Why do so many enlightened people claim we don't really exist? What is the basis for such a statement.

Christopher Martin

Contemplative philosopher

I see three ways of approaching this question: 1) simply to address the basis of the statement, even if the statement itself is dubious; 2) to analyze how such a claim relates to the widespread lack of higher-level philosophical ability amongst the enlightened (analytical philosophy and enlightenment are two completely different abilities), and 3) to show how the question misrepresents typical views of enlightened people.

Going in order, let’s say that many enlightened people claim that we don’t really exist. This really isn’t the actual nuance of the typical statement, but let’s roll with it just for fun. What is the basis? Well, enlightenment occurs on the basis of the stabilization of a dramatic perceptual shift. An enlightened person, when looking at a tree, isn’t having the same visual experience as you. When looking at her hands, she isn’t having the same visual experience as you when you look at your hands. When hearing the sound of a brook, or smelling a flower, she isn’t having the same perceptual experience as you. And when experiencing her own thoughts and emotions, she isn’t having the same perceptual experience as you.

The challenge for the enlightened person is to try to convey what she is experiencing - and very rarely is any enlightened person up to the challenge in a philosophical sense.

Vaguely put, what happens with this perceptual shift is that the basis for perceiving a ‘self’ disappears, as well as the basis for perceiving an absolute difference between self and others, or self and the external world. It’s not a cognitive shift - it’s not some idea you can read in a book. It’s like taking off sunglasses only to realize that you’d been experiencing a darker world when they were on.

You can easily see how a perceptual shift of such a nature would lead to a statement like, ‘We don’t really exist’. Obviously it’s not philosophically articulate, but it’s grasping at trying to convey a dramatic change to experience. The perceptual shift is very real; the methods of trying to convey it are largely inadequate, and rather than trying to convey the nature of the change in experience itself, most people instead convey the conclusions they’ve drawn on the basis of the experience. But since most of them aren’t as smart as Spinoza, they say some pretty kooky-sounding things.

So, we’ve dealt with ‘1’ already and we’re about halfway through ‘2’. Being enlightened doesn’t somehow instantly convey the ability to be precise and articulate. Heck, getting a Ph.D. in analytic philosophy doesn’t convey that either! The skill of analytic precision is about as rare as enlightenment. So the Venn diagram of their overlap is…small. I’d love to see a cross between Sri Ramana Maharshi and Lord Bertrand Russell - but it’s definitely not going to happen every generation. The last time anything remotely close happened in Western philosophy was…drumroll…Spinoza. In Eastern philosophy I don’t know: there are lots of great enlightened Eastern philosophers, but in terms of a philosophical method and tradition that’s relevant to the modern world, I’m not sure. Nagarjuna and Adi Shankara don’t fit the ‘modern’ methodology bill, as brilliant as they were.

So, enlightened people are going to do a terrible job of expressing what enlightenment is all about for the most part. They’re trying, but it’s a difficult task. And even if someone came along and was really articulate and precise…how many readers would be ready for that level of intellectual commitment?

This is not the philosophy section of a bookstore!

But as for ‘3’, this isn’t a very accurate representation of what enlightened people say. They usually say that the individual self is an illusion, or that separateness is an illusion, or something more along those lines. Another is that the ‘conventional self’ is an illusion. To try to understand this without a lot of mysticism, imagine all of the universe as a virtual reality, like the World of Warcraft. Imagine all of us as characters populating this game. We’re all part of the same computer, the same game, the same code. We don’t exist independently, we’re not ontologically separate or even ontologically real - we’re only conventionally real as subcodes within the game.

If you imagine the computer and the game as the chance result of an unintelligent process, then you’re a mystic atheist, or perhaps some variety of Buddhist - but that discussion gets quite complex. But the characters are still just a node in the process, conventionally recognizable as separately existing, but not actually so. Even if a subroutine can be thought to be an ontologically independent unit, it doesn’t do anything without the rest of the program - which sounds markedly similar to philosophies of ‘dependent origination’ and ‘emptiness’. But call the computer, the operating system, and the totality of the programs running on it ‘God’ or brahman, and now you’ve arrived at a rough approximation of Spinoza, or Alfred N. Whitehead, or some of the soteriological contemplative Hindu Orthodox traditions.

But either way, you’ll quickly see from this thought experiment alone, even if you don’t agree with the premise, that all of ‘us’ in such a model of reality are just fluctuating computational experiences with no fixed ontologically independent existence.

The one thing that is unchanging - if you accept it as a ‘thing’ at all - is the consciousness perceiving the displays of the programming. In a computing model, that consciousness is the computer user, which is separate from the computer. In the typical contemplative worldview, the computer and the user are one - like a single mind which both computes and experiences the computations.

The rub is that the ordinary person experiences a perceptual illusion which makes a view like this seem like science fiction. The exact nature of the illusion is a bit complicated and beyond the scope of the question, but it’s a bit as if all the pixels on the screen displaying you are altered so that you really think that you is real and separate. For the enlightened person, that illusion drops out, and the whole display is just pixels - they all have ‘one taste’ or a ‘single flavor’. When you experience that, it’s easy to vaguely say that we don’t really exist, or that the self is an illusion. It’s much easier to see that we’re all just computational nodes in a vast - perhaps infinite - computer or mind

odes in

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John Bellamy Adds:

The above does seem to complicate matters for the ordinary thinking man. Enlightenment is different for each person and we all see enlightenment through different views of reality.

I agree that this is the time of the MASS AWAKENING - the MASS ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE HUMAN SOUL - and there are ways this happens you do not wish to know about and then there are other realities and that we will begin to understand with time, and as always, it takes time. In our reality no one really gets enlightened and if they do, they are probably unknown to anyone as anyone claiming to be enlightened is usually - a con man, a preacher of ill repute - someone often with a large following but they are a charlatan, a fake, a snake oil seller - claiming to follow this Bible or this Koran or some other Holy Book but sadly, it is often all about the preacher more than the message. Ego mind takes over and the message becomes diluted in favour of fame and fortune ( Giving your money to a church where the Preacher lives a grand lifestyle with cars and jets and staff - is NOT enlightened at all, but just another con man.)

Enlightenment is a personal thing and not something any Preacher can guide you through as they haven't a clue, any more than anyone else, what actual enlightenment even means.

Follow your Inner Feelings and you will get there eventually.

=

Before enlightenment

Collect wood.

Chop wood

Make fire

Cook and eat dinner.

After enlightenment

Collect wood.

Chop wood

Make fire

Cook and eat dinner.

Enlightenment is a moment to moment thing. Like joy and sadness. You can watch a movie and find one bit sad and cry and the next bit is funny and you laugh. It is a moment to moment thing.

Enlightenment is when you awaken to something you didn't know before, and enlightenment in this manner means spiritual enlightenment, and one needs faith of some kind, not religious faith, but faith in a great good - a higher self - something bigger and more powerful and not some old man with a stick, but something that you, and me, and everyone is a part of but is lost to our vision of reality until - we become - enlightened.

Seeing is believing

NOT

Believing is seeing.

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