The Enlightenment Intensive Retreat
By Jack Wexler

The Aha! Experience. It is the direct experience of the absolute truth. It has been described as the experience of union or oneness. People wakened by a direct experience often exclaim, "Aha!" or "It's ME!" or "This is It!," or "OH my god!" If you ask 100 people on the street about enlightenment, you'd get 100 different responses ranging from ignorance, uncertainty, preconceived ideas to presentations filled with clarity, truth and direct knowing.

The dictionary says the word enlightenment means 'to illuminate,' or 'to comprehend the truth of something you want to know'; or 'to free yourself from a state of ignorance.' The Western Zen Buddhist meditation teacher, Philip Kapleau, translates the Japanese word 'Satori' into the English word enlightenment. Satori means 'Instantaneous Awakening'. It is the elevated state of self-realization that Zen meditators and Enlightenment Intensive participants aim for. Zen Masters poetically describe it as 'Opening the Minds Eye' or 'Awakening to your True Nature.'

People around the world point to the enlightenment experience by calling it many different names: direct experience, self-realization, god consciousness, kensho, reality, Truth, etc. Zen masters say that 'pointing at the moon isn't the moon,' which is to say that the idea of enlightenment shouldn't be confused with the thing itself. To know what enlightenment is, you have to directly experience it for yourself.

Charles Berner, the originator of the Enlightenment Intensive Retreat says, “Enlightenment is the direct experience of the truth. In the case of self-enlightenment, it is the direct experience of the truth of you. By direct experience is meant by no way or no via. Not by seeing, thinking, believing, deciding, reasoning, feeling or not by any other way. Direct experience of the truth is enlightenment.”

Jeff Love who has been facilitating Enlightenment Intensives since 1970 says that, “words are inadequate to convey the meaning of enlightenment, but that you'll know what I mean when you yourself have experienced it.”

If you’re hungry, why eat the menu? Reading the menu in a restaurant never fulfils your hunger. To satisfy your hunger for food you have to eat real food. At the Enlightenment Intensive Retreat the enlightenment experience is always the main feast on the menu. If you are hungry for the Absolute Truth, eating ideas or concepts or indirect experiences will not satisfy. Why eat the menu when you can eat the real thing?

What is needed to experience enlightenment in a weekend?

1. Intense Effort: The main methods for seeking enlightenment are to keep your attention focused for a long time on that which you want to be enlightened upon. This requires you to maintain an intense effort with relaxed concentration.
2. Mastery of Attention: This is the ability to put your attention on the object of your enlightenment and keep it there despite what distractions you may face. The power of the enlightenment dyad structure is that another individual repeatedly tells you to put your attention on the object of enlightenment.
3. An Appropriate focus: A variety of means have been devised in different spiritual traditions to help people keep their attention on the object of enlightenment. Candles, breathing, sounds, pictures and statues have all been used. The technique used in the Enlightenment Intensive Retreats uses a repeated self-enquiry contemplation such as ‘who am I’ to focus and channel your energy.
4. The Enlightenment Dyad Structure: This is the technique used in the Enlightenment Intensive Retreat. The word dyad is a Greek word and it means the number two, as in two people. An enlightenment dyad is a formal and structured contemplation and communication exercise for two people that increase your ability to relate yourself to others. Relating is the key principle that accelerates the process of enlightenment.
5. Enlightenment Master: The primary quality of a person who facilitates an Enlightenment Intensive is the absolute certainty that he or she can get participants enlightened. This certainty comes from (a) personal enlightenment experiences, b) the dedication to help others and (c) from past success in helping people through the many difficulties that arise when one faces the barriers on a journey of enlightenment. The Enlightenment Master is adept at providing a supportive environment in which enlightenment is highly likely to occur and one in which intellectual or phenomena experiences are not substituted or mistaken for enlightenment. The term ‘Enlightenment Master’ is drawn from Eastern spiritual traditions in general and the Zen Buddhist tradition in particular. ‘Master’ is used in the sense of one who is adept, not in the sense of a power relationship as in master/slave’. A more Western version of the term ‘master’ would be a facilitator, guide or teacher.
6. A Balanced & Intense Schedule: The Enlightenment Intensive provides a balanced schedule of daily activities and processes to heal, purify and awaken one’s body, mind and feelings to the truth of oneself. The schedule includes a balance of intense effort and rest, nutritious food and snacks, silent meditations, movement meditations, contemplative walks and the enlightenment dyad technique. The daily meditative activities begin early and end late. This intense meditative focus of the schedule dissolves the impurities of the body, mind, and emotions, lessening the opportunities for inputting new impurities.
7. A Simple and Pure Diet: The body must have sufficient strength and stamina to continue and persist with the effort needed for intense contemplation and communication. A pure diet that is light enough not to burden the body and mind but nutritious enough to maintain the daily activities is provided.
8. Treating Others with Kindness: If we can open up sincerely to each other and at the same time not hurt each other, we create a situation in which a direct absolute experience of our own true nature can spontaneously occur.
9. Grace: The enlightenment experience is ultimately an act of surrender to that which already is. There is nothing you can do to make it happen. You can only be open. You can do things to support and help create the ideal situation for the Truth to be revealed but you cannot force it to appear. It is beyond your egotistical control and beyond your desire.

