The Facsimiles of Enlightenment
The brown-headed cowbird is a North American songbird that reproduces by laying its eggs in a nest made by another species of bird, often after knocking out the eggs that were already there. An unsuspecting mother-to-be returns in complete ignorance about what’s happened while she was gone. In this way, the “mother” becomes the reproduction slave to the cowbird without really knowing it. She is simply following the pattern of instinct that helps her make babies, and all the intents and purposes of reproduction have been fulfilled as far as she’s concerned, except for the fact she’s been ruthlessly foiled in her attempt to pass along her own genes. But since she was never cognizant of that failure, it appears as a win-win to all parties involved.
I am going to argue that this is the condition of the much larger part of those who are participating in some way in Spiritual Enlightenment Culture [SEC], that of the victimized mother bird who does not understand she’s a victim. Spiritual Enlightenment Culture is the set of religious, spiritual, and secular practices that present a kind of final, and usually, transcendent state of being and consciousness commonly referred to as “enlightenment.” The conception of the finality, and inferred enormity of this condition has placed it on the highest shelf of human achievement, at least in its own estimation. As a result, those who make and promote their claim of having “achieved” this condition can find themselves admired by those who seek their “wisdom,” not uncommonly on a global scale.
SEC has been successful primarily because the ideas within it, when applied imaginally, that is, taken as presuppositions about our personal existence, can result in a great deal of happiness and success for the practitioner. It’s difficult to overstate how easily a spiritual idea, once it’s rooted as a presupposition about the world, can bring an improved outlook and sense of ease. That outlook and ease may not last, but there is always another idea that can take its place and provide a sense of further ease along with the hope of a brighter tomorrow, and who doesn’t want that?
But what if there were a hidden cost for this success, that being the sacrifice of the goal of the ideas themselves? What if the ideas we use to help us understand what we are seeking when we think of the word “enlightenment” are actually one of the greatest reasons for its prevention? What if the neurobiology of thinking about enlightenment creates a cognitive condition which obscures it? If these things are true (as I believe they are,) the entire artifice of SEC must be reframed in a way that aids, rather than assaults, the intention to become spiritually enlightened.
The range of descriptions about enlightenment are too numerous to mention here, but if we look to Hinduism’s Advaita Vedanta philosophy, we can find the root ideas for much of SEC, including Buddhism and what’s commonly referred to as New Age Religion.
Philosophically, Vedanta is a pan-psychic idealism that proposes human consciousness is part of a universal source of consciousness called Brahman, from which all existence across all space and time has its origin. It is very common to consider Brahman to be God in their impersonal, universal presentation. But it also proposes a human-scale equivalent to Brahman known as the Atman. The prevalence of the idea of “oneness” within SEC is the result of Vedanta’s insistence that Atman is Brahman. This idea creates a conceptual landscape based on the idea that since a person’s Atman is Brahman, they are ultimately and essentially one with all existence and divine, and that the same is true for all living beings. I believe this is the original source of the very common meme within SEC that informs us that ‘we are all connected’.
These ideas were reformed with the emergence of Buddhism, but really, only slightly. The Atman, being the positive existence as a person’s true spiritual and ultimately divine essence, became anatman, or just emptiness. What both Vedanta and Buddhism have in common is the idea that when one encounters directly and realizes their true existence as the Atman or anatman, that they have now become spiritually enlightened.
I’m going to propose that both Atman and anatman point to the same feature within human phenomenology, that of simple awareness. I’m defining simple awareness as ‘aconceptual’, as in, without concept or apart from concept. This is why both the Atman and emptiness are often described as indescribable. It is something we can experience that we cannot employ words and concepts to communicate about. Unfortunately, words are the primary tools we have to communicate with, and this has resulted in the contents of SEC itself, much of which harbors a poison pill that is really only a feature of our cognition of the concepts themselves.
