Enlightenment made simple: it's reality

Back in my true-believing religious days I looked upon enlightenment as something special, difficult to achieve, and rare. Now, I see it pretty much opposite: not unique, easy to attain, and commonplace.

When you read descriptions of enlightenment in the world's spiritual, mystical, and philosophical literature -- and I've read lots of them -- some commonalities start to become apparent beneath all of the bewildering idiosyncratic descriptions.

The basic one is this: loss or lessening of self-hood, egotism, sense of separateness.

Supposedly enlightened people, such as the Buddha, talk about how "I-ness" isn't truly real. We humans aren't ego-encapsulated entities who inhabit our own realm of reality. Rather, we're part and parcel of the cosmos, an integral aspect of the interconnected world.

Well, that's exactly what science says. Also, everyday experience.

So what's the big deal about "enlightenment"? Nothing, really. In fact, that's what much of the literature on this subject says: enlightenment is realizing that there's nothing to be enlightened about, nor anyone to be enlightened.

In short, there's only reality. Seeing things as they are (necessarily, of course, within the confines of human consciousness) is the clearest perception.

Likewise, I suppose we could call wiping dirt off of a pair of glasses in order to see clearly "enlightenment." But since it's really just an act aimed at seeing normally, where's the need for a special word?

In "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" Alan Watts writes about this simple seeing as well as anyone I've read. Last year I quoted some passages in a blog post, Alan Watts tells me who I am: Everything.

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the entire universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals.

Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

...Apart from your brain, or some brain, the world is devoid of light, heat, weight, solidity, motion, space, time, or any other imaginable feature. All these phenomena are interactions, or transactions, of vibrations with a certain arrangement of neurons.

Thus vibrations of light and heat from the sun do not actually become light or heat until they interact with a living organism, just as no light-beams are visible in space unless reflected by particles of atmosphere or dust. In other words, it "takes two" to make anything happen.

Back in the 70's I spent several years in a Systems Science Ph.D. program. Never earned a doctorate, but I learned a lot about interconnectedness. The world isn't made up of discrete entities. Feedback, interchanges of energy and information, looping chains of causes and effects -- this is how the universe functions.

In a chapter, "The World is Your Body," Watts says:

As soon as one sees that separate things are fictitious, it becomes obvious that nonexistent things cannot "perform" actions. The difficulty is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature.

...Yet isn't it obvious that when we say, "The lightning flashed," the flashing is the same as the lightning, and that it would be enough to say, "There was lightning"?

...To sum up: just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment.

For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts.

Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into parts.

There are many ways to come to the understanding Watts speaks of.

Science is one way, since the laws of nature are marvelously interconnected, just as nature itself is. Ecology teaches us that no species is an island, sufficient unto itself. Rather, every living organism survives (and dies) via interchanges with its environment.

Meditation, in the broadest sense of "seeing clearly," is another way. I can intuit that when I feel myself sitting on my cushion, that sensation is a product of nerve endings in my butt, the firmness of what I'm resting on, and how my brain interprets that aspect of bodily awareness.

Whenever it seems that my self is a discrete independent entity, I'm not viewing reality accurately. I've narrowed my vision to focus on this or that aspect of the cosmos. That's fine, but every "figure" needs a "ground" to be perceptible.

The figure always defines the ground and the ground defines the figure. They are inseparable -- you can not have one without the other.

Everyone recognizes this. But often we forget this fact, or fail to pay attention to it.

"Enlightened" people simply do a better job of attending to reality. And I suspect that how this attending occurs plays a big part in whether someone is revered as an enlightened sage, or just appears to be a normal human being.

Meaning, some people will have a stronger intellectual or cognitive understanding of the universe's interconnectedness. Others, a stronger experiential or emotional understanding.

I suspect that these two varieties of understanding (which doesn't exhaust the varieties of "enlightenment") aren't as discrete as is often supposed. Thinking about how I am connected to the world likely will lead to different emotional states; I may feel less anxious, more compassionate, and such.