What is the Process?

Identification and De-Identification: Identification begins by not being conscious of what and who you are, then mistakenly considering yourself to be a body, a brain, a name or other things you were taught or which you concluded you were or felt you must be in order to relate to others. The process of de-identification takes place rapidly if when you become conscious of what you think you are, you will communicate that to another. If it is basically untrue, that which you have identified yourself with will separate and vanish to the degree that it is understood by another. The principle of separation and banishment of untruth through presentation to and understanding with another accelerates progress in enlightenment efforts. By continually presenting one idea after another of the things you have mistaken yourself for and having these ideas understood by another, you de-identify from all those things.

What are the stages of enlightenment?

The path to enlightenment or knowing yourself is the hero's journey. Independent of what path you may take, you'll face several stages or steps that are common to all paths and spiritual traditions. Though the enlightenment dyad technique offers rapid progress and high percentage results it does not avoid any of the stages to enlightenment that you may go through in any other enlightenment system. As one who follows the hero's journey you or may not duplicate the stages to enlightenment in the order they are listed below. You may in fact come across the stages in a slightly different order. You may spend only a little time or a long time in each stage or you may move in and out of the various stages revisiting them as you make your way along the journey of enlightenment.

Stage 1: Giving Answers are the initial responses to the 'Who am I?' contemplation. The enigma is that there are no right or wrong answers. But in this first stage you may think the goal can be reached by giving a 'right' answer. And so begins a steady flow of ideas about who you are that are drawn from your memory of previously learned things from parents, teachers, clergy, friends, books, TV, media or ideas that you figured out in the past. By presenting these ideas and answers to your partner in the enlightenment dyad process each idea is dissolved from your mind.

Stage 2: Intellectualizing, logical thinking, reasoning and trying to figure out the answer are the hallmarks to this stage. Sometimes you even succeed at arriving at a correct answer; but answers, correct or not, are not an enlightenment experience. When you let go of trying to answer a question and set out to directly experience the object of your enlightenment, then the intellectualizing dissolves and you move into the next stages of the hero's journey.

Stage 3: Phenomena is experienced when you stop intellectualizing and attempt to experience yourself, life or others directly. But because you are still using your brain, a variety of hallucinations and bodily phenomena begin to occur. You may see a young woman turn into an old man. Your body may have hot and cold flashes or you may see angels or spirits. People may mistake these phenomena for enlightenment, but enlightenment comes only from a direct conscious experience, not from seeing, feeling or perceiving.

Stage 4: A Blank or void occurs when the field of consciousness has been emptied but the meditator continues to 'look' at one's self. In this void or blankness nothing is seen or heard, no thought occurs and progress appears to be at a stand still. But its at this stage that your journey of enlightenment progresses more rapidly if instead of 'looking' you refine your contemplation and seek to experience yourself directly. This stage has been called the quiet mind and for some schools of meditation is an end in itself.

