Enlightenment
Outside of my everyday life and hobbies, one area that has always fascinated me has been ancient cultures, because when you read the translations and motivations of ancient peoples, it highlights how similar we are and how little we as human beings have changed over the last few thousand years and maybe even further than that. We continue to struggle with certain aspects of what it is to be human, where did we come from and where will we go to. Why don’t we know about our past and how do we prepare for what comes after? I am not going to discuss religions here, what I will say is that it is the drive for someone to tell us that leads and keeps many people under different religious doctrines. Once you’ve read enough about these cultures, one area that tends to appear more often than not is the concept of enlightenment and it does so across all areas of life. So what is it? Well, there are actually several different aspects of this much used and poorly understood concept. In its simplest form, to enlighten means to bring light; or to give information to inform or instruct; to give spiritual or intellectual insight; to free from ignorance, false beliefs or prejudices. You could become enlightened about pretty much anything from a position of not knowing much about it. So is enlightenment the new found state of being after these changes? I am not so sure.
As we have grown older and developed our own powers of thought and self realization, there is no doubt in my mind that we have passed through several different aspects of enlightenment and yet we continue to be enlightened. So are we ever enlightened on anything or more realistically, are we constantly in a state of being enlightened throughout our lives. The more we learn about the world and ourselves, the more we are able to learn because we have more background knowledge to see the world in a different way. I cannot imagine reaching a point where we understand everything there is to know before we reach our end stage in life, pass through what comes after and then get ready to start again, retaining none of the specific knowledge we had attained. Once you’ve reached the point of being comfortable with this concept and it can take us a long time to get here, you are going to ask the question, ”why”? Before you ask, I am at the point of being comfortable with the questions, not the answers.
From a single life perspective, maybe enlightenment is just being comfortable with the process we go through.
I often hear that the world is unfair or life is unfair (often from myself in my youth), neither of which I now believe to be true. We may have built a society or culture that doesn’t feel fair to different age groups or demographics but you could never accuse life of being unfair because we haven’t figured out the rules yet. Unfair compared to what?
I look at all the systems I see in place or being brought into place by governments to give them greater control of society and it is clearly not for greater good, it is for the maintained stability of the current power structure, the security of our leaders rather than the people they represent. As a species we remain a very anarchic mix of different belief structures and differing means of self expression, mostly stemming back to a sense of unfairness in our societies - how this is handled seems to be dictated by how enlightened our leaders are, in this day and age not very and mostly motivated by greed and power, not our finest representatives as a species. Which all brings me back to the question of “why?”
Taking an unbiased look at life, there are so many levels and types of temptation seemingly tailored to different weaknesses in ourselves, some we indulge in, others we “draw the line at” as we encounter the boundaries of our own moral compass. It is at this point that we start to encounter what I would call our own “personal enlightenment”, at our moral boundaries, those boundaries we draw for ourselves and those we draw for others. It is this area that I feel causes us most concern with our leaders, they do not draw such moral boundaries for their own self interests (obviously we would, given the same situation!) and know enough to conceal the actions they know will draw the most ire from the population rather than abstaining from them. Far better to have a society that cannot raise its condemning voice and should instead trust the moral judgements of our leaders. Our issue is that we don’t, we have learnt our lessons from the past and refuse to blindly follow guidance from leaders who continually hide their true motivations. This process and cycle are nothing new and simply a re-run of previous cultures, leaders and peoples of the past. So where does this all come from and what can we do to prevent it repeating itself? The old adage of the Gnostics, “as above, so below” comes to mind, our systems and leaders represent the moral lessons we have all been taught early in life, if we are unhappy with the resulting adults, we should look back to how we are raising our youth. People’s beliefs are far more powerful than you might think at influencing the world we live in, they are the invisible template we use to justify the world we build.
Until we take a long hard look at our spoken and unspoken beliefs and the impact they have on the world around us, I do not think we can become enlightened as individuals or as a species. Breaking free of our own unspoken and sometimes poorly expressed beliefs is no small undertaking, ask any psychologist. Our ancestors used to call this this an apocalypse, a word we use poorly in modern times, it comes from the Greek apokalypsis which translated literally means an uncovering, a revelation or a lifting of the veil. Until we are willing to undertake such an understanding of ourselves and our actions, we will make little headway into understanding the problems with the world around us and what we can impactfully do to change it.
If you search online and in older texts, there are numerous examples of people for whom their worst fears were realised when disaster struck, what you rarely find are the stories of broken individuals, they seem to emerge stronger and with a greater sense of understanding of themselves and the world around them. Maybe we all need our own apocalypse to understand who we really are and how to make the most of the world around us. In the end, it may be our fears that actually hold us back.
