What Would Enlightenment Be?

 

Well, we all remember Sankara’s Snake.   A farmer goes out at dusk and confronts a rope down on the ground about 10 meters away and ‘thinks’ it is a snake.  What this tells us is that we do not have Direct Perception of Reality, but that we perceive reality as a kind of imperfect reflection, through the Senses which apparently can be mistaken.  Well, Sankara spun and spun and spun the ramifications of that Story about the Rope being a Snake until everyone was convinced that the entire Material Universe was just an Illusion.  I think that was going a bit far.  After all, if it really is a snake and if it bites you, then is it Real?  

When I was very young and naïve I read stories of the Saints throughout History, of their Knowledge… their super-knowledge – knowing things they had no way to know, and their miraculous powers, and it occurred to me that they had found a way to a Sixth Super Sense, perhaps a Direct Perception of everything through the Medium of Gravity itself, the great Existential Force.  This Perception through Gravity locked them into the same Field of Being as everything else.  Yes, their limited brains could not process everything all at once, but they could learn to focus – bringing their attention down from Universal Visions of the Galaxies, to scanning the neighborhood to tell a distraught farmer where his favorite horse had gotten off to after the barn door had been  left open (a Sai Baba of Shirdi miracle).

So, no, I don’t think Enlightenment is just some kind of flimsy state of mind in which one is enlightened because he momentarily has what my mother would have called a “nice little nap”.  I think Enlightenment is an actual thing, that grants a new level of perception and a Direct Knowledge.

Then there are the Miracles.  Once one can sense Gravity, probably by becoming One with it, then one can manipulate Matter from inside of it.  Matter can be manipulated through its Gravity.  Now, yes, there could be the complication that Energy is required to manipulate matter, and this energy needs to come from somewhere.  So we shouldn’t expect any man to lift a mountain, since it has never been done before…not in recorded History.  But plenty else has been done, and we need to expect the same level of performance from any modern Enlightened Saint as of the Historical Enlightened Saints.   So Show us the Miracles.  It is Silly to Believe without them.

So, really, there should be two tests for Enlightenment – Direct Perceptions of anything in the Universal Gravitational Field, and the ‘miraculous’ manipulations of matter.  Unless all the vague spiritual talk and Zen Paradoxes can get us there, then it all seems rather little-sisterish.