You said something in that piece that stuck with me, hard: that some people mistake dirt for the lightbulb, and others dig so perfectly they still miss the flick. I’ve seen both. I watched a man meditate himself into total stillness—fasted for weeks, renounced everything, shaved his head—and still flinched every time someone touched his past. Enlightenment as armor. I’ve also known a woman who swore she found her lightbulb during a shrooms trip in a Motel 6—came back glowing, but couldn’t make eye contact with herself six months later.
Your metaphor landed because it wasn’t neat. You left the edges rough, like someone who’s touched bedrock and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream. The part that really hit? The choice to fill the hole back in. That’s not failure—it’s knowing too much. It’s the kind of clarity that says, ‘This light doesn’t need to stay on for me to see.’ I respect the hell out of that.
It reminded me of something weird: when I was nine, I dug a literal hole in our backyard for weeks. Said I was looking for treasure. My uncle asked what I’d do if I actually found it. I told him I’d probably bury it again, so no one else could mess it up. He laughed, but I wasn’t joking.
Reading your piece, I felt that same impulse. Like maybe we dig because the process gives shape to the parts of us we can’t language. And when the light hits? We cover it—not out of fear, but because we know what light does to people. Makes them worship. Makes them forget how to dig.
Anyway, just wanted to say—you’re one of the few people who makes philosophy feel like an act of rebellion again. And that matters more than most of us admit.
"All the effort was just to get to the point where you could see it."
To extend your metaphor, this makes me think of being a child or infant and how getting older is having dirt and rocks and boulders thrown at you. And people with difficult childhoods perhaps had more tricky or hard to deal with soil and boulders which is why it's also harder for them to shovel through it and access the child again (by which I mean a sort of blank slate-ness and an ability to just exist in the world with no dirt burdening you). But of course, we can't really get rid of all the dirt and exist because we are built by it, it's an essential part of having gone through life and had experiences. And as an adult you have so much the child doesn't: agency, independence, power. The price you pay for that is accumulating soil.
I am not interested in arguing over the particulars of a metaphor, sorry.
The reason why is that "enlightenment" appears to be (and is described in this essay as being) without any observable properties or symptoms. To the extent that it exists, it's a purely internal experience that cannot be described well enough for people to believe each others' reports about it.
> Enlightenment itself changes nothing, and if it's changed something, it's not really enlightenment.
This sounds like "enlightenment itself," rather than being a Real Thing that exists but is unobservable and causes no changes, is simply nothing. The thing that actually exists is the mental work that occurs during all the meditation and the psychic exploration etc. The special magical macguffin at the bottom is a lot harder to accept.
The description also seems compatible with enlightenment being a real mental event that is just not particularly useful for anything.
The account of enlightenment I think I've heard the most makes it sound like it's about noticing how your subjective experience and qualia are actually constructed out of more basic mental building blocks that do not involve qualia. Identity and consciousness are a sort of hallucination your brain comes up with to explain its own function, and if you practice concentrating on the details of the hallucination really hard, you can make it dissolve away for a moment.
If that is indeed what enlightenment is, then it's a cool party trick, and I can see how to someone living a thousand years ago with no knowledge of modern neurology or other mind science, this'd be a very mind blowing experience. You might feel like you've discovered some deep and ancient secret of the universe. But if you are a 21st century atheist and already know that your identity and experience can't be some irreducible facet of the fundamental laws of physics, it seems significantly less illuminating or impressive.
If you could get to enlightenment with a few hours of digging, I might try it out for the novelty of the experience. But it's not worth years of effort to me if I already learned the deep and ancient secret of the universe from a neurology blog post.
I don't see why this would be harder to accept than people who learn how to defocusing their eyes to see those 3D shapes hidden in what looks like noise.
That is very easy to accept for at least 3 reasons:
1. I, personally, have successfully seen the shapes in the magic eye puzzles, which grants me first-person confidence that the thing is really there
2. Those things are created by humans. You get to appeal to teleology when there's a knowable telos involved!
3. People agree on what the shapes are. if you give 10 people the same magic eye puzzle, they'll all tell you that it's a donkey. That gives me a lot of confidence that there's a donkey in the puzzle! If they all came away saying "I saw something... but I can't tell you what it was like... there are no words for the shape I saw," I would be less sanguine
> if you give 10 people the same magic eye puzzle, they'll all tell you that it's a donkey.
Sure, now embed an image with a completely complex or ambiguous shape that doesn't relate to anything that we have unique descriptive words for and watch people fumble trying to describe it. This is a failing of language to describe qualia, which is not evidence that the qualia wasn't perceived. People have different perceptible colour ranges/sensitivities, taste ranges/sensitivities, hearing ranges/sensitivities and so on, I don't see why perceiving this new state of mind would be any different.
The thousands of years of tradition describing enlightenment is sufficient evidence that the perception is real, and the variability in accounts is no more surprising than the variability in other sensory reports IMO.
> Sure, now embed an image with a completely complex or ambiguous shape that doesn't relate to anything that we have unique descriptive words for and watch people fumble trying to describe it.
if you did this people could just draw the shape. the shape is really there. but, again, i don't think arguing about the particulars of metaphors is productive. the metaphors are not the actual thing we are talking about.
> the variability in accounts is no more surprising than the variability in other sensory reports IMO.
sure, but i think this is too big a hammer. there are certainly limits to communication - nobody but me _really knows_ what my internal experience of happiness is, or the colour blue - but everyone agrees that when you see a cute baby and you smile at it, the thing you're feeling is happiness, and we can all point at the sky and say that's blue. people don't even agree on that level about "enlightenment."
clearly, deep long-term meditation causes some people to have intense experiences. but I suspect that different people use the term "enlightenment" to describe very different qualia.
you could say, you know, "there are qualia that are achievable only via deep meditation, and I'm naming this particular one enlightenment." and that's fine. but giving it such a standout name - especially one with such connotations - gives it a lot of importance. and I don't think that people are pointing at the *same* quale with the word. "I did a lot of meditation and I had some weird experiences including some that were profound" - yup! absolutely believe you. "there's something special and obvious about one particular meditation-experience in a way that is similar across practitioners" - I am unconvinced.
At the risk of getting the other awakened beings mad at me, I mostly agree, although I'd also stress something about how everyone's lightbulb is already there and turned on, but until you dig you can't see the light.
When children learn to count and try to count to the highest number, eventually they stop and understand "infinity" without having to literally understand it and also without needing to understand the Very Useful symbol ∞ used in math which is "Real" symbol even though infinity itself is "fake and can't be reached"
Some children see other children going AHA! I understand now! and are jealous and claim that they also understand. It's hard to tell the difference because they can even use the ∞ correctly in math class showing their work.
However... some of them think of things like 9999^9999 and other notations to make the numbers everyone else counted too feel infinitely small so that they themselves can feel closer to infinity.
The key behavior that changes when infinity is truly understood is when the urge to count bigly disappears...
and this results in the same behavior as someone who just stops because they don't like math. It's the midwits who suffer most
Wow, this infinity analogy is amazing for this user case. Although I still need to find a way to put it in a more intuitive way for the people who haven't tried counting to infinity yet, if you know what I mean.
For me the question about enlightenment was always: what’s the point? If after all those years I’ll still need to chop wood and carry water, and I won’t even obviously be a more ethical person, OR more “enlightened” in any externally verifiable sense (eg new scientific or mathematical or philosophical insights), then what was it for? To say that this interesting piece has failed to answer that question would be an understatement.
