Do you truly believe you can attain enlightenment this lifetime? This is a personal question. Not for you to teach me.

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Would have left this one alone if I hadn’t been A2A’d.

For me, there is nothing to attain. I’ve read enough of the literature and experimented enough with techniques given to come to the conclusion that there’s nothing for me to do. Instead I try to come to greater understanding of myself as an already-enlightened being.

To facilitate this, I devote much of my time to building greater understandings of the concept of meaning. For example here, rather than attaining enlightenment, I want to understand what it means to be enlightened. But I want to aim higher than that. I want to understand what it means to be human. Even higher, I want to understand what it means to exist.

A meaning is a short collection of words that describes a concept. Embedded in these collections is a great deal of context. Inseparable from the context of meaning is the being doing the understanding. That being has a history, an environment, and a level of consciousness. A dog understands things very differently than a housewife, even though they share the same environment.

Enlightenment is a level of consciousness. It’s usually characterized by a number of things that we shall call “abilities.” For example, enlightened people are universally blessed with the favor of the gods. They also all possess nondual modes of thought. I could go on but I want to keep this personal as the question wants.

I possess every aspect of enlightenment that I’ve been able to identify. Furthermore, I’ve possessed them for as long as I can remember, and these aspects are as natural to me as breathing. I don’t have any lived experience of what it’s like to not be enlightened. A big shift came for me when I realized all this, my life completely changed.

I find no meaning in the attainment of ‘more’ enlightenment aspects. It’s not that I can’t find anything to do. For example, I could become some kind of world teacher like my mentors David Hawkins or Osho. But it holds no appeal to me, I can’t find any meaning in it. Nor does “advanced” techniques like quelling all anger or the like.

In the past, I used to do this stuff. For awhile I even had a ‘student’ that I would guide through meditations and help awaken his spirituality. It was interesting and fun, but the realization was that I wasn’t really getting anywhere but providing entertainment.

No, I learned in all this is that consciousness growth cannot be meaningfully accelerated. Not mine, not anybody else’s. It slowly grows as a byproduct of existence. You can build connections with people and teach them and help them in this lifetime, but you can’t just pump up their consciousness. Discovering what that means is an ongoing study.

I could help someone awaken their spirituality but that won’t really make them any more conscious, from my perspective it would just give them something else to do on evenings besides watch TV. The difference between Game of Thrones and spiritual exploration is not meaningful to me.

All kinds of existence are equally meaningful to me. I am more aware of things now than when I was in my twenties, but I was just as enlightened then as I am now. Ignorance is very useful in driving meaning. I’d be super bored if I were aware of everything at all times. Even though there is no meaningful difference between knowing something and not knowing something, there is meaning in going from ignorance to knowledge.

As an example, I was quite curious as to how reincarnation “works,” so I’ve devoted quite some time towards figuring it out. Now that I have the broad strokes mapped out in my head, it’s less mysterious. Consciousness is on a different ‘plane’ than everything else. It requires something like a brain in order to exist. The brain offers exponentially-more ‘room’ for a consciousness to grow and expand than the consciousness could ever use. For example, though I am talented in just about everything I do, I just don’t have the time to learn everything. Personality and identity is constructed out of the things you do do.

Now that I’ve wrapped my head around it, it’s easy and simple. Discovery moves elsewhere. Like right now I’m curious about the collective nature of consciousness. This is really interesting to me and among the things I’m doing to explore it is:

I’m taking a Coursera course on machine learning
I’m exploring my family tree.
I’m cultivating a relationship.
I’m devoting more attention to my team at work.
I read about governance systems, geopolitics, and history.

It’s all intended to drive deeper ‘clicks’ in my brain about the fundamental nature of existence. There’s no big “attainment” I’m seeking here, I don’t need any such thing. It’s just interesting to me right now. I might do it again in the next life and it will be just as meaningful.

I’m a little like a gardener. There was soil with plants growing on my little patch of the Earth before I started tending it, and it will still be there after I stop. But in the meantime, how cool can I make my garden? Just because there’s no absolutely-defined goals or permanent things I can accomplish doesn’t mean it’s totally pointless. Just because Camelot falls in the end doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of study and enjoyment.

Well, there is something I might be trying to attain. I call it immortality. I normally find momentary meaning in various things, like the discovery process I outlined just now. What immortality is about is merging the realm of the Unmanifest with this world we live in. The main thing that keeps beings locked in a life-death cycle isn’t the fact that they aren’t enlightened. It’s ultimately the lack of meaning engendered by being somewhere where there aren’t rules or stakes. Lack of meaning manifests itself in most beings as boredom.

The real world provides immediacy. I always play Minecraft on survival mode rather than creative, because I find the added constraints to make for more meaningful play. But I rarely play Minecraft at all because I just don’t want to spend that much time on a game. I’d rather spend it in this world. What I want is more time to spend on all the things I want to do in life.

Immortality is about merging immediacy with the massive amount of ability and resources that the Unmanifest can bring to bear. Typically this is seen as superpowers. But adding superpowers typically reduces the amount of time activities stay meaningful. Playing Doom with iddqd on just isn’t as fun as playing the game the way it was written.

I want to crack that nut. To have my superpowers and still find meaning in everything. Being enlightened is already a kind of superpower. But there’s lots of devils in the details.