Why Enlightenment Needs A New Name

Enlightenment Is A Weighted Word

When thinking about spiritual enlightenment, I am not a fan of the term, enlightenment! We all know how much weight can be carried by words, and enlightenment now carries so much historical weight and pressure, it is hard to believe it refers to a state any mere mortal can actually attain. To be enlightened sets one apart from others, as if the enlightened one is somehow special, or has received some kind of special understanding not available to the rest of us.

Enlightenment conjures up visions of a grandfatherly wise old man, not unlike the old testament Christian God. But this is from an eastern worldview so our enlightened one is a sage, from China, or an Indian, or Tibetan, Buddhist monk.

He (still usually a man) has gone through many years of meditative training, being slapped on the head with a stick for not knowing the answer to the riddle of one hand clapping, but in the end realising his place as beyond all cares of the world.

Becoming enlightened, in this sense of being beyond all cares of the world, seems so far away and unobtainable, that it has become akin to getting famous or winning the lottery. It happens to someone else, they get to enjoy it. It looks like a prize to most of us, another status symbol to lust after, in a pious, self-realizing way of course. On the other hand it can also become a stick to beat ourselves with, when we fail to achieve such enlightenment – I wish I was enlightened. Why can’t I be enlightened? Everything would be just perfect…. if I was enlightened.

Unfortunately, enlightenment is often presented in this exact way, both by religious teachers and self-styled Gurus. Many happily present their own version of enlightenment as a panacea to all life’s ills. However, for the unscrupulous this is a mask, a way to bolster their own Ego, or a way to take your money in return for their Secret to enlightenment, or more likely, as a way to do both at the same time.

Does Enlightenment Mean Being Free of Fear & Desire?

Often it seems to be promoted as such. The idea of being free of emotions, like fear, and living a life of peace and fulfillment, without strong desires, is attractive to many of us who have found life to be full of dramatic swings, between between ecstatic highs and disastrous lows. Enlightenment seems often to be seen, and promoted, as being free of any negativity, and emotions like fear and anger, and feelings of desire, are often painted as purely negative.

However, no human can be free of fear and desire. And, these are not inherently negative states.

Our most basic reactions to stress, fight, flight and freeze, are accompanied by strong emotions – fight comes with anger (and often fear), flight brings fear and freeze also brings fear. These reactions are hard-wired into one of the oldest parts of our brain, the amygdala. I discuss the fight, flight and fear response in more detail in the article Mind Body Healing but suffice to say that it is an automatic reaction, outside of our conscious awareness, that originally evolved to keep us safe in times of danger. As they are hard wired deep within us (the amygdala is one of the oldest parts of our brain in evolutionary terms) they will always happen, no matter how enlightened anyone becomes. They are also essential to our survival, and to telling us what we like, and don’t like in our lives.

But what is possible is to learn to allow your emotional reactions, without attaching to them, in the language of Buddhism, or to use the language of ACT & IFS therapy, without blending or fusing with your emotions. This can be see in extreme examples of some Buddhist monks, who have learned to modulate their emotional reactions to such a precise extent, that they can fast for long periods without showing distress, or even burn themselves alive without without crying out in pain or fear, as in the footage and image we all know from the Vietnam war of Thich Quang Duc, now forever known as The Burning Monk.¹

This level of accepting emotions, and essentially controlling the body and mind’s reactions, is more akin to athleticism than enlightenment. It can allow an individual to achieve what can seem like superhuman feats of endurance, but it is hard to know whether this level of emotional control was global in Thich Quang Duc’s life. Perhaps learning through meditation to control your pain and emotional responses to extreme stressors didn’t mean he wasn’t still annoyed when someone acted in a way that he disliked? His death was an act of political protest as well, which suggests he felt strong emotions on such subjects.

It is questionable if this level of emotional control is useful in most people’s everyday lives. Thich Quang Duc left his parents and started his training as a monk at the age of seven, his whole life was within the Buddhist order, where he rose to a high position overseeing the construction of many Buddhist temples in Vietnam.² Emotional control was written through his life, and was part of his everyday world. Most of us have lives with partners, children, parents and jobs that thrive on our emotional connections, and for most of us the ability to meditate to such a degree where the outside world is almost cut off is unnecessarily complicated!

Feeling our emotions is also important for our mental and physical health. As discussed in Mind Body Healing, and elsewhere in this website, our emotions guide us to what we want or don’t want in our lives. Knowing our emotions is vital to bring harmony to all Parts of ourselves, and so achieve a healthy and strong World Identity.

I am not saying that Buddhist monks don’t have emotional connections with others, Thich Nhat Hanh’s discussion of the importance of community or Sangha, in Fear, shows just how important emotional connection was for him, but more that it is not necessary to control all emotions to a high degree, to reach an enlightened state. Also, it is not necessary and not possible to be free of our emotions.

