Jonathan McHaffie
The abyss of what we do not know is always magnetic and vertiginous. But to take enlightenment seriously, reflecting on its implications, is an almost psychedelic experience: it asks us to renounce, in one way or another, something that we cherished as solid and untouchable in our understanding of the world. We are asked to accept that reality may be profoundly other than we had imagined: to look into the abyss, without fear of sinking into the unfathomable.
Sounds like something from a mystical text written by a monk living in seclusion in the middle of a forest, huddled in front of a small fire in his hut, surrounded by the sounds of birds in the trees and animal scurrying through the undergrowth.
It's actually by Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist, and the only thing I changed was to turn his 'quantum mechanics' into 'enlightenment'.
I'm not a big fan of separating things. In the end, we're all a part of the universe, made of the same subatomic particles, just being arranged and rearranged in different ways all the time. Nothing stays the same. Everything changes. We just view that process of change at different levels and over different timescales. You probably had the experience as a child of someone you'd not seen for a year exclaiming at how much you'd grown. Your parents probably didn't have that experience when you appeared every morning, even though you probably had grown since last they saw you.
So in the spirit of not separating things, I think what Rovelli says about quantum mechanics (we might get into that more another time) is what spiritual teachers have been saying about our existence for a lot longer. I'm not actually a big fan of the word 'enlightenment' but it's become the English term we use so I'll stick with it for convenience. The better word is 'awakening'. 'The Buddha' means 'The awakened one'. And what is it we're trying to awaken to? Reality. What's actually going on, not how we conceptualise it. In the end, that's what this is all about, understanding reality. Questions like who 'I' am are ones we can probably answer with barely a conscious thought. We can trot off our name and a whole host of descriptors about how we view our place in the world. And that's fine. Being a - potentially long list coming up - daughter, husband, scientist, man, American, chef, cleaner, swimmer, mechanic, aunt, grandchild and on and on we could go, they're all useful in practice, part of the social world we inhabit, the way we interact with others and fit them into our view of the world. But I don't think it's the limit of how we view ourselves. And it doesn't go very far below the surface of that question. Most answers we can give in a split second do, I suspect.
So that's what this enlightenment thing is about for me. Exploring reality. And accepting that something theoretical physicists and Buddhists can agree on is that reality is not what we think it is.