The model of enlightenment that I’m proposing is based on some of the terms of Vedanta, but is rooted in the neurobiology which creates our perceptual envelope [PE], the array of perceptual information available that is put together into the experience of our existence in the moment by our attention. This includes anything we are perceiving, thinking, feeling and remembering at any one time. At this moment, my perceptual envelope includes my perception of the room I’m in and the objects around me that I am attending to, including any sounds and smells I’m aware of, as well as anything I’m thinking about or sensing internally.
My model proposes that our perceptual envelope is composed of simple awareness in the same way an image on a computer screen is composed of pixels. A pixel exists as a potentiality, really just abstract coordinates, until it’s assigned a color. The collection of colored pixels can then present as an image that can be dynamically updated continuously by the orchestrated transformation of the color of the pixels across time. I’m contending that simple awareness is like the collection of empty pixels. But where our model diverges from the computer screen metaphor is the fact within our PE, the pixels are always empty and colored across time, simultaneously. This is where the common SEC meme ‘you are already enlightened’ comes from.
So we have a PE composed of simple awareness (empty pixels,) that presents to us as a compound awareness (colored pixels,) or the contents of our experience as it is happening to us moment-to-moment. When we are born, and as we develop in our lives as embodied individuals, we experience our PE as a continuously updated compound awareness. Because it’s our compound awareness that presents information about what’s safe, what’s dangerous, what’s desirable, and what to avoid, it’s all we really ever pay attention to. Evolution has never felt pressure to develop a sense of our simple awareness, just as we don’t need to be aware of the individual pixels to discern the image on the screen. Our simple awareness has been “in our face” the entire time we’ve been alive as perceiving individuals, but because we’ve never actually needed to know about it, we haven’t recognized that it’s the fundamental basis of our awareness of the world, ourselves, and our very sense of being alive.
This makes the problem of avidya, or the ongoing ignorance of our own nature as this simple awareness, a simple function of the ubiquity of simple awareness rather than a feature of our behavior, as SEC commonly proposes. One way to understand this is by employing the concept of inattentional blindness. This term was coined by experimental psychologists in 1992 to describe the phenomena they were observing in their research on human perception. What they discovered is that if you assigned a subject a visual task, such as attending to the movement of a basketball among players on video, that you could introduce anomalous elements, such a man in a gorilla suit moving among the players, without it being noticed by the subjects at all. They are rendered unconscious to the presence of the man in the gorilla suit as they are looking right at him on the screen! The subjects are distracted by the task of attending to the movement of the basketball, and thus, never see what’s showing up right in front of them. It’s in this same way that we fail to recognize the simple awareness presenting our PE, as we are simply distracted by the continuously changing landscape of compound awareness informing us about our surroundings both internal and external.
If this is indeed the case as I believe, it makes the problem of avidya a feature of what attention is seemingly not able to do, which is to bind to (recognize and attend to) simple awareness over what’s presented within the scope of our compound awareness. It follows that if we are to recognize the existence of simple awareness within our PE, that we’ll need to develop a new attentional skill, one that results in attention finding a means to bind to simple over compound awareness. This makes spiritual enlightenment primarily something we experience via our attentional function, and it thus follows that we might want to learn some kind of simple meditation practice that can allow us to develop how our attention can function within our PE.
So now that we’ve established that the neurobiology of enlightenment is primarily a feature of how our attention may function within our perceptual envelope, we can look at how the vast majority of the contents of SEC is radically counterproductive to the task of becoming spiritually enlightened. Because simple awareness is aconceptual, there is no possible way to describe it, and the mystical texts of many religions reiterate this contention. Yet because we use words to transmit concepts, there has developed an incredible array of ideas about what spiritual enlightenment is like as an experience, with all of these ideas leading directly back to the concept ‘Atman is Brahman’, or the Buddhist equivalent that anatman is emptiness. Because Brahman is thought of as God, or at least the essence of divinity, spiritual enlightenment is almost universally described as being one with God (or with the universe.) Because Buddhism rejected the divinity of the Atman in favor of the idea of emptiness, spiritual enlightenment is often characterized as being empty, and that idea is often misconstrued to mean a state of non-existence as an individual, which is a surprisingly common idea within SEC. These two central ideas, that spiritual enlightenment is either being one with God (or the universe,) or being non-existent, form a scaffold for a set of ideas born out of the entailments of these notions that I will be referring to as the folk theory of enlightenment (FToE). Like the more well-known folk psychology, the folk theory of enlightenment constitutes a set of “common sense” presuppositions. But rather than being a set of ideas just about how the human mind works, the FToE is constituted of presuppositions about spiritual enlightenment and what that is like as an experience. It’s the main reason why people become interested in enlightenment in the first place, for what on Earth could be better than being one with God?