Because it's that good. I've only ever had brief glimpses, and even that is life changing. It's like a dozen wars you didn't know were raging inside you (on top of the ones you knew) are all pacified all of a sudden. It doesn't dumb you down or mess with your sense of salience like a drug; it's like all your inner pipes are unclogged for a moment, everything is right and clear, and there's no conceit because it's not even about you. Next to that, our ordinary state of waking consciousness is like wading through a muddy, stinky swamp. And people who have had strong awakening or satori experiences talk about this kind of thing lasting for weeks and months. It's no wonder one wants to go back and stay there; it's just that it doesn't work as an act of will, and the wanting itself becomes another front in those wars.
The connection to ethics is very indirect. Various traditions do say that there is such a thing as final, complete enlightenment, and that it (among other things) is 100% incompatible with unethical behavior. But that's mostly irrelevant for us, because this level of realization is vanishingly rare (possibly down to a few individuals a generation), and most importantly, it's no guarantee that you will get progressively more ethical along the way. There's no shortage of fallen gurus out there, and probably even more of them standing in metastable states waiting for someone to notice.
The traditional connection to ethics is the other way round. You don't become ethical by getting awakened; if your ethics have anything to do with awakening at all, you become ethical by understanding that the shit that unethical behavior inevitably brings up will keep you far away from any possibility of awakening.
(My sources are a combination of Buddhist, Hindu and modern non-denominational.)
I mean, is it more like: I'll suddenly know the ultimate truth of the life, cosmos, and myself, BUT I won't be able to put that truth into words, so I'll appear none the wiser when the conversation turns (let's say) to cosmology or foundations of quantum mechanics? Or is it more like: I won't perceive any new truths, but will "merely" have had a life-changing subjective experience, as people do with various drugs? In the latter case, aren't the drugs easier? :-D And (just like with the drugs) who's to say the radical change will be for the better?
Here's a very relevant comparison for me: pure math, theoretical physics, etc. ALSO demand many years of intense concentration and study. And few people would claim that this study will make you a more ethical person, OR that it will get you rich or laid or anything like that. So then what's the point of it? Well, at least this study produces a "paper trail" of results that virtually all experts agree are correct and that any motivated person can check for themselves, and it also propels our whole technological civilization forward in ways that anyone can observe. I'm asking whether there's any claim of an analogous payoff from Buddhist-style Enlightenment.
I'm neither enlightened nor a proselytist, so my take on these kinds of questions is deflationary. Why does anyone write poetry or spend years honing skills at an instrument? Or put lots of effort digging actual dirt and planting trees, like Kryptogal below, when you can just order mass-produced fruit online for cheap? Ultimately it becomes an intuitive thing, you try it and you see whether it's for you or not. A good spiritual teacher will goad you along to "do the work", but only if you're clear that you want to, otherwise just go and do something else! — same as in athletics or any other field that has its own measures of excellence.
Meditation doesn't give you magic knowledge about the world, how would it even? The Buddha didn't write down Newton's or Schrodinger's equations when he got up from his tree, and I don't think you attending a Vipassana retreat or some such would magically enlighten you to the foundations of QM — at best it might bring a moment of clarity where the thing you already know suddenly come together, but you might as well have one of those on a random walk in the forest. Then again, there is no huge qualitative difference between a meditation session and a good walk or run in the forest. If you were able to disconnect from the background sense of worry and rumination and persistent wrongness that pervades so much of life, you're already in the same space. Meditation and other techniques are just ways of pushing further into that space, and discovering that there's more depth there than meets the eye.
A "spiritual" outlook in the wider sense values subjective experiences for themselves, not just because they help further some instrumental goal. The psychedelic-like shift in conscious experience mirrors a shift in views and values, where you recognize that subjectivity is what gives color and value to our dear old objective things, not the other way around. Propelling technology forward is only good to the extent that better conditions of living tend to feel good in our phenomenal experience.
If not enlightenment, I wonder if there is some other practice which has an actual track record of producing ethical behavior etc. Come to think of it, humans have a suspicious lack of interest in that question, if you ask me.
The point is simply to have a better experience of life—to suffer less. For some of us that seems like a completely alien concept, and it landed for me only recently. Why would I do something simply because it’s good for my own experience of life? Am I actually allowed to have that?
This is a big question to unpack. The short answer is that entitlement is just awareness of being. It's getting deeply in touch with reality without viewing it through your ontological framing. You should probably want to be enlightened if you care sufficiently about truth.
But enlightenment also brings joy and peace and steadfastness and lots of other things if you let it. There's much to gain from attaining nothing.
However, the process of becoming enlightened is generally awful. Only do it if you feel you must. Just know the fruits are sweet even as you get to taste them along the path.
Could I ask what you mean by, "what's the point?" I can imagine an awful lot of things you might reasonably mean by that, but I'm having trouble narrowing it down from there, and my sense is that some versions of that question might sit uncomfortably with whatever it is we're calling Enlightenment here.
One thing you're missing is that 'enlightenment' is a generic English translation for a bunch of different words from a bunch of different traditions meaning a bunch of different things.
Wu, Satori, Bodhi, Moksha, Prajna, Vimutti, Kensho, Xian, Daigo-tettei, etc all have fairly precise technical meanings in their own traditions and no English language equivalents. 'Enlightenment' in English just means a state of understanding, so it's used as a bucket term all the others get tossed into. Then people learning about or experiencing 'enlightenment' think those using it to mean something else are ignorant or faking.
Of course it isn't helped when you try to bring non-Western traditions across to a culture which is highly competitive, achievement oriented, individualistic and where the term 'holier than thou' can be readily understood. And when you start selling 'enlightenment' in a competitive marketplace ...
In several Asian traditions you can't achieve 'enlightenment' because we were all 'enlightened' all along. You can only 'realise' it, and in doing so you 'realise' you can never be inferior or superior to anyone else. Tat tvam asi.
There's nothing more egotistical than a Californian who has 'attained egolessness', especially if he spent a lot of time, money and effort doing it.
Yeah that's one failure more, fully agree. The modern spiritual marketplace is a jungle, and there's lots of room for self-deception and ego-based egolessness, whether Californian or German style.
But the traditional Asian institutions have their own failure modes too. They hold the traditions, they have hands-on experience with the process, they know satori from samapatti and so on, and in the best of cases they can guide you through a long and delicate process that needs lots of balance and steadiness. It's pretty well-known in all sorts of traditions that if you dig long and hard enough, you can reach a point where you feel like the job is done, yet a good teacher can tell it's not. That's the point where many people in the modern freelance world will start teaching, gather a following, and often make a mess.
The flip side, is that institutions will institute, and they often care 90% about their own preservation, and just 10% about their ostensible goals. They have a huge incentive to give you just enough spiritual instruction to you get hooked that there is something there, and then make you emotionally dependent on them (through a combination of gratitude and lack of intuitive development). That's why established religions are often so disempowering once you're past the initial high. Many people give them their entire lives as monks, and get turned into little more than worker drones. So definitively watch out!
Yeah, definitely agree about institutions. They might be made of humans but they're not human and have their own imperatives. That goes for all institutions - spiritual, religious, corporate, military, political, educational ... whatever.
I've learned (and sometimes taught) at several Asian 'spiritual' institutions - in India, Thailand and Sri Lanka - and I can't say I've ever heard discussion of if/when "the job is done". Even in Theravada, with it's formalised 'enlightenment stages' of sotapanna, sakatagami, anagami and arahant, I don't recall any teacher presuming to tell someone which, if any, stage they were at or whether their job was done.
