Enlightenment Articles

Enlightenment Articles

Enlightenment articles by Dr. Robert Puff, a respected psychologist and meditation teacher, shares his insights on enlightenment derived from his thirty years of personal experience meditating. These articles can help you to make sense out of your new perceptions of life.

How Do I Achieve Peace of Mind?: Move Beyond the Mind to Find Real Peace

People around the world are seeking peace of mind. The field of psychology in which I was trained is all about helping people arrive at and achieve peace of mind…..

Nothing Exists Unless You are Aware of It: The Power of Lucid Living & Nonduality

When we answer the question “Who are we?” we might have so many ideas about who we are and we just assume they’re correct. But now we’re going to explore them and perhaps even change them…..

Does ‘Just Being’ Mean Detachment from Feeling? : How to Care for Others & Find Spiritual Enlightenment

When I was in graduate school working on my PhD, I remember I was taking a course in child psychotherapy. On the first day of class, the professor stood up and said, “We are always going to have child abuse throughout the world. Always, so what are we going to do?”…….

Focus on What is Permanent: The World of Nonduality

As we explore the world of enlightenment together, one of the key components of the journey is: What is the ultimate reality of what is? Here, we are really getting back to what is, what truly has always been and always will be. In our pursuit for this, we are looking at identifying what is permanent….

What Happens During Spiritual Enlightenment: You are the Ocean, not the Lotus Flower

As we journey towards the path of enlightenment, what can we expect from our lives? What can we expect to happen inside of us? What is going to happen? In truth, there is nothing that we must do. Life just unfolds and we are merely the witness to that unfolding……

How to End Suffering and Find Happiness: Spiritual Enlightenment is our Natural State

When I was about 12 years old, I really wanted a minibike for my birthday. It just had one gear and went about 15 to 20 miles per hour. But I knew that if I got this minibike I’d be the happiest boy around. When I finally got it, I rode it all over the place. I especially rode it in my backyard. Round and round I rode, and I was in heaven. I thought “Life is so wonderful.” For a little while, it was…..

Nonduality & Living Without Labels: Stop being Defined by Thought

Our minds love to label things. From a very young age we start airing our opinions, such as by saying, “We like this,” “We don’t like that,” “That’s ugly,” “That’s beautiful,” or “That’s disgusting!”…..

How Spiritual Enlightenment Helps Us to Live an Egoless Life

What is the key factor of waking up and discovering who we are?

In many ways, it’s very simple but it can be extremely difficult to do. When we’re around the age of two or three, we start identifying with things. For instance, we like and dislike certain things, we realize who our parents and grandparents are, we take on a name, we take on a personality…..

Spiritual Enlightenment & The Play of Life: The Beauty of Nonduality

We need to become aware of the fact that we are, and everything comes out of who we are. All there is, is beingness. Silent awareness, things that can’t be described but what we are, and everything, is not two, non-dual, isness…..

Who Are We If We Wake Up From Our Lives? : Questioning Leads to Enlightenment

One of the most important tools that can help us enter the world of enlightenment is deep questioning about everything. If Albert Einstein had not questioned the laws of gravity he never would have discovered the special and general theory of relativity, which basically describes that gravity isn’t what Newton described as an apple falling to the ground but rather it is a curvature of space-time….

Being Who We Really Are: Putting an End to Suffering

As human beings, we can suffer so much. Yes, there are joys in this life, but often with joys come pain. We just go back and forth between the thrills or excitements and then the suffering and pain that follow these highs. It’s as though with a high comes a low…..

Silence Is The Royal Road To Enlightenment: The Power of Witnessing the Internal and External World

What is perhaps the most important thing we can do to wake up and discover who we are is to ask ourselves “Who are we?” But is it knowledge and having the right information that enable us to wake up? Is it having a secret mantra so that we know who we are? Is it having a mystical experience so wonderful that it awakens us to the truth and reality of who we are?…..

Losing Identification With Our Desires: The Freedom of Beingness

Desires cause us suffering and don’t work because anything that we choose as a desire is based on that which isn’t permanent. That which isn’t permanent leads to discontentment. Even though the desires may be fulfilled, later we’re going to seek new ones again. We’ll want something else and this endless cycle of desire and satisfaction, desire and satisfaction doesn’t work because we’re seeking that which is impermanent…..

Total Recall of Who We Are: Stop Thinking and Start Being

Let us explore why self-identification causes bondage and how we can be free of it by identifying who we truly are.

I don’t know if you ever saw it but there was a movie once made starring Arnold Schwarzenegger called Total Recall. A large part of the movie revolved around the character discovering who he really was…..

Discovering Who We Are: Rembrandt’s Self-portraits as a Means of Self-discovery

Though I was born here in the United States my relatives from my mother’s side and some of my father’s relatives came from Holland. I think because of my ancestry I’ve always been attracted to Dutch painters. One of my favorite painters in the world is Rembrandt. One of the things that Rembrandt loved to paint pictures of himself…….

