What kind of Enlightenment?
What is enlightenment, and where does the concept come from? Indian philosophy says we pass through three states of mind each day: the waking state, the dream state and the deep sleep state. Most people are conscious (if at all!) in the waking stage. The average meditator will get occasional glimpses of the dream state. Only a good yogi, however, will be fully conscious in the deep sleep state.
The deep state of lucid trance gives birth to the mythology of enlightenment. Trance is a ‘transpersonal zone’, since the sense of the waking self has vanished. It is profoundly still: there is no impulse to do anything at all. It is always the same each time you enter it. It seems to be outside of time. It is free of all the disturbing emotion that occurs in waking life. What is there to be afraid of, when you have no (awareness of your) body? And what else could you possibly desire?
This state is the exact opposite of the stress, pain and confusion of waking life. It is indescribably satisfying and beautiful. It is a state of pure consciousness and pure being. It may feel as if you have become one with God, and attained the ultimate spiritual glory.
The state of lucid trance seems eternal when you’re in it, but you can’t stay there forever. It is transient. Unfortunately, the language of Eastern spirituality has an appetite for the absolute. It loves to talk about the eternal, the perfect and the whole, and this is its undoing.
For example, in deep trance, your consciousness is totally absorbed in itself. Since you are aware of nothing outside yourself, you can feel that you have experienced the great truth of non-duality, and have become one with everything. Unfortunately, this is just narcissism. You have simply become one with yourself. This state of ‘oneness’ is based on excluding everything that doesn’t fit, virtually the whole outer world in fact.
The feeling of space and freedom that comes from lucid trance is well worth achieving. However, it does not mean you have utterly transcended the material world, the ego, time, space and causality. It doesn’t even mean that that kind of transcendence is ever possible. Yet Eastern philosophy defines enlightenment in those impossible terms, and often ignores the more humble, but useful, reality at its core.
Another problem is that people have vastly different views of what enlightenment is. A student asked me recently, “After all your years of meditation, do you feel you’ve become enlightened yet?” I should have been flattered but I instantly felt offended. ‘Am I that cold and heartless?’ I thought.
When I asked her, I realised that my student saw enlightenment as a state of oneness with the universe, accompanied with a desire to help others. This is a lovely vision, but it has little connection to the Asian tradition from which the term comes. Personally, I prefer my student’s version.
I have no great respect for tradition as such. I feel it is natural to adapt the resources of the past to our own quite different purposes in the 21st century. Nonetheless, we should understand what the original tradition was about, if we are going to use its language. If we are going to bomb Iraq in the name of Jesus, we should at least know what the gospels said. We should know what the word ‘enlightenment’ means in the East, even if we choose to use the term very differently ourselves.
The Sanskrit words used to illustrate enlightenment are ‘moksha’, ‘nirvana’ and ‘bodhi’. The first two rely on a belief in reincarnation. Moksha and nirvana mean liberation from the all-but-endless cycle of births and deaths that was regarded with such dread by the ancient Indians. In other words, when you die, you don’t come back. What a relief!
Moksha also means freedom from suffering. The state of lucid trance is blissfully, if temporarily, free of pain, but moksha is supposed to last forever. It is about permanent liberation from all the suffering that accompanies being alive, lifetime after lifetime. No regrets, no hunger, no sadness, no headaches, ever!
In lucid trance, you briefly enter a state of pure, egoless consciousness. Moksha extrapolates that into the belief that ‘atman is Brahman’ – that the individual soul is identical with the subtle, formless, undying, unborn Ground of all Being. This is not quite the same as feeling one with Nature. It is more about contacting the indescribable essence beyond it all, whatever that is.
Can you stay in that state permanently? It is said that an enlightened being is ‘in the world but not of it’. He or she dwells in a refined mental state beyond the concepts of self, time, space and karma. In extreme cases, the ‘god-intoxicated’ yogis of India are so out of it that they only survive at all through the care of their attendants.
Of course, most ‘enlightened’ people you hear of are not like this at all. They are more moderate, balanced, in the world and helpful to others. But can there be such a thing as ‘moderate’ enlightenment? The old texts are very adamant about what is really required.
