Question: Sir, how does a mind that is enlightened look at life? What happens to its thoughts? Does its wiring change in response to fear? Does it change its response to emotions?
Answer: Assuming sufficiently good understanding of the brain and sufficiently developed scientific processes, anything can surely be done with the brain. That involves all kinds of neural rearrangements and the rest of it.
Do we understand enlightenment? Can enlightenment ever be ‘understood’? Even with the best of science, you can only as much to the brain as you have knowledge of. If the scientist does not know enlightenment, how can he devise a neural circuit for enlightenment? Can there be a scale of enlightenment, metrics of enlightenment? When exactly would you call a person enlightened? To replicate something, one must first define it.
Think of the problems in the identification of enlightenment. Is it an aspect of behaviour? Is it a way of being? Is it a particular kind of expression? Or is it just a personal claim?
At the base of it all, the assumptions are that:
- Enlightenment is something that happens in the brain.
- Enlightenment is the same thing in the brain for all people. One man’s enlightenment corresponds to the same biological thing in all other men just as headache or pregnancy do.
- Enlightenment is something localized in the brain i.e., it can be achieved by changing one part of the brain while letting the other parts remain the way they are.
All of these are tenuous. These are reducing that experience to something objective, like a fracture in the arm. Enlightenment, by definition, is not objective. For all their common-ness, enlightened people show great diversity as well.
How can enlightenment be one objective thing? Krishna dances, Buddha cannot. Jesus won’t fight, Mohammad fights all his life. Kabir sings, Mahavira won’t speak at all. The Zen monk hits his students, the Jain monk can’t think of hitting even an ant. And then, there is so much diversity in the post-enlightenment teachings as well, even as they point towards the One.
Finally, the last assumption seems most vulnerable to scrutiny. Suppose you do fix the enlightenment to some part of the brain, the other parts remain as they are. So, here we have an enlightened master who is also greedy, violent and miserable !
One could surely prepare the brain for enlightenment. Ashtang yog attempts exactly that through breath control, thought control etc. But is enlightenment is a condition of the brain? It’s like saying that the mind is a condition of the body, and the Atman is a condition of the mind. Slim chance !
Question: Dear Sir, last night I reflected on this again and here are some more thoughts:
- You are right when you say enlightenment cannot be an objective thing: there cannot be ‘one set of neural circuits that define enlightenment’. Our brains themselves are different.2. The whole of the brain could be involved and not a part.3. As you said it is conjecture to think that it is resident in the brain.
But most importantly, the whole discussion in reflection seems to be conjecture. For a non-enlightened man to talk about ‘it’ is the same as a blind man talking about vision.
Sir, I don’t think I will write about things like this anymore. I, for my part am convinced that the discussion is perhaps pointless.
Answer: Lao Tzu kept on criticising the philosophers, the religious people, everybody. And he announced that the scriptures were meaningless and pointless.
Then, surprisingly, once Lao Tzu was caught reading the scriptures himself. He was asked, “You say it is useless to read the scriptures. Why are you, of all people, reading them then?”
Lao Tzu said, “Yes, they are pointless. But this has become known to me only after reading them.”
Ali, please make all the conjectures and assumptions you want to. That is the way of the mind. There can be no progress without assumptions, hypotheses and the like. So, please continue with full vigour. Explore, research, analyse with all your might. Only that will sharpen the mind and lead it to subtler places. Read greatly, and read as you have been reading.
Alongside, just be aware that all this is mind.
– Based on my interactions on various e-media.
Dated: 11th November,’11