Yet as Watts said, "Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated 'egos' inside bags of skin."

Fortunately, reality has a way of winning out.

Modern neuroscience is showing us the falsity of believing in a separate self that somehow inhabits our psyches distinct from the brain. Studies of the effects of meditation are offering up clues about how mindfulness can help heal the illusory rift between ourselves and the world.

Our understanding of enlightenment is steadily growing. So much so, I suspect that one day that word will go out of use. We'll just speak of knowing reality.

Comments

[tucson]

Blogger Brian wrote:

"Supposedly enlightened people, such as the Buddha, talk about how 'I-ness' isn't truly real. We humans aren't ego-encapsulated entities who inhabit our own realm of reality. Rather, we're part and parcel of the cosmos, an integral aspect of the interconnected world.

Well, that's exactly what science says. Also, everyday experience."

--We often hear in Buddhism and advaita/neo-advaita that enlightenment is no big deal or doesn't exist because how can a ficticious entity become enlightened, or there is no one to be enlightened, or enlightenment is the case whether you know it or not, or enlightenment is a myth. Sometimes I say it myself.

But it isn't as simple as that. I think paradoxically, while the above is true, enlightenment DOES happen.

Being "part and parcel of the cosmos, an integral aspect of the interconnected world" can be intensely, profoundly, intrinsically realized, not as a concept that one accepts via logic or intuition, but as an actual experience.

It is not dry and theoretical like science or an idea. It is alive, vibrant, visceral, immediate and all pervasive like a light going on in a dim room. All becomes crystal clear, There is doubt about it. It is beyond doubt or question. It just is as it is and couldn't be any other way.

The tendency is to go "aha!" now I see it, but as soon as that clinging occurs it slips away. Yet the impact remains, maybe for years, even decades. It may continue to color your life even if you never see it again.

However, it may continue to occur from time to time and one may learn not to get too excited but rather to relax into it...here it is again. Let it come over you like syrup on a pancake. Just continue to lay flat and let the syrup soak in. Don't stand on end in the excitement of the moment. The syrup just rolls off. It can't be owned. It owns you.

[David]

Brian,

Have you ever woken up earlier than usual and meditated instead of continuing with sleep? Say you sleep 7 hours and go to bed at 12am. Why not wake up at 5am and meditate? You should be in REM rebound at that time and start to experience funky hypnagogic stuff, possibly even an OBE.

[George]

So enlightenment made simple is the recognition that 'all is interconnected'.

What does interconnected mean?

It cannot mean a mental connection since i do not know what you think, nor you me. I only know what I think, I think therefore I am.

It cannot mean a physical connection because the last time we were physically connected to another was to our mothers before the umbilical was cut.

Perhaps interconnectedness means all being composed of the same basic building blocks or atoms, this may be so, but each arrangement of said atoms is unique. Not only are species different, but so are all individiduals within a species. This diversity is essential for life.

So what are we left with? the recognition that we are all products of, or dependent on, our environment, so what? this is common sense, it requires no enlightenment. It does not even require any conscious recognition, since it is hardwired into every lifeform, whose very existence is dependent on its uniquely evolved way of interacting with its environment.

[Blogger Brian]

George, I gave some examples of interconnectedness -- they're ubiquitous in both science and everyday life. Interchanges of matter and energy are everywhere, from the air we breathe to the Internet by which we're communicating.

Interconnectedness doesn't mean identity. If everything in the cosmos were exactly the same, without any distinctions, there wouldn't be "everything." Or any thing.

Interconnectedness or interrelationships are how the universe functions. That was the core premise of my Systems Science studies. Look at any one thing in isolation and you miss what's really going on, because nothing is isolated.

The problem with us human beings, as I see it, is that we have a mistaken intuitive understanding of our separate uniqueness, a.k.a. ego or self. I agree with you that our inherent connectedness with the environment should be obvious. But for many, it isn't.

