Is it possible to be “half-enlightened”? I have lost interest in many things as they now seem silly, but I haven’t felt anything profound.

Tagged:

The process of growth and change happens naturally over the course of life. We slowly accumulate knowledge and experience and wisdom and these things can combine to produce something that feels like liberation but isn’t really liberation as taught by Hindu and Buddhist spiritual tradition. They had a much bigger view on the broader scheme of human evolution. This view started as ‘normal’ heaven and hell and you only get one life, and over the course of the events of the Vedas, Hinduism adopted a doctrine now known as saṃsāra.

This is the cycle of life, death, and rebirth that keeps all living beings locked until we can find release, liberation, moksha. Spiritual techniques abounded for accelerating the process, one of these techniques is now called Buddhism. Buddhists provide various maps that you can use to plumb the deeper nature of reality, using specially-devised forms of meditation. In so doing you slowly come to the realization that the person, the self, the thing, doing the watching is completely drowned in delusions of things that don’t actually exist. The meditations allow you to witness the arising and passing of, well, ‘stuff’ in real time.

These maps are continuously being refined upon in a process quite akin to theological exploration. That so many of these maps exist begs the question of whether they actually describe truth. The only way to find out is to explore for yourself, and so you can make your own map. In making your own map for reality, it’s revealed that all reality is ultimately subjective and personal. It is not possible to witness reality without a witnesser.

The surrender to this realization is enlightenment. You didn’t have to go the Buddhist route to attain it, there are more ways to the same truth. But the Buddhist way of meditation is special. The experience of diving and exploring gives the realization actual teeth, it doesn’t fall into the same sort of experience bucket that other learning goes in, something you do a few times then put aside.

Anybody can find knowledge and wisdom and use these tools to change themselves. But the term ‘enlightenment’ should apply only to the sort of spiritual realization described above.

Because it really does provoke a fundamental recategorization and recontextualization in how reality is experienced. Actually doing the meditation is worthwhile. The effects provoked by the meditative journey, the mindset described as nonduality, is pretty darn neat, if often difficult to discuss rationally.