This set of ideas constitutes a landscape of ideology about spiritual enlightenment that gives us a goal it simultaneously denies to us. The reason ideas about simple awareness (FToE, etc.) prevent the recognition of simple awareness is simply due to distraction. As we’ve already proposed, because of ubiquity, simple awareness is initially not easy to discern. Add a flight of ideas about it, and attention gets owned by the compound awareness carrying the ideas. Attention is displaced to the compound by ideas about the simple. Any idea of any kind does the same — we attend to the concept.
But since what is sought as spiritual enlightenment is within our own PE, any concept we attend to can only not be it. And if the recognition of simple awareness apart from compound awareness is a kind of attentional skill, filling your head with ideas about something that cannot be conceptualized in any way to any degree due to its essential aconceptuality seems the epitome of unhelpful, yet this is the primary activity of the teachers and gurus who are currently transmitting the contents of SEC!
We’ve established that spiritual enlightenment may have a relatively simple neurobiological basis. It’s a change whereby an individual’s attentional function can bind to the simple awareness out of which our compound awareness is rendered. But there is an additional feature to this new skill, our identification can now shift to our simple awareness from the sense of self carried by our thoughts, feelings, memory and behavior within our PE. This provides a very useful cognitive resource to the individual, something akin to an instant state of meditation, referred to in Vedanta as samadhi. Yet all the thoughts, feelings, memory and behavior that make us “us” are still mapped into the neural networks of the nervous system. So even though you are now an aconceptual awareness that you’ll never really ever be able to tell anyone about, you’re still the same person to those around you and you remain equipped with all the cognitive skills to get that job done.
That’s all it boils down to in the opinion of this embodiment whose sense of self is now identified with the simple awareness from which my experience arises. It really is that simple. There is really nothing at all exotic about it. You could even say that it is closer to you than your own heart, and what could be more “you” than that? But if you take a moment to consider all the exotic things that are imagined to be true about it, essentially the contents of SEC, and you get a sense of just how vast the problem that the FToE has been to the community of those who are sincerely seeking spiritual enlightenment.
Adjacent to the FToE are a collection of essential metaphors that have arisen from the need for concepts with which to communicate about spiritual enlightenment. This has made speaking about the unspeakable a big business for millennia, and never more so than today. These metaphors are the only way teachers can establish what spiritual enlightenment is supposed to be, but as we’ve already surmised, ideas about simple awareness prevent attention from binding there, and so most of the teachers in the business of teaching spiritual enlightenment are unwittingly (with perhaps some quite wittingly) providing themselves employment insurance in the form of the continued patronage of their students, who are very likely to remain distracted by the ideas they have been taught.
I’ve identified 9 of these metaphors as being the most prominent within SEC as the main facsimiles of enlightenment. They are:
Presence
The Present
Nothing Silence
Light & Energy
Bliss
Oneness
Love & Compassion
Divinity
Higher Self
Egolessness
What is truly tragic about the negative effect these metaphors have on the search for enlightenment is that some of them also represent some of the best qualities of humanity in general. That’s the good that religion and spirituality have brought to the world, so it’s important for me to note that my criticism of these notions is limited to the scope of their use as concepts which describe spiritual enlightenment exclusively.
