"I wish I had an answer to that because I'm tired of answering that question." --Yogi Berra
Enlightenment. It's why you practice, right? To become enlightened? You probably have your own ideas about it.
The end of suffering. The end of karma. The end of confusion. Free from the struggles of life. The end of anger or greed or stupidity. Free from neuroses and neurotic thinking. Ultimate sanity. Know what life is and what life is about. Emptiness. Free from subjective interpretation. See things just as they are. Free from bias and prejudice. Total objectivity. Infallible. Transform all experience into wisdom. Special powers. Complete and total moral integrity. Beyond reproach, beyond question in everything you do. Know exactly what to do in every situation and do it effortlessly. Able to help others out of their misery. Union of emptiness and compassion. Able to change the world, transform society, heal and cure all that is wrong with the world. The leading edge of the best hope for humanity.
It all sounds pretty wonderful.
Enlightenment is a promise of freedom from life as you know it. It's your ticket out of this mess called "life." It is something other than what you are experiencing right now. When you are enlightened, all your frustration and difficulties with practice and with life will vanish in the light of your understanding and wisdom.
Aren't you already enlightened, but just don't realize it? That's what some teachers say. It seems that if you don't know you are enlightened, then you aren't and if you do know you are then you are. You know you are, because you've heard that you are, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. Does that mean that you don't know that you are enlightened or you do? It's all a bit confusing, but you know it will all make sense once you are enlightened. Or is it when you know you are enlightened?
Right now, you can't wait. You work at practice, putting in time on your cushion, going to retreats. You become an "experienced practitioner." But nothing seems to change. You still get distracted when you meditate. You still react to situations unpredictably. You hear about these extraordinary experiences, non-self, emptiness, sheer clarity, bliss, etc. Maybe you taste them from time to time. But you are still stuck in life, and that can't be enlightenment. When you hear that so and so has experienced satori or kensho or become a stream-winner or has insight or seen the nature of mind -- whatever -- they seem to be the same person to you. You can't really say what is different. And you still have problems in your life. Most of the time you are struggling with the same old same old in your meditation.
You spend a lot of time with your teacher and you see that he or she isn't free from the problems of life. She is able to guide you in your practice, perhaps very well. His meditation instruction is precise and illuminating. But now and then, you get a glimpse, or more than a glimpse of what seems to be their own struggles with life. Maybe you see them acting inappropriately or even unethically in certain areas. How can that be? Aren't they beyond that? Aren't they realized? Aren't they enlightened?
You begin to wonder about the point of all this work. Have you been deceived? Have you fooled yourself? Where is this freedom that everyone talks about? Yet you continue to practice.
While you may not notice anything changing, something happens. You sometimes notice that situations and interactions that were problems for you are no longer problems, but you don't really remember when they stopped being problems. You aren't as hard on yourself, even though you pay much more attention to what you do, what you say, and how you direct your attention. There are long periods of barely discernible changes, and then something shifts profoundly, for no apparent reason.
You see that some problematic behaviors and ways of thinking have dropped away. Others, you realize, are probably not going to drop away, but you aren't taken in by them anymore. You are much more accepting of yourself and others. You see very clearly how reactions based on survival, getting emotional needs met or being somebody consistently result in suffering and struggle for yourself and those around you. You see this in yourself, and you see it in others. Because you see it so clearly in yourself, you know how it is for others, and your heart goes out to them, even when their behavior is infuriating.
The upshot is that you are a part of the unfolding of life, rather than apart from it. You know contentment, peace, freedom, understanding and compassion, but they are not anything like what you thought they would be. They don't seem special in anyway, and yet they are. You place less and less value on having certain experiences. It's more important for you just to be there and to do the best you can, in ordinary situations, and in difficult ones. You stop looking for something different. Life itself points a way and you take it.
Follow Ken McLeod on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kenmcleod
What Is Enlightenment - How do Buddhists define enlightenment
Buddhism : Pictures, Videos, Breaking News - Huffington Post
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Life and death to all are common
common is also this life’s source,
One purpose one common ground
the life source’s transcendent course.
No man alters life’s purpose
from what life is meant to be,
bees being kissers of flowers
and flowers embracers of bees.
Process is used on aviation
as on bare desire no one flies,
it takes process on deification
to unlock man’s divine skies.
For man to know life’s true meaning
the real Christ one must taste,
divine love is life’s only healing
only in Christ life is lasting grace.
Some people in the past may have experienced some level of enlightenment and considered themselves to be unique as spiritual masters/sages, and did not perhaps feel the necessity to correlate the spiritual angle with a scientific explanation.
