The Truth About Enlightenment

For years I was pursuing enlightenment. As many other people I was expecting that it will remove my suffering. That it will provide me with a greater understanding of reality. This pursuit led me to what was first a spiritual journey. Then it became a scientific one. One which gave me answers that I did not expect. In my pursuit of enlightenment I became a full-time student in a spiritual school. There I learned that enlightenment can be categorized in two different ways. Some people experience an awakening which makes them feel one with everything. They come to realize that in fact they are one single consciousness. Other people come to the conclusion that they do not exist at all. That our whole story of who we think we are is just a construct. And that this construct has nothing to do with what reality truly is. These both experiences are different but also similar. They are as two sides of the same coin. They both lead to a desired outcome of a dissolving of one's identity. Whether in a sense of unity or in a sense of non-existence. This experience also brings them closer to the initial goal of decreasing their suffering. If there is no you, how can you have problems? When a person experiences this type of awakening it feels liberating. Your mind seems to expand. Everything becomes clear. All of your problems disappear as you change your perception of reality. I know this feeling since I went through such an experience myself. It happened during the time I lived in a spiritual school. During an intensive weekend course my spiritual teacher led me into an awakening experience. I felt my perception of my own self disappearing. After this experience for a while it was difficult for me to function in society. It was difficult to see the difference between myself and others. It was difficult for me to understand my social responsibilities as I was walking in a constant state of bliss and happiness. I thought, no wonder spiritual gurus spend their days mostly meditating while their students take care of them. They must be having the same exact experience. All of the spiritual texts that I used to read before suddenly started to make sense too. Previously I was trying to guess what each text tries to convey to me. After my direct experience there was no need to guess. I was directly relating to what was described. Yet with time this constant feeling of bliss and unity started to fade. Slowly life got back to normal and I became socially active again. My realization of non-duality remained with me but so did my suffering. I felt that my involvement in social activities was pulling me away from my experience of enlightenment. I was wondering if maybe I should become like other spiritual gurus. Meditating the majority of my life. Remaining in a state of bliss and non-duality. Yet after some time my understanding of enlightenment changed entirely. It happened when I was reading a book called The Rise of Superman by Stephen Kotler. In his book he was describing an experience that extreme sports athletes commonly go through. It's an experience where they feel that they merge with everything. Free climber and BASE jumper Dean Potter had one of these experiences. Right after a near-death experience while BASE jumping he saw a dying bird on the ground. As the book describes it, instinctively Potter picked up the bird cradling it in his shredded palms. The connection was immediate. As soon as their flesh touched he felt a powerful psychic union. As if his consciousness has merged with the bird's consciousness. In that instance they were no longer two wounded creatures. They had become one stronger animal. I know it's hard to believe said Potter but the experience was so powerful. The connection so true. I just sat there with that bird holding it while it died. When it died I died with it. And I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean I became that dying bird. Author Stephen Kotler then continues to elaborate. While Potter's experience may be hard to believe, variations of it are not that uncommon in action and adventure sports. It was like I reached a place where clarity and intuition and effort and focus all came together to bring me to a higher level of consciousness, says professional kayaker Sam Dreville. A level where I was no longer me. I was part of the river. In fact, long before the Cave of Swallows, Potter too had familiarity. When he went to Patagonia hunting that psychic connection to the universe, this was the very experience he desired. Stephen also presented a scientific explanation of these experiences. It was Jefferson University neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and University of Pennsylvania New York psychologist Eugene D'Acquili who gave us our first real insight into this experience. They were investigating a different version of oneness, the kind produced by meditation. In deep contemplative states, Tibetan Buddhists report absolute unitary being or the feeling of becoming one with everything, while Franciscan nuns experience unia misica or oneness with God's love. So Newberg and D'Acquili put both Buddhists and nuns inside a single photon emission computed tomography, spec, scanner, to try to figure out if there was biology beneath the spirituality. And biology there was. It turns out that during moments of intense concentration, something happens in our superior parietal lobe, a portion of the brain that helps us orient ourselves in space. Newberg and D'Acquili call this part of the brain the orientation association area or OAA. When functioning normally, the OAA is a navigation system. It judges angles and distances, maps course trajectories, and keeps track of our body's exact location. But to do this last part, it also has to produce a boundary line, the border of self, the division between us and not us, or in other words, a division between us and the rest of the universe. Drawing this border is no simple task. The OAA depends on a constant stream of incoming messages. All of our senses send data here about where our body is located. Incredible calculations occur. But all of this takes a lot of energy. When that energy is needed elsewhere, like during moments of intense focus, the OAA stops performing those calculations because it stops receiving those signals. Without this data stream, this part of the brain is temporarily blinded, and to an incredible result. Once this happens, says Newberg, we can no longer draw a line and say this is where the self ends, and this is where the rest of the world begins. So the brain concludes, it has to conclude, that at this moment, you are one with everything. Reading this, I realized something important. I spent countless of hours meditating, reading spiritual texts, and doing spiritual exercises seeking enlightenment. Eventually, I came to experience it directly. Yet in the long run, this experience left me unchanged. Getting a peek into the science behind it, I realized why. What is mystified and glorified in spirituality turned out to be a simple phenomena in the brain, one experienced by many people. The only difference between mystics and extreme sports athletes was that they had different interpretations of it. When my own OAA stopped receiving information about my whereabouts, I had my spiritual teacher next to me. He told me, you are going through a spiritual awakening. See, you are not your body, you are everything. That made me interpret my experience as enlightenment. It also made me feel special. It made me feel like I know the greater truth to reality. It also made my suffering disappear, at least for a while. But then I realized that if I wanted to maintain this experience, I would have to spend the majority of my life in a state of great focus. I would have to spend countless of hours in meditation, all of it to simply have an altered state of mind, one which I would interpret as enlightenment. Indeed, it would decrease my sense of suffering. I would have continued to think that I am not my body, that I am one with everything. But I asked myself, do I really want to attach so much meaning to a single state of mind? Is this what life and greater reality is about? Or would I rather spend my life embracing everything as it is, not shying away from suffering when it occurs, not seeking some greater understanding of the universe. Instead, simply doing my best to live a good life, to be a good, regular person, instead of an individual searching for spiritual alternatives. If you liked this video, make sure to check out this playlist which is all about applying critical thinking to spirituality. Thanks for watching and I wish you to keep questioning.