Ardagh describes enlightenment as an on-going process rather than as an arrival at some fixed point. He shares the life path that has taken him through many self-improvement processes and many spiritual paths while searching for enlightened transcendence, including being a successful entrepreneur. It was as he was recovering from a catastrophic car accident that the “Brilliance Cycle” came to him. In this conversation Ardagh explores how to make the expression of our innate brilliance more predictable, less of a random accident and more of a probability. He gives us the visual of four quadrants of a clock. From noon to three are moments of awakening where time and space disappear; from three to six we are in the creative flow related to intention and manifestation; around six o’clock we enter shame and self-doubt and often there is a double-bind where any decision will result in harming yourself or others. We’ve been conditioned to repress these feelings. If you sit with these feelings of shame and self-doubt, from nine to twelve you will arrive at self-forgiveness and integration to complete the cycle. These four components are necessary for a brilliant life. He also adds that you can become addicted to parts of the cycle: “You just keep wanting to make yourself better instead of just realizing I’m good enough; in my brokenness I’m good enough to make a difference. You pursue another seminar, another self-help book, another method, another training, another diet to try and improve yourself which eventually becomes kind of hopelessly narcissistic. You can get addicted to any of these four phases. Or, you can equally go into reactional judgment to any of them which is the opposite of addiction because you think you don’t like a particular part of the cycle and you want to avoid it.”
