[quote=""DMB""]Hello and welcome! [/quote]
Thank you so much.
[quote=""DMB""]
I'd be interested to know the process whereby you arrived at your beliefs.[/quote]
I was an atheist-materialist to start with. I came across an enlightened master or a modern Buddha or Christ like sage. He was aged 34 at that time.
He told me that upon his enlightenment at 28, hitherto he began to see everything at its fundamental level as pure unitary consciousness.
This was what the ancient Hindu, Taoist and Sufi sages have stated and which I have read about as well, but did not properly comprehend it until I met this person, and heard it from him. Meditating in his presence, I had some experiences of the same though I could not keep it constant.
Meister Eckhart in the thirteenth century has also given out such a viewpoint.
In modern times, the likes of Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, H.W.Poonja, Eckhart Tolle, Jed Mckenna, Mooji, Adyashanti, Robert Adams, Jeff Foster have experienced the same as well, and validated the sayings of the ancient sages in this regard.
My understanding is that enlightenment is a sort of flowering of the human individual, and this has happened in different cultures all over the world, though it is a sort of rare phenomena.
Most religions were found around such enlightened masters , but came under the grip of fundamentalists and narrow minded people later on due to lack of precise understanding of the theory part, or process of enlightenment,imho.
It is this ignorance that has now lead to religion being a formulator of conflict, intense duality and disharmony in modern times instead of peace, unity and harmony which it was originally meant for.
I believe that all this can boil down to a precise science, theoretically speaking, which can help one to understand where one is erring, in terms of application and thus correct oneself , imho.