Stage 5: The Barriers of emotion, pain and death surge up next. The hero of the journey of enlightenment encounters emotions, pain and the fear of death. Feelings of grief and anger, apathy and serenity come up and are sometimes confused with the truth of who you are. But as these raw emotions rise up, you de-identify from these states of being and let them go by fully communicating to your partner what you become conscious of.

Stage 6: The Enlightenment Experience has two aspects that occur simultaneously. One aspect is the direct conscious experience of your True Self. The second is the release of energy and other side effects such as laughing, crying, screaming and ecstatic feelings. The direct knowing of Self is a definite breakthrough experience and occurs in a timeless instant.

Stage 7: The Glow occurs as one radiates them-self as truth. In the enlightenment experience you feel totally in contact with Absolute Truth and unselfconsciously radiate this presence. This stage continues until the hero fully presents him or herself to others.

Stage 8: The Pure & Steady State replaces the glow as you fully present yourself to others. Presenting yourself discharges the energy of the glowing stage. To the degree that you are able to present your true self to others, the pure, steady state remains. The Enlightenment Intensive Retreat and the enlightenment dyad process insure the maximum opportunity to gain this ability as you communicate your true self to a broad range of people attending the retreat.

Can I get enlightened in a weekend?

Yes. Some people succeed in as little as a weekend. Others need more time. But everyone that participates in an Enlightenment Intensive Retreat expands their self-awareness, understanding and their relating abilities. The Enlightenment Intensive process has been used by thousands of people the world over in the last thirty years since its origination in the California high desert over 30 years ago. The enlightenment that people experience at a Retreat is the same that Buddha experienced centuries ago (it may not be as deep) or that anyone has ever experienced through any spiritual or personal growth system. Jeff Love reports “truth seekers may find all their previous efforts rewarded during the concentrated effort of the Enlightenment Intensive. Those new to self-enquiry often find it easier than veteran seekers who may have to overcome their own expectations. And many report having enlightenment experiences on the way home or in the days or weeks following the intensive.”

What accelerates the process of enlightenment?

Relating: Relating yourself to another accelerates the process of enlightenment. Enlightenment can be accelerated by taking the maximum advantage that relating gives to self-inquiry and thus to enlightenment. This principle is an original contribution to the varied techniques of enlightenment. There are several advantages to working with a partner.
1. The live interaction and expecting response helps keep you at the task of trying to experience yourself.
2. Communicating the things that you are identified with but are not actually you, these things vanish to the degree that they are received and understood by another individual. Untruth vanishes by presenting it to other: Truth remains. Thus mental confusions are cleared by presenting to your partner whatever occurs to as a result of pondering who you are.
3. Only by presenting yourself to another can your consciousness of yourself grow.
4. The stability of an enlightenment experience is determined to the degree that you can and have presented yourself to another. The Enlightenment Exercise Structure provides the basis format for optimizing these principles of relating that results in rapid, deep enlightenment experiences.

What are the benefits of being enlightened?

Being enlightened is a major factor in determining whether or not one can be happy. Happiness consists of consciously overcoming barriers towards one's goal in Life. The key is that oneself must be doing the overcoming of the barriers, not a personality or anything with which one has become confused. Doing anything, or nothing, is a great joy, if it is you, the actual true you, who is doing it. If you are conscious, by direct experience, of who and what you are, you can act directly from you. You speak with honest authority and are not just relaying learned information. It is a subjective state that is beyond doubt and beyond certainty. This is the state of enlightenment.

What are the characteristics of the enlightenment experience?

• There is a sense of union or oneness.
• It is often described as instantaneous and sudden. This is the definition of the Japanese word, Satori.
• It is often very ordinary and so obvious, that when you experience 'It', you realize that you knew it all the time, but didn't know you knew.
• It is experienced as timeless.
• It is imbued with a sense of universal love.
• And it can be very funny. A cosmic joke and you're the punch line. Every enlightenment experience is unique and is uniquely expressed by each individual. But these are some common characteristics.