When I first started going to India there were a lot of European Rajneeshis around who had been told how spiritually developed they were (or weren't), what they must do next to progress and how far they still had to go, but I can't say I ever studied under Osho (though I did read some of his comparative religion books with interest). A few months after he died I ran into a British woman in Gwailor who he'd told couldn't leave India until he said she'd learned what she had to learn there. She hated the place but was still there wondering when she'd receive the sign it was OK to go home. I jokingly told her it would be when she no longer wanted to and to my horror she initially took me seriously.
As for my own 'spiritual journey', I reckon I found what I was looking for in October 2012, though it had the strange effect of recontextualising my entire life - past, present and remaining - as both the process and culmination of that. Sounds like typical New Age waffle I know, but there it is. It also convinced me that everything I'd tried to teach others was BS. The blind leading the blind. At least I didn't charge for it.
Am I 'enlightened' then?
The question makes me laugh no matter which language I ask it in.
To me, Enlightenment is a guest that I greet as my closest friend when he visits, and forget about completely when he leaves. I don’t know when he will visit, but when I do, he arrives immediately. When he leaves it’s like he was never there, and when he comes it’s like he never left.
The lightbulb is on, the light is shining - that’s why you can see at all. The light by which you see is pointed to by everything seen. Noticing this, you realise that the only reason you never noticed the bulb, is because you were blinded by the light it emits.
Well, I don't believe there's such thing as enlightenment and thinks it's a silly term. But I enjoyed the piece anyway, because I liked the metaphor.
Mostly because I'm someone who ACTUALLY spends a lot of time digging holes in the ground and moving dirt - non-metaphorically. And indeed, the dirt in my front yard is cement-like clay, and in my back-yard it's sand, and it takes me about 50 to 100 times as long to dig a tree-sized hole in the front. I can plant a 6 foot tree in 30 minutes in the back, but that will take me days and dozens of hours of digging in the front.
But also, I would highly recommend to people that they dig holes and move dirt, again, non-metaphorically and not with the aim of enlightenment. I did not get into doing this because I was trying to achieve enlightenmen or some kind of spiritual purpose, I did it purely for aesthetic reasons and wanting to attract birds. The zen feeling and mind turning off and relaxing that accompanies dirt moving just happens, though. Whether you want it or not. It feels good. Like it's physically pleasurable, but in your mind and not your body. It's weirdly addictive, highly so. So yeah just move the dirt and forget all the other silliness and pretension.
Listen to yourself Katie! You’re immanentizing the very enlightenment telos you reject. I get it, you’ve found dozens of bulbs down there but don’t want to tell us, you’re hoarding them until you hard launch your salty trollop cult.
Lol people are going to be so disappointed when my cult is just digging dirt, putting it in buckets, carrying the bucket somewhere else, dumping the dirt, rinse repeat forever. ☺️ Though actually you do get hummingbirds and butterflies and pretty plants out of it too. So not just all muddy hidden lightbulbs that you find you don't need as soon as you uncover them.
> Lol people are going to be so disappointed when my cult is just digging dirt, putting it in buckets, carrying the bucket somewhere else, dumping the dirt, rinse repeat forever.
These things are just self-fulfilling, the way you put it obviously nobody will join. But if your discourse was the opposite, mysterious and implying subtle invisible greatness, you'd have queues of people with their shovels and uniforms. Mind and motivation and image are just that malleable.
Horrible technique. Barefeet and a skirt?! And a too-big shovel. She's going to chop her own toes off and exhaust her arms before she gets far. You gotta be ready to really squat and bend over and get in there with dirty pants. The image is pretty though.
But based on the large collection of creeper shots my husband has taken of my bent over backside while I'm mucking around in the dirt, it must not be TOO unsexy. ☺️
Love the dynamic that sexy lawyer you is sweating in the Utah sun while Mr. Military man creeps on the view, neither of you making a call to the landscaping service you can absolutely afford.
Aella’s image is such an uncanny melding of shoveling and sweeping. AI can pass the bar exam and fold macromolecules in 5 dimensions…. but ahhh how many fingers does a human being have and what are arms for?
This is true, she her position is more like she's playing shuffleboard and trying to push dirt forward, not dig it. Yes I could call for landscaping, but I'm telling you, there is something extremely mentally addicting and like a massage for your brain to just turn off your mind completely...no earbuds, no music, no podcast, no thoughts, and just dig and move dirt. It's good for you, I can't stop. I get itchy as soon as the ground thaws!
Having trained myself for some 35 years with various teachers, llamas, masters, all over the world, I can say with some confidence that some of them were at some stage of realization, and some are not. And it’s important to understand. There are stages of realization, and many many many stages before enlightenment., and each presents differently with different challenges and is different for every person. There’s a spectrum of awakening. It’s not an off/on type of thing in my experience. Of course I’m not enlightened or even realized at this point, so what do I know? I guess the only thing I do know is that some of the teachers I sat with had varying degrees of siddhis, gifts, and transmissions. Some of them, by just sitting in their presence, one’s mind was washed blank. Some of them have tremendous magnetism that makes students just wanna be near them. Some of them are caught up in the sexuality of that power… and some were squeaky, clean with scrupulous morals . but perhaps those would all just be some of the stages, moving towards realization, towards enlightenment.
Your question, parodic story and most of the conclusions you draw are spot on.
Awakening is turning on the lightbulb, and its a shift of perspective (which you've encountered parts of via drugs, and possibly other things - you've previously written about such experiences). However, awakenings are rarely permanent and they typically don't clear out ALL the crap (pain bodies, and resultant unfortunate adaptations/behaviors).
Awakenings might last for minutes or months, but when a person comes down, they still have to clear their crap - some do it faster and more thoroughly, others less so, and each has their own set of crap. Enlightenment/realization is probably best used for "lasting/abiding awakening" + most of your crap is sorted: much rarer than "having had one or more awakining experiences".
Plenty of teachers out there acknowledge all of this, and indeed teach students to be aware and wary of those dynamics. Some don't... bleh. Some get caught up in perpetuating the "marketing materials".... bleh. I'd point you to Adyashanti as probably the best of the lot, especially for Americans. Ram Dass too, over the years came to grips with how reality doesn't match the marketing (which includes 1000-year old texts no one knows how to contextualize for today). I'd give you specific urls, but I don't have them indexed by "perfect example of addressing what you're talking about".
Distinguishing feature of Tantra: even the "unpleasant" stuff is still life experience, and grist for the mill. Accepting it and just dealing with it (at a practical level) without the resistance of "That shouldn't have happened!" is part of the shift in perspective.
At any rate, really glad to see you still digging at the topic. Don't get discouraged :)
+1 for adya. Thats a guy who knows how to talk about shoveling, share what it’s been like for him, but ultimately point you back to *yourself* as the only one who can do the shoveling and the only one who can determine how shoveling will express itself uniquely through your unique life.
I think that in general her metaphor works, but calling enlightenment a “lightbulb” does kinda presuppose that you’ll know it when you see it from having seen other lightbulbs out in the world. Everyone knows what a lightbulb looks like. I do think there are lots of different things people are referring to when they claim enlightenment—the “private language” analogy works here—I do think there are different varieties; some being an intense feeling of interconnectedness, and the other being a feeling of extreme solipsism. I’ve experienced both of those, and can imagine spiritual guru types referring to either as “enlightenment” or “ego death,” but they’re almost completely opposite to each other. I am not an expert, however; this is just my 2 cents.
I mean, this is not an analogy, this is the subject of the argument. Enlightenment as a mental event is a private event, right? So, how can you talk about something that you by definition can't perceive? Trying to explain it is like trying to explain color to a color-blind person. You can observe that color-blind people won't behave the same way to color-preceving people but you can't explain what color is.
So the fundamental problem is not in the ambiguity (one string of letters referring to many meanings, this issue is simple, you just need to enumerate all possible meanings and rename them) but simply that people don't follow the seventh rule of tractatus.
