Introduction to the 3-day Enlightenment Intensive

There are hundreds of people offering Enlightenment Intensives - each facilitator who offers them has their personal version they feel works best. Some are better than others, but no one way works for all people. Recognize the potential for variation. Recognize that you will have to talk to the facilitator offering the Intensive to learn if this one is right for you and your needs. You must trust the facilitator enough to let go of any apprehensions - nothing must stand in the way of your truth.

Every Three day Enlightenment Intensive has a general form that has been developed over the years by many people. In all Enlightenment Intensives that I know of vegetarian meals are provided. That is not because we are all vegetarians. Vegetarian meals are provided to allow one to come into a more natural relationship with one's body. I usually start eating vegetarian food the week before to better prepare myself for the Intensive.

The Enlightenment Intensive is a three-day event designed to allow you to safely explore what you understand. By that, I mean things that are 'maybe' understood on some level, but not communicated, or maybe not conscious, or maybe not even within your field of awareness. It is designed to be a non-abusive self-discovery environment. An attempt is made to eliminate all outside distractions, for three-days you are pampered, cared for in such a way as to allow you to become totally self-centered. (Only during your turn, the other half of the time you are listening to your partner and they are becoming self-centered.) Your exploration can go very deep, past anything you might have thought possible. You go so deep that you can pass through relative meaning to absolute meaning. Absolute meaning is centered on experience and it is beyond normal thought and normal understanding. You feel and know enlightenment as an experience.

The Enlightenment Intensive is a mixture of Eastern and Western concepts. Starting with the Dyad arrangement, people typically work on one of five questions. The questions are 1) Tell me who you are, 2) Tell me what you are, 3) Tell me what another is, 4) Tell me what life is, and 5) Tell me what love is. The questions are designed to command an answer, so you can use the will of your partner to help you in you effort to find "your" truth. Remember, there are no wrong answers. As long as you think that's the best answer you have, that's the best answer. You are your only judge.

The idea is to keep it very simple. Simple set-up, simple non-distractive environment, a simple open-ended question, just you and another, simple. Next, you are allowed to spend as much time as it takes. Complexity and time are often a game that hides the truth. We want you and only your truth.

What we are trying to do is to get a non-abusive, self-discovery environment, for you, not for us or me. So a lot of care is made not to tell you how to think, and not to hint at what the truth is. Because it really does not matter what my truth is, what really matters is what your truth is. The idea being that the process of discovery has a reward, which are you wake up and you start to enjoy life. It really does not matter that somebody else is enjoying it. It is a personal experience. You have to wake up. In my opinion, other than writing, it is the most personal experience you can share with others.

I find what I discover at an Intensive, is very dependent on whom I work with. If I think this person is a real "dork" or flawed in some way I can make life changing pops go off by working with them. I am always surprised by how wrong I have been. If I try to use my ability to pick "the worst" partner as a way to make the most progress, I found to my surprise that it does not work. It becomes a real problem, who picks whom. Half of the time I sit and let someone pick me, no mater how long it takes, and the other half I enthusiastically pick people at random. I always try to work with everybody before I work with anyone twice. It is funny, in an atmosphere where there are so few distractions, how you can savor the distractions you do have!

If you attend the Enlightenment Intensive with your husband, wife, or long-term friend, you are encouraged to put off working with that person until the last dyad. The reason for this is that long-term relationships tend to have a lot of baggage. There are many experiences to draw upon, and some may be left undigested and may interfere with your flexibility in your search for your truth. Often, when we are confused and separated from "Truth," it is because of the love of the people who are the closest to us, and the lack of healthy boundaries. Which is to say, who is responsible for what, and the confusion about who causes what effect. Then again, if relationships can be kept in the ground-state (see tool #5, or without spin on them) , then the relationship is a source of great interpersonal energy, and it would be beneficial to have this person in a dyad.

The Intensive (for me) works because we all independently make the commitment to tell the truth about ourselves, we also commit to being good listening partners, and we make the commitment to do no harm to others. Because the Intensive starts at 6:15 am and goes until 10:30 p.m. we respect anyone who just sticks to the process all day long. They must have character to even attempt this process. As we hear truth from others we fall into a spiritual recognition of great love and deep lasting respect. People at an Intensive are often closer and more available than even our family members. In this process we birth a completely new comprehensive existence which - strange enough - has longer roots than our old comprehensive past. The fresh new experience is not only larger now it is also larger in the past. Our Enlightenment truth works not only now but it works for all time. We find it fun to review our old past and experience all that we missed the first time. So after an Intensive I find myself alone on a plane or in a car experiencing a bigger past than I believed possible. I don't think it is all that unusual after an Intensive to giggle when I am all alone in the grocery store or walking across an open field.

Don't think that every Enlightenment Intensive has to always be three days. Edrid says "Five or six days is a powerhouse compared with the three-day. In addition, the schedule for a five-day usually has fewer dyads per day, and you get to bed a little earlier, so there is not as much pressure and you don't feel as anxious. More good training is done. And it is easier to integrate into your life. If you just do the process, you get something really special."(thanks Edrid - keep us informed at http://www.sandoth.com)