If enlightenment is the acquiring of profound knowledge,
what is enlightenment truly for?
There’s an esoteric interpretation based on the literal meaning of the word (the
bringing of light), which traces enlightenment to the myth of Prometheus’s gift
of fire to early humans. Knowledge is thus intellectual or spiritual illumination, so that we become lights
in the greater darkness. Intellectual
illumination would amount to our potential for mental power. Specifically, a
mind can learn how nature works and can imagine ideals to motivate the creation
of artificial alternatives. To that extent, enlightenment is empowerment. In the Greek myth,
Prometheus empowered our species in defiance of the gods and was punished for
his transgression. Christians demonized the promethean symbol, believing that
our role isn’t to defy God out of satanic arrogance, to attempt to rival God’s
creation with technoscientific mastery, but to preoccupy ourselves with moral
constraints as we await the deus ex
machina of the arrival of God’s kingdom. The result of such Christian stultification
was the Dark Age in Europe, a time not just of ignorance left after the
collapse of the Roman Empire, but one in which ignorance was rationalized and
alternative ways of life were feared. Then came the Renaissance, the Protestant
Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the American
Revolution. Again, were the esoteric interpretation confined to the bringing of
intellectual light, the historical point would be that the early-modern
Europeans succumbed to the temptation to teach themselves to be independent, to
empower themselves as individuals at the expense of the Christian theocracies,
to seek to become gods through progress in know-how.
In the wider sense, though, in which the potential for illumination
is spiritual rather than
intellectual, what’s at issue isn’t just the mind but the existential
significance of consciousness. In that case, even the stars are dark, as it
were, in that they occupy a lower form of being. Like everything else in
nature, stars are absurd without an interpreter to supply them with value and
purpose. Consciousness is the light in which all beings are beheld and
appreciated. Together with mental illumination, a conscious, knowing creature has
the capacity to transform all things, including stars, and to do so according
to anti-natural and thus virtually miraculous conceptions of how nature
should be.
The Historical Variety of Enlightenments
Either way, the point of acquiring knowledge isn’t obvious. In most societies, there’s an even more
esoteric or hidden path for the enlightened, which is to withdraw from society,
to suffer in silence or to sacrifice himself or herself for the tragic love of
knowledge. In the prehistory of religion, shamans who used entheogens to
gain wisdom through a skewed perspective and who acted as mediators between the
spiritual and material world were thereby condemned to standing somewhat apart
from their tribe. Similarly, in one philosophical form of Hinduism,
self-knowledge leads ultimately to the conviction that animal and social
interests are delusory, that there’s an underlying reality discovered through
intensive self-awareness, which is that consciousness and matter, the inner and
the outer worlds are identical. After the student and the householder stages of
life, the enlightened Hindu retreats to the forest to endure as an ascetic.
In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths are triumphs of
intellectual wisdom. We learn that the nature of unenlightened life is to
suffer, but we discover also why that’s so and how suffering can be alleviated
by following the Noble Eightfold Path. The difference between the Four Truths
and the Eightfold Path reflects the difference between intellectual and
spiritual illumination (betterment). We acquire a theory or a mental map of the
main problem in life, but then we’re given a procedure of self-transformation
which is supposed to solve that problem. We can perfect our consciousness to
end our suffering. Indeed, for Buddhists, perfecting consciousness requires
curtailing the personal mind and its intellectual conceits of illumination. Thus, according to that tradition, spiritual
betterment, the enhancement of consciousness, is antithetical to the
intellectual kind, to the ego’s empowerment.