Honestly, with all the yapping how eastern philosophy is superior to western the fact that this fundamental problem is overlooked makes me doubt the depth of their teachings.
Hmm… I guess what I was getting at wrt “putting in work” was about achieving the experience of enlightenment/nirvana. Again, to use an analogy, people are born with the senses but through using those senses you can begin to become more familiar with them, appreciate subtle differences, which takes effort and concentration but not necessarily the ability to consciously conceptualize the differences. Like, for example, I’m thinking about the way animals are far more aware of subtle qualities in their environment and the information they convey but, (probably) being incapable of abstract thought, they wouldn’t be able to convert that experience to an abstract form (conceptualize I guess) and pass it onto someone else. Math, being entirely conceptual, needs to be practiced and worked at to be understood, but I think there’s something fundamentally different about the “sense” you get for math/numbers/logic and sensory experience, the former being purely cognitive. I think we basically agree. BUT:
The concept of the “interconnectedness of all things” is pretty simple to understand. It doesn’t take much effort to understand a lot of the more simple metaphysical concepts. What takes effort (or no-effort, if you want to get paradoxical about it) is having the experience, maybe? Yet another analogy: I think that it’s the difference between being able to understand a joke someone makes and experiencing the humor.
As far as not speaking about “enlightenment” and talking only about the “symptoms” I think this may be useful for research purposes. But if you’re studying a particular set of symptoms and their relationships, aren’t you by definition studying the thing that they’re symptoms *of* even if you don’t call it “enlightenment?”
Wrt colors, I do think that even if some people experience more, those who can experience more could probably convey the difference between two near identical shades or orange (“this one is slightly redder”) even if they couldn’t make us see it ourselves.
Philosophy probably can’t give us new knowledge but I think it can help us use the knowledge we have well. I think there are probably as many solutions to life as there are people, and I don’t know if enlightenment is necessarily a destination in its own right if you don’t want it to be.
Hmm… I think that even if you can’t directly describe “enlightenment” (if such a thing exists) you can describe its effects; the fact that we’re talking about it and people recognize it as something they may have experienced shows that it can be spoken of. “I felt a deep sense of wholeness and peace” “I saw and kind of experienced the interconnectedness of all things which changed my perspective in life for the better” “Some dimension of suffering I’d always experienced went away and did not come back” etc (I don’t know if these are what other people refer to as enlightenment, but in my probably unenlightened experience this is how I would explain enlightenment-adjacent experiences). Maybe a better analogy would be if someone had never seen a lightbulb, only light, and they came across a glowing rock in their garden; they know that a lightbulb is something that emits light, and this thing they’ve found emits light, and they jump to the conclusion that what they’ve found a lightbulb. (Maybe in this hypothetical world, there are no lightbulbs, only a variety of glowing things, some of which are arbitrarily referred to as lightbulbs? Idk. What I think is cool about Aella’s survey is that she is comparing these glowing rocks and trying to figure out wtf is a lightbulb and things that can be mistaken for one?)
I think you could explain color to a blind person though. Maybe not in a way that they’ll be able to experience, but they could get the idea: presumably they have other senses. “You know how notes on a piano sound different, and different combinations can create different moods? Color is like that, but visual.” But if they know about color and suddenly become sighted, they’ll have the language to describe their experience.
Maybe enlightenment can be imagined as a syndrome, characterized by symptoms but without a causal description to differentiate it from similar conditions with different etiologies? I think it’s very valid to discuss, as it seems to be something that a lot of people wish to cultivate and have found beneficial.
I do recall hearing that in a lot of Eastern spirituality, enlightenment is a goal that one works toward by putting in effort rather than an abstraction, as it seems to be treated by a lot of western philosophy affectionados.
Eh, nobody thinks that enlightenment is an abstraction in this way in the western philosophy, you too need to put work into actually doing philosophy to "get into direct relation with the absolute". Just the same way that you can't really understand math without doing math even though mathematical objects are abstract objects. Similarly, Stoic ataraxia and Aristotelian eudaimonia are achieved by working on virtues. The history of western philosophy can be read as a history of paradoxes that resist conceptual comprehension and philosopher achieves enlightenment by working against those paradoxes and failing again, and again, and again until they develop an understanding for the being-in-itself which is what people describe as "interconnectedness of all things". What really distinguishes western philosophy from eastern is attitude towards rational thinking. Western philosophy pushes the limits of what is intelligible, and eastern philosophy just gave up on this attempt and focuses on meditative techniques. And I respect that a lot since they really caught onto something that works and focused on it.
Regarding other points. I do agree that mental properties should and can only be understood by the symptoms they exhibit (although I prefer to talk about symbols). But the point I understood Aella was presenting is that those symptoms are those "layers of dirt" and the enlightenment itself is something else. And the real question is, given that those symptoms are what we value, what exactly this enlightenment gives us above and below the symptoms themselves? As the legend goes, when Napoleon asked Laplace why he didn't mention God in his theory, he said “I have no need of that hypothesis”.
This is why I don't even want to deny the existence of enlightenment, it might exist. But it can't be spoked about in any meaningful manner.
I disagree with you on the color though. Being differential isn't a description of any color. Most blind people see shades anyway, So this property doesn't explain anything about colors like "red" or "blue". Take into consideration that most of us also see a limited pallet of colours, and there are some people that see more of them. They may show us a pallet of colors ordered by shades and say they see every card in a different shade, while we can't notice a difference.
Witggestain has this argument that doing philosophy cannot give us any new knowledge. We engage in this pointless task as a result of a mistake since we can rationally solve many problems in life, then we think we could solve the life like a problem as well. This attitude sounds to me a lot like what Aella said about the attitude of the people that claim the enlightenment is not a big deal. Witggestain of course was an asshole, but if the eternal tao might be an asshole then undiagnosed neurodivergent mystic might get to be an asshole as well I think.
(After writing this I found myself disageeing with what I said but I want to first see your replay)
I agree with you: there are different kinds of enlightenment, or at least different things that people refer to as enlightenment. But I would also argue that anything that can be concretely experienced is not an enlightenment worth pursuing.
This essay hit close to home. Growing up in India, I watched spiritual leaders like Sadhguru, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and Osho offer dramatically different flavors of the same pursuit: some leaning into silence and inner engineering, others into joy and breathwork, and Osho—well—into sex and Rolls Royces. But the core sales pitch was always enlightenment. Peace. Transcendence. Some ultimate truth.
And like the Tao you describe—aloof, uncaring, maybe even a bit of an asshole—it seemed that these truths always came with a price tag. Attend this retreat. Buy this course. Donate for this cause. The paradox is hard to miss: renunciation, marketed globally. Detachment, in a luxury tour package.
Maybe, as you suggest, the real punchline is that "Truth" doesn't give a damn. That it lets us dress it up, sell it, distort it, meme it—and still just is. The Indian spiritual economy has been built around this cosmic indifference. You can profit off it or pray to it; either way, it doesn't flinch. And maybe that’s the point.
It’s a bleak kind of liberation. But also a freeing one. No guru is coming to save us. No technique guarantees awakening. And maybe that's the only honest thing anyone can say on the matter.
You said something in that piece that stuck with me, hard: that some people mistake dirt for the lightbulb, and others dig so perfectly they still miss the flick. I’ve seen both. I watched a man meditate himself into total stillness—fasted for weeks, renounced everything, shaved his head—and still flinched every time someone touched his past. Enlightenment as armor. I’ve also known a woman who swore she found her lightbulb during a shrooms trip in a Motel 6—came back glowing, but couldn’t make eye contact with herself six months later.
