The Secret of Enlightenment: Know that you know
By Neale Donald Walsch, author of “Conversations with God”
We hear a lot these days about this thing called “enlightenment.” Yet what is it? How do we get it?
Conversations with God Book 1 offers some marvelous wisdom about all this:
“What enlightenment asks you to do is to know something you have not experienced, and thus experience it.”
Most people think they can really “know” what they “know” if they experience it. Yet enlightenment says, “supposing you could know a thing without experiencing it?”
And, of course, we can. In fact, most of what we know, we know without having an experience of it. We are simply taking the word of others. And that is the problem. We are taking the word of others–others who think they know about things–rather than going within to see what we have to tell ourselves.
There exists inside ourselves a Place of Wisdom which is (believe it or not) infallible. In this place is perfect understanding, perfect clarity. If we would but listen to ourselves, rather than to the words of others who claim to know the Truth, we will find that we are enlightened. Indeed, we will find that we have been enlightened all along.
Once we decide what we know about a thing, we will experience it. For our thought
about a thing produces our reality. In this way, knowing precedes experiencing. Indeed, it produces it.
This is an extraordinary key. It is so simple, and yet for many it is difficult to accept. Yet every Master has taught, “As you believe, so will it be done unto you.”
We will soon be starting a New Year, and this would be a wonderful time to recreate what you Know; a wonderful time to “become enlightened.”
So go within, and give yourself permission to know, and to “know that you know,” what is really true about life, about yourself, and about God. This will then become part of your experience. – NDW