- Isn’t enlightenment or awaking a way of looking to the world trough the right lobe of the brain (Holistic seeing, the heaven!, only seeing), in contrast to the left lobe that works with details (Mathematical seeing, the hell!, calculating situation)? And more isn’t the whole spiritual practice a change of our attitudes (views) towards Life? (E.g. it is a kind of psychotherapy).
Enlightenment is understanding based on experience. If we consider that understanding is also a form of experience, then enlightenment is only experience.
Ignorance is delusion, the belief that we experience something which we in fact don’t have the experience of. And that which we don’t have the experience of is a separate, or limited, or body dependent consciousness (by “consciousness” I mean that, whatever that is, which is reading these words right now and understands them).
To put it differently, enlightenment is the sudden recognition that there is only one reality. Once that has been recognized, it doesn’t matter which name you use to designate this Reality: God, Truth, Reality, Being, our real Self, the ultimate reality of the physical universe, the ultimate reality of our mind, our Presence, etc…Then there is only one Reality, only one God, only HE. Then the Sufi saying “Wherever the eye falls is the face of God” becomes knowingly your every day experience.
Most of the time, psychology deals only with the content of consciousness, not with consciousness itself, which it assumes to be, without any shred of scientific evidence to back it up, an “emergent function of the brain”.
- Our body/brain recognizes itself as a separate entity (as soon as eighteen months old). Furthermore, our immune system recognizes the foreign structures (non-self, microbes, transplantation…), and eliminates them. Then how ignoring Self (image) could match with these physiological processes?
I agree that, to a certain extent, and for practical purposes (survival of the body and survival of the species), we recognize the body to be separate from the surrounding universe. I said to a certain extent because if it was completely separate from it, it couldn’t possibly interact with it or be dependent from it (food, water, oxygen, etc). In fact, from the vantage point of modern science, of Quantum Mechanics, the universe is a non-local whole, every particle in our galaxy being deeply entangled with every other particle, even with the ones located in the most distant galaxy. From this point of view, every local event observed in the universe (such as my raising my right arm or the result of my measuring the polarization of a photon) cannot be considered to be produced locally. This implies that radical separation is an illusion.
Similarly, the minds are separate, to a certain extent. My mind doesn’t know your thoughts, unless you communicate them to me via email. They are not completely separate however, since they communicate.
The real question is: is consciousness, which is the reality of our human experience, separate and personal, or could it be universal (or divine)?
Whether or not it is separate doesn’t preclude the bodies and the minds to be separate to the extent we have defined above.
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