Your metaphor landed because it wasn’t neat. You left the edges rough, like someone who’s touched bedrock and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream. The part that really hit? The choice to fill the hole back in. That’s not failure—it’s knowing too much. It’s the kind of clarity that says, ‘This light doesn’t need to stay on for me to see.’ I respect the hell out of that.
It reminded me of something weird: when I was nine, I dug a literal hole in our backyard for weeks. Said I was looking for treasure. My uncle asked what I’d do if I actually found it. I told him I’d probably bury it again, so no one else could mess it up. He laughed, but I wasn’t joking.
Reading your piece, I felt that same impulse. Like maybe we dig because the process gives shape to the parts of us we can’t language. And when the light hits? We cover it—not out of fear, but because we know what light does to people. Makes them worship. Makes them forget how to dig.
Anyway, just wanted to say—you’re one of the few people who makes philosophy feel like an act of rebellion again. And that matters more than most of us admit.
"All the effort was just to get to the point where you could see it."
To extend your metaphor, this makes me think of being a child or infant and how getting older is having dirt and rocks and boulders thrown at you. And people with difficult childhoods perhaps had more tricky or hard to deal with soil and boulders which is why it's also harder for them to shovel through it and access the child again (by which I mean a sort of blank slate-ness and an ability to just exist in the world with no dirt burdening you). But of course, we can't really get rid of all the dirt and exist because we are built by it, it's an essential part of having gone through life and had experiences. And as an adult you have so much the child doesn't: agency, independence, power. The price you pay for that is accumulating soil.
Loved this way of thinking about it!
To me this mostly seems like evidence against the idea that "enlightenment" is in fact a Real Thing
Why? Would you disbelieve the lightbulb?
I am not interested in arguing over the particulars of a metaphor, sorry.
The reason why is that "enlightenment" appears to be (and is described in this essay as being) without any observable properties or symptoms. To the extent that it exists, it's a purely internal experience that cannot be described well enough for people to believe each others' reports about it.
> Enlightenment itself changes nothing, and if it's changed something, it's not really enlightenment.
This sounds like "enlightenment itself," rather than being a Real Thing that exists but is unobservable and causes no changes, is simply nothing. The thing that actually exists is the mental work that occurs during all the meditation and the psychic exploration etc. The special magical macguffin at the bottom is a lot harder to accept.
A person who thinks he knows already can't be taught 🤣🤣
The description also seems compatible with enlightenment being a real mental event that is just not particularly useful for anything.
The account of enlightenment I think I've heard the most makes it sound like it's about noticing how your subjective experience and qualia are actually constructed out of more basic mental building blocks that do not involve qualia. Identity and consciousness are a sort of hallucination your brain comes up with to explain its own function, and if you practice concentrating on the details of the hallucination really hard, you can make it dissolve away for a moment.
If that is indeed what enlightenment is, then it's a cool party trick, and I can see how to someone living a thousand years ago with no knowledge of modern neurology or other mind science, this'd be a very mind blowing experience. You might feel like you've discovered some deep and ancient secret of the universe. But if you are a 21st century atheist and already know that your identity and experience can't be some irreducible facet of the fundamental laws of physics, it seems significantly less illuminating or impressive.
If you could get to enlightenment with a few hours of digging, I might try it out for the novelty of the experience. But it's not worth years of effort to me if I already learned the deep and ancient secret of the universe from a neurology blog post.
I don't see why this would be harder to accept than people who learn how to defocusing their eyes to see those 3D shapes hidden in what looks like noise.
That is very easy to accept for at least 3 reasons:
1. I, personally, have successfully seen the shapes in the magic eye puzzles, which grants me first-person confidence that the thing is really there
2. Those things are created by humans. You get to appeal to teleology when there's a knowable telos involved!
3. People agree on what the shapes are. if you give 10 people the same magic eye puzzle, they'll all tell you that it's a donkey. That gives me a lot of confidence that there's a donkey in the puzzle! If they all came away saying "I saw something... but I can't tell you what it was like... there are no words for the shape I saw," I would be less sanguine
> if you give 10 people the same magic eye puzzle, they'll all tell you that it's a donkey.
Sure, now embed an image with a completely complex or ambiguous shape that doesn't relate to anything that we have unique descriptive words for and watch people fumble trying to describe it. This is a failing of language to describe qualia, which is not evidence that the qualia wasn't perceived. People have different perceptible colour ranges/sensitivities, taste ranges/sensitivities, hearing ranges/sensitivities and so on, I don't see why perceiving this new state of mind would be any different.
The thousands of years of tradition describing enlightenment is sufficient evidence that the perception is real, and the variability in accounts is no more surprising than the variability in other sensory reports IMO.
> Sure, now embed an image with a completely complex or ambiguous shape that doesn't relate to anything that we have unique descriptive words for and watch people fumble trying to describe it.
if you did this people could just draw the shape. the shape is really there. but, again, i don't think arguing about the particulars of metaphors is productive. the metaphors are not the actual thing we are talking about.
> the variability in accounts is no more surprising than the variability in other sensory reports IMO.
sure, but i think this is too big a hammer. there are certainly limits to communication - nobody but me _really knows_ what my internal experience of happiness is, or the colour blue - but everyone agrees that when you see a cute baby and you smile at it, the thing you're feeling is happiness, and we can all point at the sky and say that's blue. people don't even agree on that level about "enlightenment."
clearly, deep long-term meditation causes some people to have intense experiences. but I suspect that different people use the term "enlightenment" to describe very different qualia.
you could say, you know, "there are qualia that are achievable only via deep meditation, and I'm naming this particular one enlightenment." and that's fine. but giving it such a standout name - especially one with such connotations - gives it a lot of importance. and I don't think that people are pointing at the *same* quale with the word. "I did a lot of meditation and I had some weird experiences including some that were profound" - yup! absolutely believe you. "there's something special and obvious about one particular meditation-experience in a way that is similar across practitioners" - I am unconvinced.
At the risk of getting the other awakened beings mad at me, I mostly agree, although I'd also stress something about how everyone's lightbulb is already there and turned on, but until you dig you can't see the light.
When children learn to count and try to count to the highest number, eventually they stop and understand "infinity" without having to literally understand it and also without needing to understand the Very Useful symbol ∞ used in math which is "Real" symbol even though infinity itself is "fake and can't be reached"
Some children see other children going AHA! I understand now! and are jealous and claim that they also understand. It's hard to tell the difference because they can even use the ∞ correctly in math class showing their work.
However... some of them think of things like 9999^9999 and other notations to make the numbers everyone else counted too feel infinitely small so that they themselves can feel closer to infinity.
The key behavior that changes when infinity is truly understood is when the urge to count bigly disappears...
and this results in the same behavior as someone who just stops because they don't like math. It's the midwits who suffer most
Mathematicians still like to count bigly. ;)
https://medium.com/@joshkerr/mind-blown-the-fast-growing-hierarchy-for-laymen-aka-enormous-numbers-d9a865c6443b
Wow, this infinity analogy is amazing for this user case. Although I still need to find a way to put it in a more intuitive way for the people who haven't tried counting to infinity yet, if you know what I mean.
Yup exactly. You can only understand infinity when you stop trying to count to it.
For me the question about enlightenment was always: what’s the point? If after all those years I’ll still need to chop wood and carry water, and I won’t even obviously be a more ethical person, OR more “enlightened” in any externally verifiable sense (eg new scientific or mathematical or philosophical insights), then what was it for? To say that this interesting piece has failed to answer that question would be an understatement.