The yogic texts say that there are four routes you can take to inner bliss. You can achieve moksha through selfless, dutiful action; or through selfless devotion to God; or through rational analysis (to prove that ‘you’ don’t exist), or through the experiential path of meditation.
The purpose of each of these paths is to extinguish emotion and the sense of self. Karma, which is the engine of reincarnation, is fuelled by our millions of subtle, ongoing likes and dislike. These are the ‘samskaras’ that endlessly disturb our inner stillness and tempt us back to the world of chocolate, sex and money.
You become enlightened by purging every last shred of desire and aversion from your being. You seek that state of sublime indifference that the Stoics called ‘apatheia’ or ‘no-feeling’. This is ‘Nirvana’, which literally means ‘the blowing out of a candle’. Nirvana is a metaphor for the snuffing out of the life-force that binds us to the world through our passions.
Nirvana is profoundly serene because you see nothing in the world as having any value compared to the inner stillness. You don’t even care whether you, or the people around you, live or die. For example, the Buddha gave this advice to one of his senior monks. ‘If bandits try to kill you, or the nuns under your care, don’t get angry with them or fight back! Protect your serenity at all costs’ (since dying in anger would lead to a bad rebirth). It is hard to believe he said that, but he did, and many other similar things.
It’s not surprising that hardly anyone follows the Buddha’s original instructions today. Ideally, you would have to be celibate, live alone in nature, own almost nothing, have no close friends, and never talk to anyone of the opposite sex. You would never again listen to music or see a movie or read a newspaper or any non-religious book. And no gossip! No idle talk of kings and sportsmen and entertainers!
To be enlightened in this classical sense means to dissociate as totally as possible from one’s body and from the world. We also find this fanatical aspiration for the otherworldly in the Western tradition. St Anthony in 4th century Egypt gave away his wealth, and spent decades in an abandoned tomb in the desert. When he emerged, he simply went further into the desert.
I’m sure enlightenment is possible but is it worth it? Probably not, but that hardly matters. Ever since the time of the Buddha, the concept has been mythologised, intellectualised, sentimentalised and generally adapted to the requirements of the people who use it.
For example, the Chinese didn’t take reincarnation anywhere near as seriously as the Indians or the Tibetans. As a result, they saw enlightenment as a here-and-now matter, rather than an escape into a featureless eternity. This is a much healthier and more practical view.
In particular, Zen emphasises the ‘bodhi’ aspect of being fully awake, rather than the ‘nirvana’ aspect of oblivion. ‘Bodhi’ means to be fully conscious and clear-sighted, moment-by-moment, both in deep trance and throughout the day, seeing things ‘just as they are’.
By recognising the fluidity of all things, including one’s ego, you also awaken to a sense of oneness and interplay with the world around you. An enlightened person aspires to be ‘in the zone’. He or she acts freely and spontaneously, loving the bewildering complexity of the world and loving themselves, without the ego getting in the way.
There is no need for countless lifetimes of self-denial. It is more a matter of recognising at a gut-level that we are already there. I’ve often heard gurus say ‘But don’t you get it? It’s so obvious!’ Of course, this is easier said than done. Awakening still takes a lot of intelligent effort. We are all alive, but in something of a trance – sleepwalkers, as the Buddha said.
To be fully awake is not just a matter of turning a switch in the brain. If we leave the comfort of our sleepwalking habits, the world can seem more awesome, beautiful, frightening and unpredictable than we ever imagined. To be enlightened is not to withdraw into no-feeling, but to find the point of balance, the edge of clear action, in the midst of it all.
This requires ‘bodhi’, the art of continuous, clear awareness throughout all the activities of the day, which is yet another definition of enlightenment. While this is just as demanding a spiritual practice as deep trance, at least it is possible, and the fruits are immediately obvious.
Enlightenment can still be a useful term so long as we regard the words typically used to describe it - egoless, eternal, blissful, all-knowing, non-dual etc. – as metaphors for a particular state of mind or a particular experience, rather than absolute, transcendent realities.