Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About This Shortcut to Enlightenment?
The spiritual practice that might be most powerful, yet most underestimated
What if the fastest way to enlightenment isn’t learning how to escape this reality— but learning how to fall in love with it completely?
For years, I thought enlightenment was something that had to be achieved.
Even though every master kept repeating that enlightenment is what we already are in our most natural state, I still couldn’t understand why we felt so disconnected from it.
So I meditated harder. Studied to understand consciousness. Tried to master the mind. Detach from the ego.
I practiced yoga, meditation, and read ancient philosophies that have spent thousands of years exploring what human consciousness is actually capable of.
And the deeper I went, the stranger things became.
Because according to many of these traditions, enlightenment isn’t simply about becoming calmer, wiser, or more detached.
It is about waking up to something that is always right in front of us.
Waking up from the assumption that we are separate beings trapped inside individual bodies. Waking up to the possibility that consciousness is far bigger than the human brain— and that what we call ordinary reality may be only a fraction of what is actually happening.
Ancient traditions had descriptions for experiences that modern consciousness research is still struggling to understand: near-death experiences, extraordinary states of awareness, and other phenomena that challenge the assumption that consciousness is simply something the brain produces.
The ancient traditions didn’t necessarily see these experiences as anomalies. They saw them as glimpses of a far greater possibility we all can access. Glimpses of what consciousness becomes when we stop identifying so completely with the human body and its ordinary limitations.
I began to think of existence itself as consciousness dreaming a human life.
Like an avatar who has become so immersed in the video game that they have forgotten they’re holding the controller.
And perhaps enlightenment is what happens when the player suddenly remembers.
“Oh. I’m dreaming. This is a play.”
Not waking up from life. Waking up inside it. Becoming lucid and remembering who — or perhaps what — you really are.
But there was one thing I didn’t expect to discover on the way there.
The Unexpected Doorway
After years of trying to reach consciousness through meditation, discipline, and spiritual practice, the doorway that finally opened for me wasn’t another technique.
It was love.
And strangely enough, the ancient yogis had a name for this path.
Bhakti.
The path of falling in love with the divine.
Some scriptures hint that consciousness itself has the potential to fall in love with us, or rather, it has always been in love with us, but we haven't been aware of it.
According to some yogic traditions, the divine is described through three qualities: Sat — eternal being, Chit — consciousness or knowing, and Ananda — bliss or love.
All three of these qualities can become doorways into experiencing divine consciousness. But love may be the most intimate of them all — the aspect that connects everything to everything else.
It is the interconnectedness between all existence, which is why when we “fall in love” with someone, we want to feel connected to them, like they are part of ourselves. In the most literal sense, we want to become one with them, expressing that connection physically.
Our longing for that eternal experience is so big that most of us spend our whole life chasing that other half, not noticing that our other half has been trying to contact us all along. Getting overlooked.
Now imagine loving someone who ignores you all the time. It feels futile, especially when your attempts to approach aren't being taken seriously, laughed at, called coincidences, or totally dismissed.
Eventually, you will stop trying because it doesn’t make a difference with someone who is not interested in you.
But what happens when your crush finally turns around and acknowledges you?
Right, you feel a rush of excitement, you start flirting and courting them, and your interaction with them becomes a sweet play of affection.
That is divine love. And by divine, I mean the consciousness that hides behind everything. The all-seeing eye! The eternal beloved.
The Divine Lover
When we truly fall in love, we feel like we have met our soulmate, because we have. Except that we think our soulmate could only be this one person, which more often than not, turns out to be a ridiculous idea later on. Have you ever wondered why?
Maybe because the deciding factor of a soulmate experience is not who the other person is, it’s how deeply we love them, opening up our heart center to look deep into their soul and find our own energy reflecting back at us.
Our soulmate is all of existence. Our other half is what we are surrounded by at all times. So if we can overcome the illusion of separation from another, we can remember that we are in fact one with all of existence.
Love as a spiritual path may be simple, but it’s not easy.
