I once had a mentor who used to say all the time, "enlightenment is a gift." He also put himself on the top of the food chain and told us the he is the only one who had the power to recognize who would get this gift and who would not. He even went on to say that there was only going to be a limit in his lifetime of who would get that gift of enlightenment and he had almost everyone of his followers to believe this. Looking back I shake my head at every aspect of this notion. First: There is no enlightenment destination, it is a constant journey. Every time you look to see where you are and have been, you stop moving forward. Second: Why would you ever place limits on someone, if you were enlightened yourself and not encourage each person to do their best, whether they knew it or not. Ironically he did not know and he did not know because of the next reason. This next part had come out of my mouth in my last conversation with him and we both realized it was time for me to leave: I was talking with him about some transgressions he did and I became aware of and confronted him with it. He then claimed he was fully enlightened and above normal human rules. At that point I said in my mind "Wow" but let him keep talking. So he went on to say how enlightenment is a gift and how he would effectively dub the next in line. Then it all hit me and I found myself saying: "No enlightenment is not a gift, having dissatisfaction with your level of consciousness was the gift. The desire to keep going and pursing more without resting on past success was the gift. If you don't know how you achieved enlightenment consciously and cannot clearly show others who want to become enlightened deliberately and conscious, you are not enlightened yourself."
I left immediately.
You see, the old trick is that if you can convince that a persons enlightenment and connection with higher dimensions can only come through you, than you can create and exploit your followers for whatever you want. This is what my mentor was doing and what organized religions of all sorts have been doing in order to keep the money flowing into their organization's coffers.
If your mentor is displaying some special powers, keep your eyes in your sockets, he's got his hands in your pockets.
Enlightenment is the result of your own empowerment of knowledge, being and awareness, not the result of something external to give you a magic lamp to rub. It does not come from believing in anything else except your own determination to not quit and to continue to make efforts.
Everything that that astrophysics has taught us up to now is that there really is no such thing as a solid. Everything is a relationship of electromagnetic vibrational forces upon each other. That means with the right state of mind, anything is possible for anyone. They just have to keep going and not get misdirected and fooled.