Because it's that good. I've only ever had brief glimpses, and even that is life changing. It's like a dozen wars you didn't know were raging inside you (on top of the ones you knew) are all pacified all of a sudden. It doesn't dumb you down or mess with your sense of salience like a drug; it's like all your inner pipes are unclogged for a moment, everything is right and clear, and there's no conceit because it's not even about you. Next to that, our ordinary state of waking consciousness is like wading through a muddy, stinky swamp. And people who have had strong awakening or satori experiences talk about this kind of thing lasting for weeks and months. It's no wonder one wants to go back and stay there; it's just that it doesn't work as an act of will, and the wanting itself becomes another front in those wars.
The connection to ethics is very indirect. Various traditions do say that there is such a thing as final, complete enlightenment, and that it (among other things) is 100% incompatible with unethical behavior. But that's mostly irrelevant for us, because this level of realization is vanishingly rare (possibly down to a few individuals a generation), and most importantly, it's no guarantee that you will get progressively more ethical along the way. There's no shortage of fallen gurus out there, and probably even more of them standing in metastable states waiting for someone to notice.
The traditional connection to ethics is the other way round. You don't become ethical by getting awakened; if your ethics have anything to do with awakening at all, you become ethical by understanding that the shit that unethical behavior inevitably brings up will keep you far away from any possibility of awakening.
(My sources are a combination of Buddhist, Hindu and modern non-denominational.)
I mean, is it more like: I'll suddenly know the ultimate truth of the life, cosmos, and myself, BUT I won't be able to put that truth into words, so I'll appear none the wiser when the conversation turns (let's say) to cosmology or foundations of quantum mechanics? Or is it more like: I won't perceive any new truths, but will "merely" have had a life-changing subjective experience, as people do with various drugs? In the latter case, aren't the drugs easier? :-D And (just like with the drugs) who's to say the radical change will be for the better?
Here's a very relevant comparison for me: pure math, theoretical physics, etc. ALSO demand many years of intense concentration and study. And few people would claim that this study will make you a more ethical person, OR that it will get you rich or laid or anything like that. So then what's the point of it? Well, at least this study produces a "paper trail" of results that virtually all experts agree are correct and that any motivated person can check for themselves, and it also propels our whole technological civilization forward in ways that anyone can observe. I'm asking whether there's any claim of an analogous payoff from Buddhist-style Enlightenment.
I'm neither enlightened nor a proselytist, so my take on these kinds of questions is deflationary. Why does anyone write poetry or spend years honing skills at an instrument? Or put lots of effort digging actual dirt and planting trees, like Kryptogal below, when you can just order mass-produced fruit online for cheap? Ultimately it becomes an intuitive thing, you try it and you see whether it's for you or not. A good spiritual teacher will goad you along to "do the work", but only if you're clear that you want to, otherwise just go and do something else! — same as in athletics or any other field that has its own measures of excellence.
Meditation doesn't give you magic knowledge about the world, how would it even? The Buddha didn't write down Newton's or Schrodinger's equations when he got up from his tree, and I don't think you attending a Vipassana retreat or some such would magically enlighten you to the foundations of QM — at best it might bring a moment of clarity where the thing you already know suddenly come together, but you might as well have one of those on a random walk in the forest. Then again, there is no huge qualitative difference between a meditation session and a good walk or run in the forest. If you were able to disconnect from the background sense of worry and rumination and persistent wrongness that pervades so much of life, you're already in the same space. Meditation and other techniques are just ways of pushing further into that space, and discovering that there's more depth there than meets the eye.
A "spiritual" outlook in the wider sense values subjective experiences for themselves, not just because they help further some instrumental goal. The psychedelic-like shift in conscious experience mirrors a shift in views and values, where you recognize that subjectivity is what gives color and value to our dear old objective things, not the other way around. Propelling technology forward is only good to the extent that better conditions of living tend to feel good in our phenomenal experience.
It's the former.
Great point.
If not enlightenment, I wonder if there is some other practice which has an actual track record of producing ethical behavior etc. Come to think of it, humans have a suspicious lack of interest in that question, if you ask me.
The point is simply to have a better experience of life—to suffer less. For some of us that seems like a completely alien concept, and it landed for me only recently. Why would I do something simply because it’s good for my own experience of life? Am I actually allowed to have that?
This is a big question to unpack. The short answer is that entitlement is just awareness of being. It's getting deeply in touch with reality without viewing it through your ontological framing. You should probably want to be enlightened if you care sufficiently about truth.
But enlightenment also brings joy and peace and steadfastness and lots of other things if you let it. There's much to gain from attaining nothing.
However, the process of becoming enlightened is generally awful. Only do it if you feel you must. Just know the fruits are sweet even as you get to taste them along the path.
Could I ask what you mean by, "what's the point?" I can imagine an awful lot of things you might reasonably mean by that, but I'm having trouble narrowing it down from there, and my sense is that some versions of that question might sit uncomfortably with whatever it is we're calling Enlightenment here.
One thing you're missing is that 'enlightenment' is a generic English translation for a bunch of different words from a bunch of different traditions meaning a bunch of different things.
Wu, Satori, Bodhi, Moksha, Prajna, Vimutti, Kensho, Xian, Daigo-tettei, etc all have fairly precise technical meanings in their own traditions and no English language equivalents. 'Enlightenment' in English just means a state of understanding, so it's used as a bucket term all the others get tossed into. Then people learning about or experiencing 'enlightenment' think those using it to mean something else are ignorant or faking.
Of course it isn't helped when you try to bring non-Western traditions across to a culture which is highly competitive, achievement oriented, individualistic and where the term 'holier than thou' can be readily understood. And when you start selling 'enlightenment' in a competitive marketplace ...
In several Asian traditions you can't achieve 'enlightenment' because we were all 'enlightened' all along. You can only 'realise' it, and in doing so you 'realise' you can never be inferior or superior to anyone else. Tat tvam asi.
There's nothing more egotistical than a Californian who has 'attained egolessness', especially if he spent a lot of time, money and effort doing it.
Yeah that's one failure more, fully agree. The modern spiritual marketplace is a jungle, and there's lots of room for self-deception and ego-based egolessness, whether Californian or German style.
But the traditional Asian institutions have their own failure modes too. They hold the traditions, they have hands-on experience with the process, they know satori from samapatti and so on, and in the best of cases they can guide you through a long and delicate process that needs lots of balance and steadiness. It's pretty well-known in all sorts of traditions that if you dig long and hard enough, you can reach a point where you feel like the job is done, yet a good teacher can tell it's not. That's the point where many people in the modern freelance world will start teaching, gather a following, and often make a mess.
The flip side, is that institutions will institute, and they often care 90% about their own preservation, and just 10% about their ostensible goals. They have a huge incentive to give you just enough spiritual instruction to you get hooked that there is something there, and then make you emotionally dependent on them (through a combination of gratitude and lack of intuitive development). That's why established religions are often so disempowering once you're past the initial high. Many people give them their entire lives as monks, and get turned into little more than worker drones. So definitively watch out!
Yeah, definitely agree about institutions. They might be made of humans but they're not human and have their own imperatives. That goes for all institutions - spiritual, religious, corporate, military, political, educational ... whatever.
I've learned (and sometimes taught) at several Asian 'spiritual' institutions - in India, Thailand and Sri Lanka - and I can't say I've ever heard discussion of if/when "the job is done". Even in Theravada, with it's formalised 'enlightenment stages' of sotapanna, sakatagami, anagami and arahant, I don't recall any teacher presuming to tell someone which, if any, stage they were at or whether their job was done.