Religion is largely to blame, with all of its talk about an immortal soul or pristine consciousness. This leads people to believe that they can view the world from a detached perspective, and after death will leave the world entirely to enter a better one.

As Alan Watts said, our language reflects this unwarranted supposition. We speak of babies coming "into" the world, rather than "from" the world, as if they popped into existence from some realm external to the universe.

Feeling that we part and parcel of the world is different from simply thinking that this is true. Tucson's comment makes this point. "Enlightenment" might be a whole bodied/brained realization of the obvious fact of interconnectedness, which otherwise remains a surface understanding that doesn't penetrate through the core of us.

[George]

Brian

while i think some of your statements may be right, they are vague and not so clearcut as you make out.

For example "nothing is isolated" is a very tenuous statement imo. The gas in a hermetically sealed box is isolated from its surrounding environment. My thoughts are isolated from yours. I can have a thought, which I choose not to act on, free will, etc.

"no species is an island" - but many species have evolved uniquely on islands, notably Darwins galapagos isles. In other words, species evolve uniquely in an isolated local environment. Flighless birds have evolved in New Zealand because there no large land predators. Similarly, life on earth may have evolved completely independently to life in another part of the cosmos.

Systems theory is perhaps an interesting way of looking at the world, in that it assumes a more holistic perspective, as perhaps compared to the more reductionist (or atomistic) tendency of traditional physical science. Thus, i can see why ppl with more mystical leanings of oneness would be drawn to systems theory, but its never really had the accuracy or predictive accuracy of science. Perhaps the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but identifying the whole and its behaviour is not so clear.

[Dogribb]

As a not-apart from the whole.Who is there to say anything is "this or that"?

[Blogger Brian]

George, let's think for a moment about the supposedly "isolated" gas in a hermetically sealed box. It isn't really isolated, because it is part of a system which determines its isolated status.

The gas is constrained within the walls of the box. Without the box, it wouldn't be possible to speak of isolation. This is the figure/ground issue that Alan Watts talks about. We get focused on a figure, and forget that what gives it reality is the ground against which it stands out.

Also, if the walls of the box changed temperature, so would the gas. And the gas isn't isolated from the laws of nature. Gravity, electromagnetism and the nuclear forces still exist within the "isolated" box.

Quantum physics tells us there is a slight probability that a particle of the gas could "tunnel" its way through the walls of the box and end up in another location. So this is another way the gas isn't isolated.

For me, the figure/ground notion is the easiest way to understand how everything in the universe is interconnected. The only way it is possible to perceive some seemingly distinct entity is by discerning how it stands out against a backdrop, even if this is a vacuum of apparent nothingness.

Which doesn't really exist. There is no such thing as "nothing," another demonstration of how the cosmos is interconnected. See:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/11/17/131383533/avoiding-the-void-a-brief-history-of-nothing-ness
(thanks Alex, for sharing that link in an email to me)

[Fred M]

Thanks for bringing attention to Watts' "The Book". Of all that I've read, I would choose it as the one book to offer someone who was curious about this not-so-mainstream perspective on life. I still remember being electrified in the days after first reading it, the total freedom and joy of being a genuine fake.

We are all afraid to relinquish our little egos, but when it happens we wonder what the fuss was about. Nobody does it fully or for very long, but with each contraction of the egotistic impulse comes joy and compassion in ever greater proportion.

[Mike Williams]

Brian, enlightenment was forced upon you by your
own readers. You got trapped by your own audience.

But, enlightenment does not make you smart. It does
not make you a decent person.

The rabbits hole is much deeper.

Much deeper. It is a place you do not want to go.

It is the place Faquir Chand called, "hanging on the gallows with no support."

The simply enlightened, are still capable of committing the most terrible crimes without even knowing it.

Enlightenment will not help the world.