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This is Karan Bajaj
Today we’ll deconstruct the word enlightenment and talk about what it means for you in your everyday life.
What is Enlightenment?
According to all religious and spiritual traditions, man exists in a state of incompleteness. So all our unhappiness, all our disappointments, all our sufferings exist because we’ve fallen from some kind of a state of completeness or perfection. Different religions mythologize this in different ways. Christianity symbolizes it as Adam and Eve, falling from the Garden of Eden because they took a bite of an apple. Yoga says that there is Purusha which is the complete soul. And there is Prakriti, which is the conditioned state of being, which is in constant flux in which we exist.
The Buddha says, that life is full of Dukkha, or anguish or incompleteness. So in some form or the other, all religious traditions say that we are in some kind of a state of incompleteness today. Enlightenment is quite simply man reaching that state of perfection or completeness.
How does that happen?
The best way to understand enlightenment is to understand the Sanskrit word called Kaivalya. And Kaivalya is a very interesting paradoxical term. According to Yoga Sutras, Kaivalya is the goal of human life.
What is Kaivalya?
Kaivalya is paradoxically a state of both, aloneness and completion. It is a state of aloneness because in the state of Kaivalya man has completely let go of all sense of ‘I’. Of ego, of becoming, of desiring this, wanting that. Fueling this tendency to propagate. Going forward in some other way.
There is the complete dissolution of that sense of self. As a result, it’s a state of aloneness. And at the same time, it’s a state of completion because when the self is dissolved completely what is left is a state of complete bliss or perfection. And that’s why enlightenment is a word from Eastern philosophy and it isn’t present in Christianity or Western philosophy in a spiritual sense because Eastern philosophy is non-dualistic. This means that they believe man and divine are one and not separate from each other. It’s layers of conditioning and thoughts and desires and individual desires to propagate that have led the Divine to be covered by this sense of ‘I’-ness or ego. And once that sense of ‘I’-ness and ego dissolves completely what is left is divinity or completion. And to uncover that is the goal of human life. So to be enlightened is the goal of human life and to get there you have to let go of the complete sense of self.
What does that mean in a practically everyday basis?
So what it means therefore is that there is good news here. There is a promise of perfection that lies for each of us. So there is a solution from all the petty sufferings, the anguishes, the disappointments that we face every day. And the solution for that is to let go of your sense of self. It makes logical sense because if you think of what leads us to our disappointments is this tendency to want things.
I want this, when I don’t get this I feel unhappy. I want this in the future, I should have got this in the past. When you let go of all of that you should feel you enter a state of complete being and this is blissfulness. So what it means for you is when you’re working just work. Become a medium for your work to express itself without thought of ‘I’. When you’re in a relationship with someone just love without expectation of return.
When you are helping someone don’t use that as a tool to build yourself. Just help without expectation of anything in return. And slowly you’ll reach that state of enlightenment because you’ve let go of all ego and that should, in turn, make you happy. I think it’s a good practice and once you start doing that you’ll start realizing that all of these mystical things actually do mean something. Obviously, the best enabler for this is to learn meditation because with meditation you learn to suspend yourself more and more in a state of perfect being without actively wanting and desiring anything. And the more you train your mind to be in that state of being the more it starts to have that state of being in almost every aspect of life.
I hope this was helpful. It was a complex concept to deconstruct and I hope I could make some sense of it. And if you’re interested in meditation I would encourage you to visit www.karanbajaj.com/meditate and download my free meditation video course today.
Thank you and see you next week.
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