There is a deeper level of being, of consciousness. At that level there is pure experience, not a succession of states of consciousness, states of mind, but a continuous reality, a continuous presence, a continuous experience but a different kind of experience from what we are imagining until then. We imagine an experience of finding what we are looking for, in some sense of fulfilling a desire. So until then, experiences are episodic. And of course they remain episodic because we live in time and space so we are constantly changing our moods and everything else is changing. But at the same time, this deeper knowledge or this deeper consciousness, we call it the spirit is becoming more present, more obvious, more ever-present, an experience that we cannot objectify. We cannot look at it and we cannot set it apart and say, ‘Oh, I’m enlightened! Now I’m enlightened, good.’
( Enlightenment by Laurence Freeman OSB )
