For most people, the enlightenment drive awakens first through the head center, as what I call the “thought of enlightenment.” This is the usual entrance—the idea that there is such a thing as enlightenment, that there is the possibility of a spiritual life or experience and, simultaneously, the interest and motivation to pursue some kind of practice or seek some kind of teaching. The idea of enlightenment and the interest in enlightenment moves us toward the freedom and the experience of the quality of life with its higher values. For most people, that is how it begins, that is how the enlightenment drive wakes up.
However, if the heart is not involved in the drive toward truth, then the enlightenment drive doesn’t have adequate juice or fuel. When the drive wakes up in the heart center, it appears as love, compassion, and the irresistible passion for the truth of inner life. We experience this as love for truth, love for God, love for reality, or as compassion for the suffering of ourselves and others and the desire to do something about it, the recognition of the need to wake up, to be real, to make a difference. All these are different manifestations of service. – Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery, Ch. 2
At the beginning of any path, you are in hot pursuit of reality. If you are really into it, and the enlightenment drive is turned on, you are seeking and you are practicing and you are passionate and you are loving whatever is happening. Your experience of reality is that you are in hot pursuit of God. You can’t rest because there is something you are aspiring to, whether it appears as a seeking or as a natural impulse.
But when this essential activation is foreground, God is after you. Reality is chasing you, and it is not going to leave you alone. When this occurs, it happens regardless of you, regardless of your resistances and delusions. It can’t help but confront and challenge whatever obstructs the way. – The Alchemy of Freedom: The Philosophers’ Stone and the Secrets of Existence, Ch. 1
The particular maturation of the soul that fosters true practice involves the awakening of a fourth drive, the enlightenment drive. Although similar to the instinctual drives, with similar energies and intelligence, the enlightenment drive is not completely biological. Its aim is not a physical one; rather, it is about the quality of inner experience. We may recognize the enlightenment drive as the religious drive, the longing for God or divine union, the desire for enlightenment or truth, or the love to discover the secrets of existence, what life is all about.
As we recognize the truth of this drive, we learn to work on the instinctual drives and harmonize them into the enlightenment drive. True nature, our inherent beingness, has its own dynamic force. As the soul matures, this dynamic force appears as the drive within us to go toward greater actualization of that nature, to bring that nature forward and display it in full consciousness, in full awareness. True nature has inherent in it the drive to reveal itself in our experience. We call this dynamic force the enlightenment drive—the drive toward enlightenment, toward freedom, toward liberation, toward awakening, toward reality, toward truth, toward the genuineness and authenticity that is the truth of Being. – Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery, Ch. 2
There are generally three stages of recognizing the movement of the enlightenment drive. Each stage reveals something further about the motivation to practice. In the beginning, we feel motivated and want to practice, to engage the path, to optimize our experience in a way that is self-centered. At some point, the soul begins to be infused by the qualities of true nature, such as love and compassion and generosity, which then appear as selfless motivations for doing the work. The last movement is that of realization itself. Here we see that practice is true nature manifesting its luminosity, its love, and its natural intelligence in a way that spontaneously and without reason, without premeditation, opens itself to greater illumination. – Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery, Ch. 3