“What is enlightenment? In other words, what is a person’s highest goal in life, in philosophical and religious terms?”
Nirvana is samsara. All forms are empty and emptiness is form. Simply, world is illusion and only Brahman is real, Brahman is the world, because Absolute is omnipresent. Thus also omniscient and omnipotent. Yet, in its unmoving original state, the absolute existence is merely blissfully conscious. One can also say that consciousness exists in a blissful homeostasis outside of time and space, life and death, good and evil. The sole existence that ever was, is, or will be. Not as an entity, but as existence that causes all being as such. As a singular consciousness, an ocean of bliss.
Thus, big bangs of ecstasy should not surprise us, and the karmic streams of natural causality should not startle us. Their perfection in simplicity of the concept as well execution are both miraculous and awe-inspiring equally as brutally logical and efficient at the same time. This is the perfectly still Absolute in motion. These are the waves and torrents raging through that ocean of bliss that hovers as a perfect non-dimensional point … nowhere.
What is enlightenment, then?
Well, it’s merely to know all of the above. Not understand, not acknowledge, not read about or discuss, but to know. Because, how does a chicken taste? All meanings are inherent, one could say solipsistic.
Yet, the usual response is to envision Absolute as another entity, as another “thing” among many. It’s understandable, because from within the universe, and each and every mind, which seem to be split into observer and observed, it’s the most intuitive way to go about it. Still, the split is illusory. Exactly as one cannot pinpoint the exact boundaries of oxygen between a tree and a human being standing in front of it — both are completely permeated by it — in a similar vein, Absolute not only permeates, but is all there is.
What is reality, if not that which is rendered into whatever form for I to perceive? Who is real, if not I who is and knows only oneself?
Thus, there is no highest goal in life except the unbearable lightness of being in the midst of eternal recurrence. To quote a classic, “All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t.” So, maybe that goal could be the ability to recognize such paths with a heart. For which the direct knowledge of true nature of all that is, and acting in accordance with it would be essential.
Honestly, as a human being, I don’t envy Devil his role one bit.
LOL, 477 words — there you go :D