Additional Information:

An excellent book The Enlightenment Intensive: Dyad Communication as a Tool for Self-Realization by Lawrence Noyes is available if you are interested in further reading.

Testimonials:

The Enlightenment Intensive empowers the individual to follow their own inner guidance and travel their own path. Proof of this can be found in the diversity of the personal statements, which follow:

By Danielle Light: The second morning of my first Intensive I related to my partner my love for God. Tears flowed down my face as I communicated the depth of this love. After this dyad, I stood by the window and gazed out at the play of greenery and light. This moment suddenly struck me with an energy so intense I felt as though I was going to pass out. I experienced a shift into another "place", a place where the air was soft and full and every sight had great dimension and character. A place where love isn't a feeling - it is reality.

By Charles Lewis: The intensive weekend is a capsule spiritual journey which starts with thoughts and ends with truth; starts with intellect and ends with your very being; starts with games and ends with the explosion of every game, including the intensive itself..."

Kurt's story: My experience at the intensive allowed me to discover true self-love for the first time. By being in the moment, which I never really understood how to do before, I have found the love energy that is my connection to the world. This has changed the way I feel about myself and the way I live my life in a profound way. I want everyone I know and love to share this joy with me by finding their own truth through the experience of this contemplative intensive retreat.

By Peter Ralston, Martial Artist: Enlightenment Intensives are very pure and very powerful. The value they had for me I can't say enough about. Enlightenment made apparent to me what my mind is and what I am, and I became conscious of what others actually are. As a result, my approach to martial arts completely transformed and my ability improved dramatically. I highly recommend Enlightenment Intensives to all students of martial arts and to anyone.

By Osha Reader, Enlightenment Intensive Master, Director of Origin Retreat Center: When I am in union with myself, sounds are as if inside my body, voices vibrate in my chest, colors are bright and clear, my love comes out without holding back; I speak the truth clearly from deep inside me — totally satisfying and pleasurable. My face and eyes look straight at others; I am relaxed. Nothing in me wants to hide. There is no judgment of others or myself. My breath flows clearly as if to my toes with no congestion because there is no congestion in my mind — because there is no mind. I occupy every part of my body — nothing can hurt me. I feel complete, wanting for nothing. I am gentle — at one with others. I could not hurt them. I know their thoughts. I do not think to do anything; it is done. There is no space, no delay between me and my actions. I am appropriate, balanced. Ecstasy flows through my body and being like waves. I feel humble, grateful for this state of grace. The truth has set me free...”

By Murray Kennedy: When my last turn was over, I was heartbroken. I just couldn’t believe it was over. Meanwhile, energy was pouring through me, and it kept rising, growing more intense even as I listened to my partner. Then the final bell rang ... and split my mind in two. That was when I got who I am. It was total. I think I whooped with laughter, but I’m not sure now. I just sat on the floor in what must have been the ultimate state of flabbergastedness. Once could have been a fluke ... but twice! In one lifetime, twice!!!”

BY V.K., Catholic Priest: I suddenly grasped hold of the question and for a brief moment possessed the answer. The intuitive flash, the direct experience of who I am. It came and went with so much power I was taken over by its energy for a number of hours. Though the Enlightenment Intensive is founded in Zen, for me it is an acutely Christian experience. I believe I discovered for the first time the meaning of St. Paul's words, ‘I live, now not I but Christ lives in me.’ That momentary flash was the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and where this leads I have no idea.

By John Crook, Ph.D.: After leaving the intensive, I was overcome by tremendous emotion that welled up in great waves from within. My breathing of itself became most strange with enormous full exhalations. I felt I was breathing out all the pain and agony of the last few years — getting rid indeed of myself. I cried and laughed for a long time Hazel’s arms. We both experienced the same unbelievable total emptiness of mind. Silence and emptiness. We were gasping out words like, ‘incredible,’ ‘extraordinary,’ ‘who would have thought it” and so on. As we embraced, we seemed to be standing literally in the portals of the great void. Suddenly I solved my Enlightenment Intensive question and then, turning to older koans, I seemed to get direct insight into them one after the other. Old puzzles that had fascinated me for years suddenly yielded obvious answers. The intellectual trickery was gone. Here was a direct seeing into the meaning. Every time an answer bloomed like a flower in the mind, I got a shock of discovery. Not as full or as overwhelming as finding out who I was but nevertheless considerable. I look out of the windows of my eyes in a different way from before. I dared not actually believe that Satori could be achieved in three days.

