I mentioned that I don’t like “enlightenment” as a word, because it means too many things to too many people, which makes it a bad word. I suppose “God” is a bad word as well, since it invariably causes misunderstandings about what is meant, but that’s because people using it usually don’t have an actual experience of anything the word is supposed to describe, and instead merely refer to scripture.

The problem with “enlightenment” is that lots of people actually have some experience that they choose to describe in that manner, but it is rarely the same order of magnitude of experience between them, and since the word is supposed to mean some kind of an ultimate achievement, some of that confusion is actually intentional, caused by the ego trip involved.

So, let’s see some of the uses. The most innocuous is “being made aware of something”. That’s how normal people use it, but not the “spiritual” ones. Then there’s the Zen enlightenment, which means something along the lines of suddenly understanding the true meaning of something, “getting it” after appearing to get it before, or merely having intellectual familiarity with the term. So far, we are still within the realm of common human experience – for instance, a person who couldn’t feel compassion with some people because of a lack of personal experience with their situation can experience Zen “enlightenment” when they suddenly find themselves in a similar situation and they understand what those people were going through and what the problem was. However, this is the different order of experience from what is meant by Buddha achieving enlightenment, or what the upanishads describe as realization.

When “enlightenment” is used in spiritual context non-trivially (which means “excluding Zen”) at a minimum it means a transformative transcendental experience, something that makes you aware of higher realities, and leaves you changed. When Vedanta talks about enlightenment, it means experience of sameness of atman and brahman, direct experience of “I am that brahman”, the experience which yoga calls samadhi, and further divides it into savikalpa and nirvikalpa, which directly translates as “with remainder” and “without remainder”, and actually means “incomplete” and “complete”. Some schools add further attributes to nirvikalpa, like nitya, making it obvious that completeness of the thing was in doubt in some cases, but since you can’t get more complete than complete, I find the practice pointless, yet revealing, because Vedanta believes that sufficiently powerful realization of atma brahma advaita is the ultimate knowledge that ends one’s imprisonment in the realm of the relative and the illusory, and yet this obviously doesn’t actually happen; rather, one has a powerful realization of something, but it doesn’t actually do what Shankaracarya said it’s supposed to do – basically, fry your karmic attachments and seedlings on the flame of knowledge, liberating you forever from the sphere of the relative world. Basically, knowledge dispels ignorance, light dispels darkness, and self-realization dispels all karma. Since that doesn’t actually happen, there was a need to distinguish between complete samadhi and truly complete samadhi, not like the samadhi of that other person who had some experience but is obviously having issues of a very worldly kind. It’s easy for me to find it funny now, but for the Vedanta people that’s actually a real issue. Basically, to them the issue is how deep and how much of a samadhi do you need in order to make it stick permanently and result in complete liberation during life (jivanmukti). The answer is: you got it completely wrong, and no amount of samadhi of any depth will produce that kind of result, because such an experience merely adds another structure to your karmic body, and while it does dispel some illusions and misapprehensions, the entire theory of what the actual problem is and what its solution is supposed to be is completely wrongly understood by Vedanta.

I’m not going to even touch the Buddhist misapprehensions about nirvana and enlightenment. Their teaching is such an incredible chaos of various misapprehensions and lack of any kind of personal experience with the subject matter, that it’s obvious that they, themselves have no idea what they are talking about. However, if we follow Buddha’s talk about extinction of the four elements into the fifth, it seems that nirvana is actually his description of the initiation into vajra after all personal definitions were withdrawn from the four lower elements. This condition is actually transformative and converts a lower, “gaseous” soul-type into a crystalline one, and is something that happens when an astral soul grows big enough through compassion (meaning that the forces that repel soul-particles from each other have been diminished), and then this large amount of astral substance is compressed by removing the rest of the “kinetic energy” of the astral substance through suffering, until you get perfect purity and stillness of all four lower elements, starting the process of transformation of the soul into a crystal of vajra. Vajra means both “diamond” and “lightning”, which is quite descriptive because this substance feels like both – it’s incredibly “hard”, and incredibly “bright”, and “enlightenment” is here much more than a metaphor, because you are literally being “made of light”, of the kind that is harder than a rock and denser than a core of the star, of such density that it goes through all other matter as if it were mere gas. A diamond made of pure lightning, dense as a neutron star or a black hole, without any worldly attachments and definitions in anything lower, is what it subjectively feels like. So, this is the first thing where I would use the word “enlightenment” in the meaning that is both completely non-metaphoric and descriptive, and also means what it’s supposed to mean – a permanent transformation of the nature of one’s soul from worldly to eternal. The number of such souls in this world is, of course, low, but it’s greater than what people would think, since the majority of such souls incarnate in order to process further karma that would end up magnifying their soul core, essentially making them a bigger soul-crystal, both in quantity and further sophistication, because yes, there are higher things than vajra, of such wonder and majesty that I don’t even wish to go there at this point. However, when a crystalline soul incarnates here, it is basically creating a “gaseous” provisional-soul for the purpose of incarnation, meaning an astral body and a karmic structure that defines its purpose in this life as a being, and in order to make actual spiritual progress, it needs to re-experience initiation into vajra in this incarnation, essentially “hardening” the provisional soul-stuff to the level of its own true being, and only then it’s actually starting to do actually advance its karmic position. Obviously, this is a rare achievement. But let’s say that the incarnating entity is not merely a small vajra-crystal, but one of the major Gods. The process is essentially the same – attaining self-awareness as the incarnating entity by passing through successive initiations into progressively denser and higher substances, and learning how to wield them from the physical body.

But what happens when a major God attains full self-awareness in the physical, and even out-initiates their former state?

I am not allowed to write more at this point, but stay tuned. 🙂