Skip to main content

Enlightenment



Enlightenment is as full an understanding of the world as possible.  It goes beyond rational understanding.  It is spiritual, so to say.  It is intuitive, if you wish.  When we say the Buddha was an enlightened man, what we really mean is that he understood the world much more than the ordinary people. 

Understanding leads to love or, at least, compassion.  The Buddha was one of the most compassionate creatures that ever walked on the planet.  French writer Francois Mauriac said in one of his short stories that God was able to endure our world because of his profound understanding.  Mauriac’s God was an enlightened being: one who saw the human condition so clearly that he could not condemn anyone.  Rather he would feel compassion, however wicked the person might be by normal human standards.  

In his classical work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James speaks of American poet Walt Whitman as an enlightened person.  Whitman loved whatever he saw.  He loved the flowers as well as the weeds.  Everything that he came across held a special charm for him.  All sights and sounds pleased him. 

Enlightenment produces what James called “healthy-mindedness” and defined as “a way of feeling happy about things immediately.”  Such healthy-mindedness “excludes evil from its field of vision.”  It is not ignoring evil conveniently.  It is understanding the object of perception so profoundly that the evil aspects dwindle before the intrinsic goodness of the object.  That ability to perceive the goodness, to perceive the object in its totality rather, is enlightenment. 

The enlightened person is happy in a way that is quite different from those who discover happiness in things like food, wealth or possessions.  As the Buddha said, “When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.”

PS. Written for #BlogchatterA2Z

Comments

  1. parwatisingariApril 5, 2018 at 9:14 AM

    great as ever

    ReplyDelete
  2. Novemberschild (Romila)April 5, 2018 at 10:15 AM

    My deepest wish is that spreading personal enlightenment would result in a systemic awareness of our interconnection with other species, an acceptance of responsibility for our actions towards them, a moderation of our personal demands from the Earth and its biosphere, and a strengthening of the movement back to human-scale communities.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 5, 2018 at 8:16 PM

      Absolutely right. Those who have achieved that enlightenment or are on the way are superb human beings. They have a mystical connection with the universe .

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
18 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more

Octavian the Guru

Octavian was one of my students in college. Being a student of English literature, he had reasons to establish a personal rapport with me. It took me months to realise that the rapport was fake. He was playing a role for the sake of Rev Machiavelli . Octavian was about 20 years old and I was nearly double his age. Yet he could deceive me too easily. The plain truth is that anyone can deceive me as easily even today. I haven’t learnt certain basic lessons of life. Sheer inability. Some people are like that. Levin would say that my egomania and the concomitant hubris prevented my learning of the essential lessons of life. That would have been true in those days when Octavian took me for a farcical ride. By the time that ride was over, I had learnt at least one thing: that my ego was pulped. More than 20 years have passed after that and I haven’t still learnt to manage affairs in the world of people. That’s why I admit my sheer inability to learn some fundamental lessons of life. Th
8 comments
Read more