Login
Theme: Light Dark

What is spiritual enlightenment, and how does it differ from emotional or intellectual enlightenment?

Tagged: enlightenment, identity

Home - Quora Link

The best definition of enlightenment I’ve encountered in my 20-some-odd years of reading and exploring the topic is, strangely, the one found on Wikipedia’s Enlightenment (spiritual) page. Right there, in the first sentence:

Enlightenment is the "full comprehension of a situation".

When I first came across it, I realized that all the different ‘types’ of enlightenment refer to the situations one has managed to have full comprehension of. In the Buddhist sense, it’s full comprehension of the nature of human existence. What keeps everyone from being enlightened is that ‘full’ part. We are born ignorant and must be taught. When it comes to spiritual enlightenment, in order for a ‘full’ comprehension to make sense, one must also have completed a meditative or otherwise ‘spiritual’ journey to arrive at a full comprehension of the spiritual situation.

In Western non-affiliated Buddhist circles, we call this nonduality, or, the lack of a perceptive boundary between the watcher and what’s watched. To eliminate the boundary is the end goal of the journey, and all spiritual methods, pursued diligently, move you in that direction, awakening you to other kinds of experience that you can have, shifting your identity, that which stands between the watcher and watched, through various incarnations. At some point, one’s identity shifts to a form which doesn’t stand in the way all the time, this unlocks a new way to perceive and experience, and full comprehension of the spiritual situation has been earned.

I’m not aware of any such tradition that has come up with a similar definition for emotional or intellectual enlightenment. When I hear these terms, I think of how a teacher might refer to imagined spiritual enlightenment. An ‘emotional’ enlightenment would refer to a person who merely feels good all the time. An ‘intellectual’ enlightenment would refer to someone who believes they have all the answers and considers this fact to merit a designation of ‘enlightened’.

If I were to posit an actual emotional or intellectual enlightenment, I would want to look for groups of people who spend their time exploring and writing about and understanding these worlds, enough to the point where they can deconstruct down to individual pieces, like how above I’ve deconstructed spirituality into the component parts of perception and identity.

In order to have full comprehension, you need a map to the terrain and the ability to navigate it.