When I first started going to India there were a lot of European Rajneeshis around who had been told how spiritually developed they were (or weren't), what they must do next to progress and how far they still had to go, but I can't say I ever studied under Osho (though I did read some of his comparative religion books with interest). A few months after he died I ran into a British woman in Gwailor who he'd told couldn't leave India until he said she'd learned what she had to learn there. She hated the place but was still there wondering when she'd receive the sign it was OK to go home. I jokingly told her it would be when she no longer wanted to and to my horror she initially took me seriously.
As for my own 'spiritual journey', I reckon I found what I was looking for in October 2012, though it had the strange effect of recontextualising my entire life - past, present and remaining - as both the process and culmination of that. Sounds like typical New Age waffle I know, but there it is. It also convinced me that everything I'd tried to teach others was BS. The blind leading the blind. At least I didn't charge for it.
Am I 'enlightened' then?
The question makes me laugh no matter which language I ask it in.
To me, Enlightenment is a guest that I greet as my closest friend when he visits, and forget about completely when he leaves. I don’t know when he will visit, but when I do, he arrives immediately. When he leaves it’s like he was never there, and when he comes it’s like he never left.
The lightbulb is on, the light is shining - that’s why you can see at all. The light by which you see is pointed to by everything seen. Noticing this, you realise that the only reason you never noticed the bulb, is because you were blinded by the light it emits.
Well, I don't believe there's such thing as enlightenment and thinks it's a silly term. But I enjoyed the piece anyway, because I liked the metaphor.
Mostly because I'm someone who ACTUALLY spends a lot of time digging holes in the ground and moving dirt - non-metaphorically. And indeed, the dirt in my front yard is cement-like clay, and in my back-yard it's sand, and it takes me about 50 to 100 times as long to dig a tree-sized hole in the front. I can plant a 6 foot tree in 30 minutes in the back, but that will take me days and dozens of hours of digging in the front.
But also, I would highly recommend to people that they dig holes and move dirt, again, non-metaphorically and not with the aim of enlightenment. I did not get into doing this because I was trying to achieve enlightenmen or some kind of spiritual purpose, I did it purely for aesthetic reasons and wanting to attract birds. The zen feeling and mind turning off and relaxing that accompanies dirt moving just happens, though. Whether you want it or not. It feels good. Like it's physically pleasurable, but in your mind and not your body. It's weirdly addictive, highly so. So yeah just move the dirt and forget all the other silliness and pretension.
Listen to yourself Katie! You’re immanentizing the very enlightenment telos you reject. I get it, you’ve found dozens of bulbs down there but don’t want to tell us, you’re hoarding them until you hard launch your salty trollop cult.
Anyway, count me in.
Lol people are going to be so disappointed when my cult is just digging dirt, putting it in buckets, carrying the bucket somewhere else, dumping the dirt, rinse repeat forever. ☺️ Though actually you do get hummingbirds and butterflies and pretty plants out of it too. So not just all muddy hidden lightbulbs that you find you don't need as soon as you uncover them.
> Lol people are going to be so disappointed when my cult is just digging dirt, putting it in buckets, carrying the bucket somewhere else, dumping the dirt, rinse repeat forever.
These things are just self-fulfilling, the way you put it obviously nobody will join. But if your discourse was the opposite, mysterious and implying subtle invisible greatness, you'd have queues of people with their shovels and uniforms. Mind and motivation and image are just that malleable.
please comment on sexy AI picture lady’s shovel technique
Horrible technique. Barefeet and a skirt?! And a too-big shovel. She's going to chop her own toes off and exhaust her arms before she gets far. You gotta be ready to really squat and bend over and get in there with dirty pants. The image is pretty though.
But based on the large collection of creeper shots my husband has taken of my bent over backside while I'm mucking around in the dirt, it must not be TOO unsexy. ☺️
Love the dynamic that sexy lawyer you is sweating in the Utah sun while Mr. Military man creeps on the view, neither of you making a call to the landscaping service you can absolutely afford.
Aella’s image is such an uncanny melding of shoveling and sweeping. AI can pass the bar exam and fold macromolecules in 5 dimensions…. but ahhh how many fingers does a human being have and what are arms for?
This is true, she her position is more like she's playing shuffleboard and trying to push dirt forward, not dig it. Yes I could call for landscaping, but I'm telling you, there is something extremely mentally addicting and like a massage for your brain to just turn off your mind completely...no earbuds, no music, no podcast, no thoughts, and just dig and move dirt. It's good for you, I can't stop. I get itchy as soon as the ground thaws!
What a beautiful image at the top of the post. Who's it by? Or is it AI?
AI! Midjourney
the image is absolutely gorgeous
and also 100% created by an entity that has neither held a shovel nor understands how human arms work lol
Great extended metaphor use!
Having trained myself for some 35 years with various teachers, llamas, masters, all over the world, I can say with some confidence that some of them were at some stage of realization, and some are not. And it’s important to understand. There are stages of realization, and many many many stages before enlightenment., and each presents differently with different challenges and is different for every person. There’s a spectrum of awakening. It’s not an off/on type of thing in my experience. Of course I’m not enlightened or even realized at this point, so what do I know? I guess the only thing I do know is that some of the teachers I sat with had varying degrees of siddhis, gifts, and transmissions. Some of them, by just sitting in their presence, one’s mind was washed blank. Some of them have tremendous magnetism that makes students just wanna be near them. Some of them are caught up in the sexuality of that power… and some were squeaky, clean with scrupulous morals . but perhaps those would all just be some of the stages, moving towards realization, towards enlightenment.
Your question, parodic story and most of the conclusions you draw are spot on.
Awakening is turning on the lightbulb, and its a shift of perspective (which you've encountered parts of via drugs, and possibly other things - you've previously written about such experiences). However, awakenings are rarely permanent and they typically don't clear out ALL the crap (pain bodies, and resultant unfortunate adaptations/behaviors).
Awakenings might last for minutes or months, but when a person comes down, they still have to clear their crap - some do it faster and more thoroughly, others less so, and each has their own set of crap. Enlightenment/realization is probably best used for "lasting/abiding awakening" + most of your crap is sorted: much rarer than "having had one or more awakining experiences".
Plenty of teachers out there acknowledge all of this, and indeed teach students to be aware and wary of those dynamics. Some don't... bleh. Some get caught up in perpetuating the "marketing materials".... bleh. I'd point you to Adyashanti as probably the best of the lot, especially for Americans. Ram Dass too, over the years came to grips with how reality doesn't match the marketing (which includes 1000-year old texts no one knows how to contextualize for today). I'd give you specific urls, but I don't have them indexed by "perfect example of addressing what you're talking about".
Distinguishing feature of Tantra: even the "unpleasant" stuff is still life experience, and grist for the mill. Accepting it and just dealing with it (at a practical level) without the resistance of "That shouldn't have happened!" is part of the shift in perspective.
At any rate, really glad to see you still digging at the topic. Don't get discouraged :)
+1 for adya. Thats a guy who knows how to talk about shoveling, share what it’s been like for him, but ultimately point you back to *yourself* as the only one who can do the shoveling and the only one who can determine how shoveling will express itself uniquely through your unique life.
yo this is so fuckin rad. thanks!!
This sounds like Wittgenstein's argument against private language lol
I think that in general her metaphor works, but calling enlightenment a “lightbulb” does kinda presuppose that you’ll know it when you see it from having seen other lightbulbs out in the world. Everyone knows what a lightbulb looks like. I do think there are lots of different things people are referring to when they claim enlightenment—the “private language” analogy works here—I do think there are different varieties; some being an intense feeling of interconnectedness, and the other being a feeling of extreme solipsism. I’ve experienced both of those, and can imagine spiritual guru types referring to either as “enlightenment” or “ego death,” but they’re almost completely opposite to each other. I am not an expert, however; this is just my 2 cents.
