involves a kind of perception. Not that you don’t exist. Not that your ego doesn’t exist. Not that you’re gone.

But merely that when you experience something, you lose yourself in it while you’re doing that. It’s not an all or nothing thing, and you get better at it over time. It’s a gradual thing, not sudden at all. Non-duality means the self doesn’t get in the way of experiencing. Not that the self doesn’t exist. It just disappears while you’re seeing cool stuff.

If you’re fully enlightened, then you’re seeing cool stuff all the time. Meaning your self is pretty much always muted. You can perceive the self, making the self a cool thing that you’re perceiving. Meaning you are your total cool amazing self all the time. Leading to the “life of love, confidence, bliss, and unshakable peace.”

But really that’s the province of the stage after enlightenment that I talk about. That of mythic existence. It would be impossible to make your life a myth if you didn’t have anything to build the myth around!

Embrace the long wait times of spiritual advancement and the daily work of making yourself better every day. The more you really know about it, the less you care about accelerating the process. Every day, remember you’re an amazing person with wonderful abilities and a connection to the divine, then exercise that connection. It’s really that simple, it doesn’t get any better than that, external rewards are just window dressing around the essential joy that comes from just being alive.