In December 1937, a man from Kashmir called Pandit Gopi Krishna is said to have experienced a highly advanced stage of Enlightenment, but for twelve years after that he could not regain that ecstatic state, and in the words of Amaury de Reincourt (The eye of the Shiva) :
```He underwent the tortures of the damned and literally descended into the bowels of a Dantean hell. There appeared to be no relief from the seat of kundalini.He began to fear that he was on the verge of insanity. His body wasted away, he could no longer eat and lost all desire to live. So intense was his suffering that he almost made up his mind to commit suicide. But it then occurred to him, being a technically-minded man, that he might have accidentally aroused `kundalini` through the hot solar channel, `pingala`, rather than through the `susumna` within the spine, as he should have. He decided by the supreme effort of the will, to attempt to shift the implacable current to the cool lunar channel ida, on the left side to counteract the horrifying fire that was raging inside.Applying all the mental concentration he could muster,he did so.The result was astounding :
(to be continued)
```The result was astounding:
``there was a sound like a nerve thread snapping and instantaneously a silvery streak passed zigzag through the spinal chord… filling my head with a blissful lustre in place of the flame that had been tormenting me``…… His first ordeal was over, but there were several others to come and each was overcome …… …… ```
Reincourt continues to describe in detail about the indomitable willpower of Pandit Gopi Krishna and his growing understanding of the mysterious force that was operating within him, his prolonged research – where his body and physiological apparatus became his own laboratory - into the technicalities of it, as well as his interactions with the greatest Indian saint `Shri Aurobindo` in far away Pondicherry……Indeed This is a must read chapter entitled `Convergence` from the book referred, if one is to understand what this enlightenment is all about.
Finally after a gap of twelve years PGK experienced that state once again. In his own words this is how he described it :
(To be continued)
PGK`s description of his ecstatic state:
`` …. I stopped abruptly, contemplating with awe and amazement, which made the hair on my skin stand on end, a marvelous phenomena in progress in the depths of my being… … I had expanded in an indescribable manner into a titanic personality, conscious from within of an immediate and direct contact with an intensely conscious universe, a wonderful inexpressible immanence all around me…. The phenomenal world ….. receded into the background and assumed the appearance of an extremely thin, rapidly melting layer of foam upon a substantial rolling ocean of life, a veil of exceedingly fine vapour before an infinitely large conscious sun, constituting a complete reversal of the relationship between the world and the limited human consciousness. It showed the previously all-dominating cosmos reduced to the state of a transitory appearance and the …. Point of awareness, circumscribed by the body, grown to the spacious dimensions of a mighty universe and the exalted stature of a majestic immanence before which the material cosmos shrank to the subordinate position of an evanescent and illusive appendage.```
Was`nt that something like going through the event horizon of a black hole?
In the end it’s a question of science, and its just a question of time before the `mind` in us becomes a `supermind`.
In few hundred thousand years we have become men from apes, is it not inevitable that in course of time we will become supermen from men?
What exactly happens when we get enlightened?
Does it remind you of the song ``There is someone in my head but it’s not me``? From the album ` dark side of the moon` …. Pink Floyd.
Why does it happen to only a few of us?
Why are we so privileged?
What have we done to deserve this?
What about the others who don`t get it, whose interactions have been such that they have not come across articles like this, or met people who can teach them how to attain such enlightenment by meditation or something?
Perhaps Sri Ramakrishna – whose disciple Swami Vivekananda was – might have reached this state of Samadhi sometimes, but each time he pulled himself together and cried to himself `` come down, come down`` in order to continue his mission on earth, and he pleaded ``Oh mother , let me not attain these delights, let me remain in my normal state, so that I can be of more use to the world``
`The great mystic Ruysbroeck once said `` If you are ravished in ecstasy as highly as St.Peter or St. Paul or as anybody you like and if you hear that a sick man is in need of hot soup, I counsel you to wake up from your ecstasy and warm the soup for him. Leave God to serve God : find him and serve him in his members, you will lose nothing by the change``..` ….`The eye of Shiva` .. by Amaury de Riencourt.
What I am trying to say is that even if we are able to attain this state, the first thing that will strike us would be `Why am I so privileged? What did I do to deserve it?
http://www.kusala.org/udharma4/mpe.html
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living would also be a starting point...
Google Tech Talks on You Tube have extremely interesting introduction videos from Jon Kabat-Zinn, Matthieu Ricard, Shinzen Young, etc...
For some definition of "sufficiently."
And it's not even chauvinist in comparison to the times of the buddha. Because that's what the buddha said. That we all have buddha nature.
I haven't read your references cited below yet, but it has always seemed to me very plausible - both at a superficial level and at any deeper level - that the point of the whole thing is to manage to go through adult life with the stress management capacities and resilience of a child.
I hope that at some point I'll get to look at the up to date EEG evidence for that. For the time being, I'm fine as long as I manage to be like a child often enough.
:-)
Research on the physiological correlates of pure consciousness found during TM practice:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7045911
Breath suspension during the transcendental meditation technique.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10512549
Pure consciousness: distinct phenomenological and physiological correlates of "consciousness itself".
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9009807
Autonomic patterns during respiratory suspensions: possible markers of Transcendental Consciousness.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10487785
Autonomic and EEG patterns during eyes-closed rest and transcendental meditation (TM) practice: the basis for a neural model of TM practice.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19862565
A self-referential default brain state: patterns of coherence, power, and eLORETA sources during eyes-closed rest and Transcendental Meditation practice.
Research on the physiological correlates of the stabilization of pure consciousness outside of meditation in long-term TM meditators:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12406612
Patterns of EEG coherence, power, and contingent negative variation characterize the integration of transcendental and waking states.
http://www.tm.org/american-psychological-association
Abstract for the 2007 Conference of the American Psychological Association
Brain Integration Scale: Corroborating Language-based 
Instruments of Post-conventional Development
Research on the physiological correlates of the stabilization of pure consciousness outside of meditation in non-meditators:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0838.2009.01007.x/full
Higher psycho-physiological refinement in world-class Norwegian athletes: brain measures of performance capacity
Answer: The application of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
What?