Enlightened Ones Are Human All Too Human Too

This view of enlightenment as an emotionless state, or at least a state free of negative emotions persists, but do so called enlightened ones live it? In Tibetan Buddhism, though the Dalai Lama has talked many times about healthy ways to manage strong emotions he has also been involved in a decades long battle with Dorje Shugden – a strand of Tibetan Buddhism whose tenants the Dalai Lama has tried to suppress. Though he recently lifted what amounted to a ban on anyone practicing Dorje Shugden, this feud was full of animosity, and bitterness, on both sides.

This kind of behaviour doesn’t seem very enlightened, but putting aside the whys and wherefores of the politics of the Tibetan Buddhist church, on a smaller scale the Dalai Lama has shown a loss of control and outburst of anger in daily life. It is seen here, directed at a Dorje Shugden Nun. What are we to make of this? I think it points towards one of several possible conclusions:

1. The Dalai Lama isn’t enlightened – if enlightenment means no more so called negative emotions such as anger.
2. The Dalai Lama, and other promotors of spiritual enlightenment, say one thing and do another.
3. Enlightenment is not really about existing in a state free of emotions like anger.

Though I can imagine all three statements being simultaneously true, I lean towards the third statement as holding the most significance. Enlightenment is not really about being free of emotions like anger, but rather about being detached from emotions, while still feeling them. In essence it is about not letting your emotions carry you away.

How Do I Stop Getting Carried Away By My Emotions?

There are two core steps to practice.

1. Get to know your World Identity – all the Parts of yourself that are the psychological embodiments of your emotions and desires. By getting to know these Parts of yourself you can understand yourself and start to put space around these Parts that feel fear and desire with abandon.
2. Feel yourself as Universal Consciousness and as part of Infinite Existence and so will never really cease to exist.

This isn’t enlightenment in the sense of being detached from all worldly concerns, but enlightenment in a freer sense, of shining a light on all of yourself, and on our greater reality. Enlightened means seeing clearly, as if a light has been shed upon your life and you can see what is in the shadows. In this way it doesn’t mean a brand new life will be created for you, or that you have to find such a new life, rather that you see your own in all its aspects without the need to judge one aspect as worse or better than the others.

Freedom or … Choose Your Own

To reach this kind of enlightenment start by dropping the word enlightenment altogether. Though we are tied to language, and when trying to explain what it feels like to feel freed from attachment to desires and fears, language really fails, yet it is all we have to work with. But let’s use a different, less weighted word than enlightenment.

Awakened is a commonly used substitute for enlightenment but again it is a word that sets a person apart from others, putting the awakened one on a pedestal. Like I was always told as a child about the Queen of England – we all use the toilet. We all fart, and burp, and bleed, and get sick and die, and this applies to Sages too, no matter how enlightened or awakened.

Freedom for me is is a better word to use. It has an egalitarian feel, and gets at the state of feeling mentally and emotionally free, that follows acceptance of all aspects of yourself, and the world. Feeling free has a lightness and easiness to it, and this is the feeling that comes when you know that everything in existence, and yet to exist, will happen forever, in infinite patterns. And still, freedom is an ordinary sort of word, one to which we don’t attach any mystical or special meaning. When we talk about someone being free, we think of them as having a lightness, and a sense of space around them, and with possibilities being open to them.

Perhaps this is all just history repeating itself. After all enlightenment/enlightened & awakening/awakened were not words always associated with mystical self-awareness. Perhaps though that is the very point. As they have now become so attached with mystical meaning it’s time to use new words. But, perhaps a word like freedom can retain its ordinary sense of possibility.

You Will Know

When will I know I am free? Freedom is obvious because you don’t feel the need to go searching for ultimate answers anymore. You will feel you are completely perfect, (without having to change your imperfections), and you will know your life’s purpose, because that is simply living your life. You will feel like you don’t have to prove anything to anyone or yourself. You will feel you don’t have to gain or achieve anything (which are just more ways to prove to yourself and others that you have a right to exist.) You will live as much as possible in appreciation of what is happening right now, in the present moment.

You will feel emotions like fear and anger and feelings of desire but won’t be dragged along with them like someone drowning in a fast flowing river. All emotions and feelings are you, but you are not them, not defined by them or enslaved to them. This state of freedom is peaceful and joyous.

Freedom Embraces Imperfection

Freedom means you are allowed to fail. Everything in your life doesn’t have to be right all the time and won’t be, even at Stage Seven of The Roadmap. You are human and you will get angry, irritated, fearful, lustful, jealous, envious, impatient, bored and silly, just as you will get happy, joyous, ecstatic, humble and all the other human emotions and feelings. You will get caught up in these feelings at times before you remember that they are not all of you.

Freedom means that this – getting caught up in – lessens and becomes a rarer experience. But it will always happen. You are human and your emotional brain reacts. However, as your awareness of these feeling grows and your understanding of your World Identity deepens and so you know which Parts of your World Identity runs with these reactions, this will become a softer and less frequent experience.

And this sense of space from your World Identity, which is connection with Universal Consciousness, is a deep peaceful loving joyous feeling in itself. Freedom is like finding a deep long lasting purpose that requires no effort at all. It also comes with a deep sense of connection to others, even when they are behaving in ways that would once have driven you crazy!