Who We Are Beyond Memory: Identify with Beingness

Let us take a good look at the question of who we are. What is equally as important is to know who we are not. As humans, we have an incredibly strong tendency to identify circumstances and ourselves with labels…..

Being and Non-Being: When We Still the Mind, We Move Beyond Everything

To solve any problem, we first have to go to its source, the ultimate source of ourselves to discover who we are. Our minds can think of two possibilities: we’re being or we’re non-being. But, because the mind is part of this enquiry, it is limited. It is incapable of going beyond itself and yet who we are is beyond the question of being versus non-being……

Silence is the Great Teacher: Achieve Freedom from the Mind

As we journey through life we spend a lot of our time in the pursuit of things which we believe will bring us happiness, joy and peace of mind. For example, when I was at Princeton working on my Masters degree, I had a friend who was really in love with a woman and he felt that if he got her to marry him, he would be in a state of eternal bliss and happiness….

Understanding God: Moving from Concepts to Enlightenment

Who are we before anything else ever was? Who are we permanently at our core? When we take everything that is impermanent away, who are we? When we begin to remove things that we often consider to be the ultimate, we are left with God. However, although God may be the ultimate, our concepts of God are not…..

Learning To Live Spontaneously: Loosening Our Hold on Fear and Desire

Life is a dance between two intense emotions: fear and desire. We go back and forth between these two throughout our lives. But what we’re exploring here is what precedes and pervades life before desire and fear…..

The World Exists Because We Do: Changing How We Perceive the World and Ourselves

Some questions we need to ask ourselves when finding out who we are and how to live in the world in an enlightened way include: “What are the various states of being in which we exist?” and “What ultimately is our true, primordial, foundational state of being?” ……

How To Live With Desires: Identifying with the True Self Instead of Letting Desires Control Us

When we desire something, we first have to work for it. Often we find ourselves spending a large amount of mental energy thinking about it, wishing for it and wanting it to happen. But after working for it, we should let go and just be…..

Life Is But A Dream: Waking Up from the Dream of Life

When we think about our lives, the people in our lives, the work we go to, the city we live in, the galaxy we’re a part of and the whole universe, we think of it as so real, tangible, ever present and everlasting. But because we perceive it in our minds and we can only perceive that which our minds can grasp, it’s actually a very small universe…..

How Can I Achieve Happiness? How the Natural State is the Key to Pure Happiness

As we go through life, sometimes we have beautiful experiences. They are so wonderful that we are filled with a desire to hold onto them for as long as possible. But why we can’t hang onto them and why they go away is because we can only remember them in the mind….

What Is Really Real? How Awareness and Beingness Open the Doors to the True Self

Everything that is, everything that ever will be, everything that has ever been, can only occur because we are bearing witness to it. Everything exists simply because we are aware of it. Without us, nothing can be. The entire universe unfolds from our true self: our consciousness, which is also known as the ultimate self, or the ocean of awareness……

The Ultimate Purpose of Meditation: Meditation’s role in enlightenment

I began meditating almost thirty years ago. I think at first I began just out of curiosity. I had been studying meditation in my academic training and learned how science has shown that meditation is very beneficial to us…..

Awakening Your True Self: The power of awareness

In this life, the most permanent thing we experience is witnessing awareness. It begins when we are born and it goes away when we die. But beyond this witnessing, beyond the most permanent thing that is part of our life, is that which truly is…….

Cause and Effect: Suspending time to achieve beingness

What causes things to be the universe, us, everything that is? Time and space play a huge role in causation. Physics, Einstein and scientists around the world have concluded that we live in a space-time continuum…..

Dealing With Past, Present and Future: The power of here and now

In life we experience two main emotions: one is pleasure, the other is pain. They come and they go; they are a normal part of the human experience. But what happens is that our minds try to maintain the good and push away the bad……

Discover the “I Am”: Embrace the infinite possibility of the real you

Knowledge is one of the things that prevent us from awakening. Why? We think we know many things and knowing these things keeps us from being awake. To gain awareness we need to unlearn what we know, or think we know…..

Finding Truth Through Negation: We aren’t what we think we are

Ironically, one of the main things that keeps us from awakening to our true nature is knowledge. We think we know things, and knowing these things keeps us from being awake. Our belief that we have true knowledge keeps us caught up in our perceptions, labels, and opinions, making them appear as realities rather than the biased points of view they actually are……

Finding The Answer To “Who Am I?”: Lose the labels and learn the art of beingness

Before anything can be known, before anything can come into existence, there must be someone who is the background to all that exists. When we wake up in the morning, everything blooms in our awareness……

The Essence of Who We Are: Living in the Now

The infinite reality of now is what life is really all about. In many ways, we have created a prison around ourselves. The walls are all those limiting ideas of who we are, who others are, and what life is. Practice neti neti: not this, not that……