I mean, this is not an analogy, this is the subject of the argument. Enlightenment as a mental event is a private event, right? So, how can you talk about something that you by definition can't perceive? Trying to explain it is like trying to explain color to a color-blind person. You can observe that color-blind people won't behave the same way to color-preceving people but you can't explain what color is.
So the fundamental problem is not in the ambiguity (one string of letters referring to many meanings, this issue is simple, you just need to enumerate all possible meanings and rename them) but simply that people don't follow the seventh rule of tractatus.
Honestly, with all the yapping how eastern philosophy is superior to western the fact that this fundamental problem is overlooked makes me doubt the depth of their teachings.
Hmm… I guess what I was getting at wrt “putting in work” was about achieving the experience of enlightenment/nirvana. Again, to use an analogy, people are born with the senses but through using those senses you can begin to become more familiar with them, appreciate subtle differences, which takes effort and concentration but not necessarily the ability to consciously conceptualize the differences. Like, for example, I’m thinking about the way animals are far more aware of subtle qualities in their environment and the information they convey but, (probably) being incapable of abstract thought, they wouldn’t be able to convert that experience to an abstract form (conceptualize I guess) and pass it onto someone else. Math, being entirely conceptual, needs to be practiced and worked at to be understood, but I think there’s something fundamentally different about the “sense” you get for math/numbers/logic and sensory experience, the former being purely cognitive. I think we basically agree. BUT:
The concept of the “interconnectedness of all things” is pretty simple to understand. It doesn’t take much effort to understand a lot of the more simple metaphysical concepts. What takes effort (or no-effort, if you want to get paradoxical about it) is having the experience, maybe? Yet another analogy: I think that it’s the difference between being able to understand a joke someone makes and experiencing the humor.
As far as not speaking about “enlightenment” and talking only about the “symptoms” I think this may be useful for research purposes. But if you’re studying a particular set of symptoms and their relationships, aren’t you by definition studying the thing that they’re symptoms *of* even if you don’t call it “enlightenment?”
Wrt colors, I do think that even if some people experience more, those who can experience more could probably convey the difference between two near identical shades or orange (“this one is slightly redder”) even if they couldn’t make us see it ourselves.
Philosophy probably can’t give us new knowledge but I think it can help us use the knowledge we have well. I think there are probably as many solutions to life as there are people, and I don’t know if enlightenment is necessarily a destination in its own right if you don’t want it to be.
Hmm… I think that even if you can’t directly describe “enlightenment” (if such a thing exists) you can describe its effects; the fact that we’re talking about it and people recognize it as something they may have experienced shows that it can be spoken of. “I felt a deep sense of wholeness and peace” “I saw and kind of experienced the interconnectedness of all things which changed my perspective in life for the better” “Some dimension of suffering I’d always experienced went away and did not come back” etc (I don’t know if these are what other people refer to as enlightenment, but in my probably unenlightened experience this is how I would explain enlightenment-adjacent experiences). Maybe a better analogy would be if someone had never seen a lightbulb, only light, and they came across a glowing rock in their garden; they know that a lightbulb is something that emits light, and this thing they’ve found emits light, and they jump to the conclusion that what they’ve found a lightbulb. (Maybe in this hypothetical world, there are no lightbulbs, only a variety of glowing things, some of which are arbitrarily referred to as lightbulbs? Idk. What I think is cool about Aella’s survey is that she is comparing these glowing rocks and trying to figure out wtf is a lightbulb and things that can be mistaken for one?)
I think you could explain color to a blind person though. Maybe not in a way that they’ll be able to experience, but they could get the idea: presumably they have other senses. “You know how notes on a piano sound different, and different combinations can create different moods? Color is like that, but visual.” But if they know about color and suddenly become sighted, they’ll have the language to describe their experience.
Maybe enlightenment can be imagined as a syndrome, characterized by symptoms but without a causal description to differentiate it from similar conditions with different etiologies? I think it’s very valid to discuss, as it seems to be something that a lot of people wish to cultivate and have found beneficial.
I do recall hearing that in a lot of Eastern spirituality, enlightenment is a goal that one works toward by putting in effort rather than an abstraction, as it seems to be treated by a lot of western philosophy affectionados.
Eh, nobody thinks that enlightenment is an abstraction in this way in the western philosophy, you too need to put work into actually doing philosophy to "get into direct relation with the absolute". Just the same way that you can't really understand math without doing math even though mathematical objects are abstract objects. Similarly, Stoic ataraxia and Aristotelian eudaimonia are achieved by working on virtues. The history of western philosophy can be read as a history of paradoxes that resist conceptual comprehension and philosopher achieves enlightenment by working against those paradoxes and failing again, and again, and again until they develop an understanding for the being-in-itself which is what people describe as "interconnectedness of all things". What really distinguishes western philosophy from eastern is attitude towards rational thinking. Western philosophy pushes the limits of what is intelligible, and eastern philosophy just gave up on this attempt and focuses on meditative techniques. And I respect that a lot since they really caught onto something that works and focused on it.
Regarding other points. I do agree that mental properties should and can only be understood by the symptoms they exhibit (although I prefer to talk about symbols). But the point I understood Aella was presenting is that those symptoms are those "layers of dirt" and the enlightenment itself is something else. And the real question is, given that those symptoms are what we value, what exactly this enlightenment gives us above and below the symptoms themselves? As the legend goes, when Napoleon asked Laplace why he didn't mention God in his theory, he said “I have no need of that hypothesis”.
This is why I don't even want to deny the existence of enlightenment, it might exist. But it can't be spoked about in any meaningful manner.
I disagree with you on the color though. Being differential isn't a description of any color. Most blind people see shades anyway, So this property doesn't explain anything about colors like "red" or "blue". Take into consideration that most of us also see a limited pallet of colours, and there are some people that see more of them. They may show us a pallet of colors ordered by shades and say they see every card in a different shade, while we can't notice a difference.
Witggestain has this argument that doing philosophy cannot give us any new knowledge. We engage in this pointless task as a result of a mistake since we can rationally solve many problems in life, then we think we could solve the life like a problem as well. This attitude sounds to me a lot like what Aella said about the attitude of the people that claim the enlightenment is not a big deal. Witggestain of course was an asshole, but if the eternal tao might be an asshole then undiagnosed neurodivergent mystic might get to be an asshole as well I think.
(After writing this I found myself disageeing with what I said but I want to first see your replay)
I agree with you: there are different kinds of enlightenment, or at least different things that people refer to as enlightenment. But I would also argue that anything that can be concretely experienced is not an enlightenment worth pursuing.
This essay hit close to home. Growing up in India, I watched spiritual leaders like Sadhguru, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and Osho offer dramatically different flavors of the same pursuit: some leaning into silence and inner engineering, others into joy and breathwork, and Osho—well—into sex and Rolls Royces. But the core sales pitch was always enlightenment. Peace. Transcendence. Some ultimate truth.
And like the Tao you describe—aloof, uncaring, maybe even a bit of an asshole—it seemed that these truths always came with a price tag. Attend this retreat. Buy this course. Donate for this cause. The paradox is hard to miss: renunciation, marketed globally. Detachment, in a luxury tour package.
Maybe, as you suggest, the real punchline is that "Truth" doesn't give a damn. That it lets us dress it up, sell it, distort it, meme it—and still just is. The Indian spiritual economy has been built around this cosmic indifference. You can profit off it or pray to it; either way, it doesn't flinch. And maybe that’s the point.
It’s a bleak kind of liberation. But also a freeing one. No guru is coming to save us. No technique guarantees awakening. And maybe that's the only honest thing anyone can say on the matter.