Am I Enlightened or is This Just a Good Mood?

Alas, a good mood, a feeling of being “on top of the world” is not enlightenment. A good mood is little different from a down mood – they are both moods. They pass and they can be witnessed by the Self, the same source of awareness that can see every passing thought, experience, process, feeling, and emotion.

A good mood is not only not enlightenment, but it can be a barrier to finding the true Self.

When we think that “being on top of the world” is the vibe of awakening, our minds can assert and believe that this is the goal of awakening; that it is to feel this way pretty much all of the time.

Moods are just collections of thoughts. Good moods tend to happen when our wishes are met by circumstance and bad moods happen when what we want doesn’t happen – but they are not logical events. They come and they go, like everything else in the universe.

When we chase after good moods, we reject not only the immediate Now of our life, but we reject ourselves in this process. In this way, good moods sustain our identification with inadequacy. The pursuit of good moods and happiness is, in the bigger picture, no different from the flight from bad moods and depression. They are both energetic responses sustained by our deeper identification with our invalidated self; the one formed in the time of our primal invalidation (see Liberation from the Lie at amazon.com for a full analysis of the origins of invalidation).

The way out is always the same. Find out who it is that can witness good and bad and neutral moods without being effected by any of them. Find the Self that is not drawn to being “on top of the world” or feeling any need to escape the seeming darkness of occasional depression.

That self is there right now seeing the play of All of this.