What is especially potent about the nervous system’s use of metaphors is the fact that they are embodied, that is, tied directly to the neurons that control our musculature. In their landmark book, “Metaphors We Live By,” and further elucidated by the follow up work, “Philosophy in the Flesh,” authors Mark Johnson and George Lakoff make a compelling case for the notion of embodied cognition and the outsized role metaphors play in the construction of human reason. They contend that from a finite set of metaphors based on things we can do physically, the basics of human reason emerge. So we might find ourselves having to “push to greater heights,” or “sweep a problem under the rug,” or “cast a wider net,” or “race against time,” etc. These kinds of metaphors are so basic to human communication that we don’t usually pay attention to them or the fact they are metaphors at all.
But because they are embodied metaphors, the neurons that control our musculature are involved in their expression within the cognitive theater making up our PE. Thus, if you consider our simple awareness to be a “presence,” as some teachers might say, there is an automatic embodied response, perhaps of feeling “here,” or in our bodies. Indeed, I believe the very idea of being in our bodies is a metaphor that is born out of our use of the containment schema, the very basic thought that a boundary can lie between something that is inside and outside of it. Thus, we’ve come to believe we are something in our bodies (a soul) with our skin being the boundary, rather than simply being part of the biological process that is internal to the body. In this way, the act of cognition’s continuous reference to our embodiment keeps attention focused on what is presented within compound awareness, sailing right past the simple awareness upon which it is all based.
It’s an unfortunate truth that the cognitive playing field is stacked mostly against the development of the attentional skill that results in enlightenment. However, out of the collection of individuals who have truly come to recognize the nature of themselves in their simple awareness, a significant number came to the attentional skill suddenly and spontaneously, often without knowing anything at all about enlightenment beforehand. That’s another clue we are on the right trail with our contention that the ideas we hold about enlightenment can only really get in the way of enlightenment.
But if these ideas are so harmful to the task they were created to aid, why are they still so prevalent today? Why can a person who is sociopathic enough to lie about their status as an “enlightened master” manage to attract great acclaim and a large audience? What is it about SEC that makes it so memetically “sticky” despite the apparent dearth of success as measured in authentic spiritual enlightenment?
To me it seems clear that the contents of SEC remain afloat across time and culture because one can achieve a condition of solace simply by employing one or more of the ideas contained in SEC as presuppositions about their existence. You adopt a worldview provided by the network of concepts made available by SEC, and this helps you along the path of your life by providing a sense of purpose, relationship with the world around you, and perhaps a sense of belonging if you join others in your SEC activity.
I’m going to call the activity of participating in most of SEC imaginal spirituality [IS]. This is opposed to attentional spirituality [AS], which is more concerned with simple meditation practice and personal investigation. The success of IS is impossible to overstate. Basically all religion is IS. Anything you take on faith is IS. And all the metaphors employed to communicate the nature of spiritual enlightenment are purely IS.
This isn’t to be critical of IS as a means to social and personal well being. That’s why it exists, and I’m a proponent of a mindful application of IS. After all, happiness is happiness and you’ve got to get it where you can. But if you are seeking what’s behind the metaphors that only ever really distract you, you are probably going to want to engage with the contents of attentional spirituality, as these are primarily about the development of attention and self-understanding. AS is the antidote at the center of the poison pill that is SEC, but it’s often ignored in favor of more exotic ideas and practices.
IS has been successful for a good reason, but that success has never carried into what has been its original reason, which was to foster an individual to an authentic spiritual enlightenment. This is because the ideas and metaphors that are employed to describe enlightenment anchor attention to compound awareness, bypassing the simple awareness which is the source of spiritual enlightenment when recognized by our attention. The solution is not the elimination of the ideas, which have persisted due to their utility as aids to our sense of ease, but a recognition of their essential misdirection when applied to the notion of spiritual enlightenment. So, you can believe you are one with all creation but remain mindful that the idea does not and cannot describe spiritual enlightenment when the attentional ability becomes available to an individual.
