What I think enlightenment is and is not
Enlightenment, awakening, and liberation refer to the same thing. It is the complete stripping away of the delusions and biases that hold us back from the people we truly want to be.
The surprising thing is just how deep the delusions go, and just how amazing life can be in their absence. The full path strips away deep delusions in which we imagine ourselves to be Cartesian agents, with a strict separation between, for example, images in our mind and the one experiencing those images, or sensations in our body and the one experiencing those sensations, or even between the world around us and the one experiencing that world.
Many reading this essay will already know that there cannot be some hard boundary between subject and object in this way, since our brains are constructed out of the same basic material as our bodies and the rest of the world. But knowing this is different from having it propagated through all levels of awareness, just as standing on a transparent pane of glass looking down many stories at the street below can generate a strong anxiety even in a person who knows that the glass is strong and secure.
The path also reveals to us the goals we are pursuing that we do not really wish to pursue, and the fears and anxieties that are causing us to pursue them, and the delusions that fears and anxieties are predicated on. In seeing these delusions clearly, they dissolve and we are free of them. There is no need to put aside “selfish” goals and instead choose “selfless” goals; once we see the fundamental delusions clearly, we see which goals we actually wish to pursue, and we are already one step closer to having the freedom to pursue them.
The path even reveals to us delusions in our fundamental conception of suffering. This is a very deep delusion indeed, but it is ultimately just a delusion. Enlightenment is not inscrutable. It simply clears away our belief in things that are not true. The shocking part is finding out just how deluded we have been.
The path only subtracts delusions, it does not add knowledge. It should come as no surprise that one practicing meditation does not automatically gain any knowledge of science or math. It does leave the practitioner in a truly excellent position to learn such topics, having developed concentration, clarity of purpose, and being free of the many delusions that normally hinder our progress. But with respect to specific math knowledge, the enlightened math student has no special advantage over any other math student.
Consider now: does enlightenment confer any special knowledge of ethics to the practitioner? Ethics is a body of conceptual knowledge that has been built up over thousands of years, and presumably will continue to be augmented in the future. Ethics as a field is concerned with working out what is truly good and right, and how we as humans ought to behave. Many times, the implications of a set of ethical precepts for how we should behave turn out to be highly non-obvious, and many times the study of ethics has revealed such counterintuitive implications of our ethical systems. Enlightenment does not offer us any shortcut to ethical insight, although it does give us clarity on why we should care at all.
