How to Experience Cosmic Consciousness

“Enlightenment is an accident, but some activities make you accident-prone.”

The phrase above is often attributed to the spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti and what it implies is that spiritual enlightenment is not something you can bring about through an act of will. You can wash your hair, or memorize a poem. These are things you can do, but you can’t enlighten yourself. If enlightenment dawns, its source and cause will always be mysterious.

At the same time there are activities that you can engage with such as meditation, reading sacred texts, prayer, etc., that seem to increase the likelihood of having a spiritual breakthrough. Spiritual practice will not guarantee enlightenment, but it does appear that people who engage with spiritual practices are more likely to experience realization.

The question we are asking here is, what can we do to increase our chances of experiencing cosmic consciousness? My own experience of cosmic consciousness was the single most life-transforming event of my life and it is what I most want to share with others, so I have thought a great deal about what I specifically can encourage people to do that will increase their likelihood of being blessed with the miraculous revelation universal being.

Before going further, let’s discuss the nature of spiritual transformation. When we transform, we change in such a fundamental way that we can honestly say that we are not the same person that we were before. We can grow in many ways and still feel like we are the same person, but a transformation leaves us so different that we don’t recognize ourself.

After a spiritual transformation we specifically become a person who is directly aware of, and connected to, the most sacred and divine aspects of being. Spiritual transformations occur as the result of a spiritual breakthrough and a shift in perspective.

A spiritual breakthrough is an experience that allows us to believe in an extraordinary possibility and eventually leads us to know beyond doubt that it is real. But knowing something is real is not enough to change you. You can be the same person with a new understanding of reality.

Transformation requires more than experience, it requires a shift in perception, or a paradigm shift. This means seeing everything through the lens of the breakthrough experience. It means stepping into a different world and living according to a different understanding of what is real and what matters. The combination of a breakthrough experience and a paradigm shift is what leads to deep change and transformation.

Most often we think of the spiritual path moving from breakthrough experiences to shifts in perspective. In this case, the breakthrough causes the shift that leads to transformation. What is less frequently acknowledged is that the opposite can also be true.

In relation to cosmic consciousness that means that if you hold the perspective of cosmic consciousness you will actually invite the experience of it into your heart and mind. You are effectively making yourself accident-prone.

Over the years I have developed various techniques that bring people into the perspective of cosmic consciousness and allow them to rest in that perspective. Initially you are resting in a view that feels like something you are imagining, but if you continue to maintain that perspective you begin to see that it is not just something you are imagining; it is real.

Eventually if you rest in the perspective of cosmic consciousness long enough, you will have a mind-altering recognition; you will see that you have discovered the truth of who you are as a cosmic being, a manifestation of the living consciousness that gave birth to existence in the first place. I call this way of working creative illumination and what it involves is using the creative powers of the imagination to work our way as close as we can to the edge of realization in the hopes of falling in.

What is so deeply empowering about this form of spiritual work is that you do not have to wait to have an experience. You are simply adopting a different perspective on the experience you are already having. You take the position that the consciousness you are experiencing right now is not coming from inside your mind or body, it is coming from the universe itself. You adopt this position and hold yourself in it and that is how the magic starts.