In fact, it requires the most difficult part of enlightenment right from the start. To drop our own ego, our protection in this world of intrigue and armour, to open ourselves up to vulnerability.
To our ego, the risk is high; we might get hurt or disappointed. But the rewards are endless. In fact, as lovers of the divine, we might be offered epiphanies and downloads that meditators work years and lifetimes to achieve.
There is nothing more generous than a lover who likes to impress and spoil us. Just to make us happy.
Human Love and Spiritual Love
Many of us know the concept of divine love only from nuns and monks who devote their lives to living in the church and abstaining from any sexual human relationships.
But does that mean that the spiritual lover has to abstain from human love?
I don’t think so, I think human love will always introduce a potential distraction if we center our self-worth around it, but it can become an expression of our divine love, since the divine operates through everyone and everything.
In fact, prioritising our divine love can strengthen our human relationships since it helps us to regulate our nervous system independently of another human's supply of affection.
One of the difficulties of human love is that it is usually tangled with our emotions, fears, and old wounds. Since most of us are living and regulating disconnected from the perfect source of love, we tend to act from our emotions and triggers, sooner or later, throughout a relationship.
Now, some people might be more open to channeling that divine love energy than others, and you might find that the more in love you are with your divine lover, the more attracted you feel to people who embody high amounts of divinity in themselves. And this is where the magic begins, and true soul healing starts.
How Love as a spiritual practice transforms your life
Being in love by default is a magical experience. We all love being in love; what makes us suffer in love is making our ability to love dependent on another.
Rooting it in the divine — an energy that feeds us on a consistent, infinite basis — can turn life itself into a never-ending honeymoon phase.
And this has a very interesting effect on life. First of all, you start romanticising every day, which, to me, is the best part of being in love. To be excited for every new day and every new experience we share with our love?
Have you ever wondered why, as soon as we are in love, more people seem to take an interest in us, even past lovers who return for our glow-up? Think of the attention you seem to get every time you are freshly in love, like the strangers who are telling you how you're glowing.
The same things happen when you start living in love. You become magnetic to life and your surroundings, and your world reflects that back to you.
Love as a spiritual practice is the most enlivening experience I have felt in life so far. And when I traveled the world, one thing was always with me, bringing the extra kick, and that was the eternal beloved. The companion that truly never left.
So the most powerful spiritual practice isn’t another technique at all. Maybe it is simply learning to love.
Not just people who love you back. Not just the moments that feel beautiful. Not just the parts of yourself you already accept. But life itself.
How would you live if you were in love with life?
I think you’d meditate on the heart. You’d serve someone without needing anything in return. You’d dance until you forget yourself. You’d sing. You’d spend time in nature. You’d practice gratitude. You’d let yourself be moved by beauty. You’d love someone without trying to possess them.
And slowly, something would begin to change.
Your life might become more alive. You might start noticing how much beauty was hiding inside the ordinary. You might become more curious about people. More intimate with your own body. More willing to feel. More willing to forgive. More willing to be surprised. And perhaps, every once in a while, life seems to answer back.
A coincidence arrives at exactly the right moment. A stranger says something you desperately needed to hear. A song plays when you are thinking about someone.
You think of a person, and they call. A door opens that you weren’t even looking for. You can call these things coincidences. You can call them synchronicities. You can call them the mind looking for patterns. Or you can simply enjoy the mystery.
Because perhaps the point isn’t to prove that the universe is talking to us. Perhaps the point is to become quiet enough, open enough, and loving enough to listen.
For years, I thought enlightenment meant getting beyond this human experience. Now I wonder if it might mean going all the way into it. Feeling everything. Loving everything. Seeing the divine in everything.
Until the line between you and everything else becomes a little less convincing. Maybe we don’t have to escape the dream. Maybe we just have to become lucid inside it. And maybe the shortcut was never somewhere we had to go. Maybe it was the thing we were looking for all along.
Love.
Because what if enlightenment isn’t waking up from existence — but finally realizing that existence has been in love with you the entire time?
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