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. 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. 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

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Dopamine

Fiction Mathai went to the kitchen and picked up a glass. The TV was screening a program called Ask the Doctor . “Dopamine is a sort of hormone that gives us a feeling of happiness or pleasure,” the doc said. “But the problem with it is that it makes us want more of the same thing. You feel happy with one drink and you obviously want more of it. More drink means more happiness…” That’s when Mathai went to pick up his glass and the brandy bottle. It was only morning still. Annamma, his wife, had gone to school as usual to teach Gen Z, an intractable generation. Mathai had retired from a cooperative bank where he was manager in the last few years of his service. Now, as a retired man, he took to watching the TV. It will be more correct to say that he took to flicking channels. He wanted entertainment, but the films and serial programs failed to make sense to him, let alone entertain. The news channels were more entertaining. Our politicians are like the clowns in a circus, he thought...

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...