I am amazed at the whole impact and its implications. I have read and thought about Zen for years, struggled with it indeed, but only now do I see without any doubts its essential point. I am, and I act in that. While I have had important and valuable meditative experiences before, they had never undercut the ego process or let me gain an insight into non-duality. I feel now completely sure.

By Charles Lewis: The intensive weekend is a capsule spiritual journey which starts with thoughts and ends with truth; starts with intellect and ends with your very being; starts with games and ends with the explosion of every game, including the intensive itself...

By Osho: That question is very good. Ramana Maharishi used only that meditation. Through that meditation he attained his enlightenment, asking, ‘Who Am I?” That was his whole yoga, nothing else. The meditation (enlightenment intensive) is tremendously powerful, but one should go as deep as possible. One should allow it to sink to one's innermost core. It should penetrate you like an arrow going on and on as if you are drilling a hole and suddenly the drill has penetrated to the other side. It is a drilling exactly like that. Who Am I? Who Am I? Who Am I? Go on drilling and then suddenly you see that you have drilled the hole. You have inched to the core, and it is tremendously beautiful. You have to be alone and alone and alone. You have to seek a point, a virgin point within your being which has never been traveled before. Nobody can enter there except you. And you too can only enter up to a certain extent. A point comes when you are also left outside. Something enters ... but not you. The I is left out at the door. You enter as energy, nameless, formless, but not as you have known yourself. Your whole identity is lost. Your whole address is no more there. You don’t know who you are. You enter only when you don’t know who you are. Then suddenly you are inside the shrine and you know who you are. But this has nothing to do with your previous identity.

By Tom Richman: Never before had I spent such a concentrated looking into myself, my 'essence' if you will. Feeling at once exhilarated and scared, I asked the question, 'Who am I?' Eighteen hours a day for three days. By the end of the third day, energy shooting up my spine and pushing through the top of my head, I felt for the first time in my life I had experienced the transcendent truth...

By Hilary Sinclair, Self and Society, London: The Enlightenment Intensive format does more to help one towards wholeness than anything else I know. I have been to three, and they have been the most stimulating, awareness producing, even mystical, events in my life. During Enlightenment Intensives I have had times of aching boredom, of tense frustration, of deadness and exhaustion. I have had moments of surging energy and great elation. I have experienced universal laughter and unique pain and grief. I have felt loneliness and isolation. Truthful eloquence alternates with inarticulate dumbness and verbal diarrhea. Inner chaos and tension gives way to equilibrium and meditative stillness. After my second Enlightenment Intensive I wrote the following poem, which contains the essence of that experience for me:

I have trodden in the vacant interstellar spaces
I have frozen in the hub of the universe
The sound of stillness is in my soul.

I have heard the silence of a hawthorn tree
I have felt the trembling cracking of its branches
I know its strength and its fragility.

I have seen hope and strength shine from another's face
I been transfixed by love and felt another's doubting agony,
I have met another across infinite space."

By Brigitta D’Amato, Empowerment Facilitator: The journey itself was hard. I stumbled all over my 'many selves' who were not in favor of enlightenment. That was enlightening all by itself! But then when it did happen at last. What a surprise! It was not the earthshaking 'Aha!' my ego had anticipated. It was an exhausted giving up and letting go, a fightless falling away from DOING IT... and into simply BEING IT. I have had a million experiences every day, but in that moment (for the first time in this lifetime) I became the experience. It defies description. Thank you Jeremiah and Shoshanna for all you did, but mostly for all that you are, to make this possible.

By Charles Berner, origninator of the Enlightenment Intensive: I have tested this technique and I have compared it to other methods of enlightenment. This technique is about 50-100 times more rapid in producing enlightenment experiences than the classical techniques.