VINEETO: During my process of actualism there was a time when I watched the biography of many people who made it to being famous enough to have a biography report made about them. I wanted to find out what exactly it is that made people successful in what they wanted to achieve in life, be it a gold medal in an Olympic sport or the winner of the Tour de France, be it a successful business entrepreneur or a famous dancer or painter, be it a well-known architect or a renowned author or inventor or, in the spiritual realm of achievements, become an enlightened master. What all these people had in common was a burning passion to be successful at their chosen field of interest and an unwavering determination to do whatever it takes to reach their goal.

RESPONDENT No 23: This shows that likely you have not (yet) understood what a spiritual master is.

VINEETO: I take it then that you have not read Mohan Rajneesh’s autobiography ‘The Golden Childhood’ or any other autobiography or biography from a genuine enlightened person? They all describe, without exception, that they were pursuing enlightenment like all get-out for many years with a strict discipline of meditation, fasting, yoga and other spiritual disciplines and then, when after years of arduous practice they exhaustedly relaxed and gave up control enlightenment happened. Face it, there is no such thing as a free lunch – not even enlightenment happens on its own accord – you’d have to work really, really hard if you wanted to achieve it.

RESPONDENT: Here are 3 cases for consideration that seem to me like ‘genuine enlightenment’ without the typical meditation and preparation that goes along with seeking it.

John Wren-Lewis – http://www.spiritualteachers.org/john_wren_lewis.htm

Meher Baba – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meher_Baba

VINEETO: Let me start by saying that I fully agree with Richard that it would have been more accurate to use the word ‘and/or’ rather than ‘and’ in the second paragraph above – ‘with a strict discipline of meditation, fasting, yoga *and/or* other spiritual disciplines’. Apart from that I am actually fascinated if there is indeed an exception to my generalization that one has to put effort into becoming enlightened even though many report *after* their enlightenment that it was dead easy and one shouldn’t try so hard.

As for your three examples, Suzanne Segal was one of the people on my mind when I wrote the above paragraph as I specifically bought her biographical book in order to find out what caused her to become enlightened while waiting for/ stepping on a bus. Here is what she says she wanted to achieve very early on in life from – she had a strong interest in the feeling of vastness –

[Suzanne Segal]: ‘I used to meditate on my name. As a child of seven or eight I would sit cross-legged, eyes closed, on the long white couch in my parent’s living room and say my name over and over to myself. The name would reverberate in my mind with each repetition, starting off solid and strong. My name, who I was. Then fainter, repeating, repeating, repeating, until a threshold was crossed and the identity as that name broke, like a ship released suddenly from its mooring to float untethered on the ocean waves. Vastness appeared. The name became word only, a collection of sounds pulsing in a vast emptiness. There was no person to whom that name referred, no identity as that name. No one. (…) I will never know what compelled me to do this practice or how the idea of it ever arose. But the dropping away of personal identity, the dissolution of I-ness that occurred in this daily practice when I was just a young child, was only a preparation, a foreshadowing, for the profound and permanent state that has become my abiding reality.’ Collision with Infinite, pp 1-2

She did have a burning passion to be successful at her chosen field of interest and she also had an unwavering determination to do whatever it takes to reach her goal – she attended TM meditation courses, went on to become a meditation teacher where, to use her own words, she did ‘many hours of meditation […], exposing ourselves to the large doses of what was clearly a powerful practice’ (p 16), she entrusted herself ‘to the ocean of transcendental meditation, letting my concerns float in its waters, lulled by the promise that I would wash up on the shores’ … (p 19), and then she says this –

[Suzanne Segal]: Before embarking on the six-months siddhi course, I attended a one-month advance training, which was held in … France. This was the first training at which Maharishi insisted that men and women be housed separately in order to promote ‘one-pointedness’ in our efforts to attain enlightenment. Although TM was marketed as a technique to improve everything from blood pressure to sex, those of us who attended the advanced coursed knew that we were after only one thing – enlightenment. *We were committed, each in our own way, to finding that elusive yet utterly fulfilling experience of Unity Consciousness, and we proceeded on faith that we would get it if we did everything Maharishi instructed us to do*. (…) *I meditated with passion, never able to get enough of it*, and my experiences of transcending became clearer and clearer, even though the fear continued to arise with alarming regularity. Collision with Infinite, pp 21-22 [emphasis added]

And this is how she described the ‘siddhi course’ –

[Suzanne Segal]: ‘with the new siddhi practices, meditation, hatha yoga, and pranayama, we were now spending a total of three hours to complete one round.’ p29

After several years of being intimately involved she left the TM organization and in the ensuing busy life in the marketplace was able to enjoy her passion of meditating only once in a while. If my memory serves me right it was about 10 years after she left TM that the enlightenment incident on the bus stop occurred.