Is enlightenment a brain evolution?

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No. Enlightenment is a goal that people set out to achieve. It also can be a byproduct of consciousness evolution.

Consciousness is not the brain. Consciousness is two levels removed from the brain. In between is the mind. If you’ve ever studied calculus, you’ve learned what a derivative is. If you take the derivative of a function, then the graphed derivative function displays meta-knowledge about the function it was derived from. You can then take a derivative of the derivative and arrive in an even more meta space from the original function.

Similarly, the mind is like a derivative of brain activity. Consciousness is like a derivative of the mind.

So lets think about evolution for a second. What does it mean for the brain to evolve? Well, precisely what science says it means! The brain began evolution as the nervous system, which itself evolved from simple nervous tissue. Brains evolve not in individuals, but in species.

How might a mind evolve? Well, the brain is a physical object, subject to physical rules. But the mind is not. Minds are governed by patterns. You set patterns early on when you are born, the contents of your mind can be represented as a collection of patterns of thought. This has an analogue in human society, the thing I have in mind is law systems. Systems of law evolve slowly over time as a consequence of just seeing what works and what doesn’t work. The process is slow and laborious. Anyone who has ever engaged in psychotherapy knows that it is not a simple, easy, or quick process. But slowly you can become a better person.

Becoming a better person is probably good enough for most people to say you’re enlightened. But we can go further.

Consciousness is a field of awareness. Think of a movie screen playing, the individual frames of the movie make up a current frame of experience. Notice that it took me until this third level to finally mention experience. The unit of brain operation is electrical impulses, the unit of mind operation is pattern detection and creation, the unit of consciousness operation is experience. You cannot experience something if you are not aware of it. Experience is informed by patterns of mind but is not dictated by them. You are not bound to have the same experiences over and over again just because your thoughts are patterned!

Experience creates insight, which is subsequently encoded into mental patterns. If you keep adding experiential insight of fundamental reality to your mind patterns, you’ll eventually become enlightened. This might seem like it suggests that enlightenment is a culmination of consciousness evolution, but this isn’t the case. Enlightenment is a mental pattern just like everything else!!!

So then what is consciousness evolution? Well, experience is only one side of the coin of consciousness. The other side is responsiveness. Consciousness, fundamentally, is the ability to experience and respond to stimuli. The stimuli can come from the mind itself or through a sense ‘door’. It forms something we call an identity. Your identity is the sum total of all the things you experience.

It is here where we distinguish consciousness growth from consciousness evolution. When your consciousness grows, it means that you can experience and respond to more. What this does to you is largely up to you. You can decide to use it to get smarter or wiser or quicker. Whatever you choose to do, your consciousness and being and identity don’t change. This happens slowly over the course of a lifetime. Some people, like Elon Musk, are truly stupendously conscious, they can call upon amazing reserves of insight and motivation to do things.

But for your consciousness to evolve, it has to change at a fundamental level. Otherwise it’s not really evolution. This involves adjusting that other element of consciousness, identity. When your consciousness evolves, your identity shifts. Actually, it’s not so much your identity itself that shifts, but rather the process of identification that gets more and more capable over time. This is extremely hard to describe and I think you need to be enlightened before you can really make any meaning out of it.

The process of evolution takes a thing, embodies it vast numbers of times over a large range of time, and then comes up with small tweaks to make the whole thing just a little more fit for a purpose. The process of learning is directed singularly, one thing is learning. Whereas an entire class of things is evolving. So consciousness evolution involves an entire class of things getting a little better by doing a lot of things in parallel. That entire class of things that is getting better is you, specifically your identity as described as part of your consciousness. The sum total of all your experiences, over all your incarnations.

If you think about this, the scope of your evolution is truly vast, comparable to the evolution of animals and the universe itself. Yet it all happens in one package, you. Your brain has more neurons in it than there are people on the planet. You have more differentiable patterns in your mind than all of the written knowledge that humanity has ever put down. And your identity is collected out of the sum total of all the experiences of all of your incarnations. The space of experience itself is stupendously immense. If you collected all of your present life, to say nothing of your past lives, into a movie, and then came up with analysis for all of the events that happened to you, your reaction, you wouldn’t be able to fit the information into the entire universe, because the information grows exponentially.

This is the stuff of consciousness evolution. You become better, slowly, but surely, over time. As you evolve, should you decide to try to become enlightened, you will find the goal easier to achieve. When I investigated enlightenment, I could not find any particular event that made me such, yet I possessed all the abilities that were described. Enlightenment upon birth does not make sense to Buddhists, which teach that it can only happen through meditation and surrender, but some people simply find enlightened modes of thought naturally. That’s a product of consciousness evolution.