What is Enlightenment
Another recycled post on Daoism
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
I've been thinking a lot about enlightenment lately. Primarily, I've found that I've been spending more and more of my time living in the moment instead of fretting about the future or the past. This isn't to say that I don't spend time doing both, but just that I've found that a useful antidote to both is to focus on the "here and now".
The result has been a significant improvement in the quality of my life. While time seems to go by faster and faster, paradoxically, the individual moments I inhabit seem to have expanded dramatically. People often remark on how time seemed to go on forever when they were young, but now it seems to go by more and more quickly. I always ascribed this fact to the idea that an hour of a young child's life is a greater fraction of their lived experience than that of an old person. But now I think a large part of it might be the fact children are forced by their circumstances to be little more than potentiality----they always have to wait until some adult deems it is the "right time" for whatever they want to do.
In this clip we see Homer actively engaged in all the different aspects of getting to the amusement park, whereas the children are merely passive passengers who can do nothing more than wait. I think that this has a lot to do with the experience of time. If you are a passive person without any engagement in your life, time expands whereas if you are actively engaged, it shrinks.
This is an insight that has really made a big change in my life. When I remember it, it allows me to avoid the ennui and dread that used to fill many hours of my previous life. Like Bart and Lisa, I feel ennui (listlessness and dissatisfaction resulting from lack of interest; boredom) when I’m forced to passively sit in the back seat and wait for life to arrive. And I also feel dread during my episodes of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when I am consumed with terror over what might happen and guilt over what already has (flashbacks). By focusing on the individual moment in time that I am inhabiting now, I am able to avoid both aspects of Hell.
What this experience has got me thinking about recently is what "enlightenment" could be. All religions seem to have some sort of mental state that at least some of their followers are seeking. Buddhism is probably most famous for its pursuit of Nirvana. Daoism has its equivalent in Ziran. I believe that Sufism has the concept of "An" (although I cannot find a supporting link.) And Christianity and Judaism has Shalom.
Please note, that I am not suggesting that all of these experiences are exactly the same. It might be that they are, but in any event, the cultures that they arise from are different enough that even if they are all the same, the languages used to express them are sufficiently different that they each will have different nuances. Moreover, it might be that the experiences themselves are culturally mediated in such away that there are differences between them. The key point to understand is that Buddhists who are enlightened, Daoists who do manifest Ziran, Sufis who experience An and Christians and Jews who do live in Shalom would all get along with each other far better than with their co-religionists who do not understand or emphasize these concepts in their particular faith tradition. For example, a Sufi who manifests An will get along better with a Jew who lives in Shalom than with a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida. (Which is probably why the Taliban recently attacked a Sufi shrine with a bomb, killing many worshipers.)
The experience that I have been having lately is nothing earth-shattering. It is really very mundane, actually. But it is something that I treasure and it does make life a lot easier. It is also somewhat hard to explain. People go through life on the assumption that all words and experiences can be explained. This is an important and useful assumption. Most of the time things can be explained. And when someone cannot explain something and expects us to accept it "on faith", it is usually because they believe something that is unjustifiable. As my Daoist teacher once said, "if you can't explain yourself, you usually don't know what you are talking about".
But sometimes people cannot understand something simply because they haven't had the experience. Someone who has been blind from birth simply cannot know what colour is all about. In the same way, I don't think that enlightenment or Ziran or Shalom can be understood by anyone who hasn't really tried to live their life in a certain way. Please note, that the difference in being able to understand the experience of enlightenment, realization, or Ziran doesn't come from some sort of wild, extra-ordinary experience, but rather from a lot of time spent thinking about what it means to be alive. It's more like moving ten tons of gravel, one shovel at a time than about shoving your fingers into a light socket and getting an instantaneous jolt. (This isn't to say that there aren't life changing moments, but my experience is that they are very rare and usually come about because of previous, tedious, mundane effort.)
I don't think that enlightenment or Ziran or Shalom are all that special or weird, but they do come from an "undiscovered continent" to people who haven't really tried to understand their life. And in the presence of a vacuum, people start to insert all sorts of speculation about what it could be like. And because fame and power are not things that come from manifesting enlightenment or Ziran, the guys who know the least often end up teaching the courses and writing the text books. And if you can't understand exactly what someone is talking about until you do the exercise yourself, you are going to be at a real disadvantage when it comes to shopping around for a "do it yourself" manual. And when you do make some headway, you may find yourself smacking yourself on the head and thinking "That's what it’s all about? Wow, if I'd known then what I know now, I wouldn't have wasted so much time following blind alleys."
Think of this post as a rough sketch of a road map. I might be fooling myself, but I don't think I am. It's up to you to figure out if I can be trusted or not, though. Obviously very few people do, which is why I don't have hundreds or thousands of subscribers. And therein lies the rub. To understand the map of where you want to go, you pretty much almost have to be there already.
"if you can't explain yourself, you usually don't know what you are talking about"
A wonderful tautology that works just as well in converse, therefore promoting the virtues of (willful) ignorance and silence. Why does achieving both take so much work? Thinking and talking are what make us human.