Enlightenment is a Journey
It proceeds in what you can call levels: at each level you gain a new a different view of the universe, and more becomes apparent to you. This is limited to your lifetime, but there is another aspect: the written record we leave behind for others.
Remark by a Reader
In a discussion forum, the following comment was made in a discussion about not trusting your intuition.
forgive me but I noticed you’re studying philosophy. You may have the personality to allow yourself to deny your intuition a bit more than others simply by how your mind works. Most people don’t have that ability. Most people act upon intuition and then use things like evidence and facts to build upon their first method of reasoning.
My response was that I believe this is a skill that anyone can learn. “As the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage.” There are many levels of learning that we have the opportunity to progress through. At each level, you see the world in a new way. To me, enlightenment is not a destination, it is a journey.
I am tempted to sardonically add “. . . and then you die.” Truth is that our journey is limited by a lifetime, except we today have the benefit of so many people who charted areas before us, and my only hope is that I can add just a bit to that chart to allow others to go further.
The Journey
The journey is a quest started in prehistoric times, when people started to ask questions of each other about the nature of reality. Our minds were formed from millions of years of evolution, and they perform adequately for one main thing: survival long enough to produce the next generation. The natural mind gives us a pretty good understanding of the things that are relevant to eating, sleeping, protection from the elements, and escape from danger.
We attained the ability for abstract thought (meta-cognition), and language. It was probably the invention of alphabetic writing that allowed us to specify elaborate theories about the fundamentals of the universe, and to discuss the consequences, such as the ancient Greek did. Writing allows transmission of ideas that are too large to be told verbally. Ideas are recorded in a form that can be reviewed and analyzed in detail. Since then many people have journeyed toward enlightenment, leaving behind the part of the map that they explored and what they found.
Today, we have the benefit of the writings of thousands of philosophers, and we can skip over many of the dead ends, and start earlier in the more promising territories. Because of that, each new philosopher is able — possibly — to go a little further.
Changing the Questions
Progress moves through what can be thought of as level, although I don’t believe there are any specific punctuation into a discrete set of levels. It is better to think of it as a continuum however there are things that when we learn them, they suddenly a whole new aspect of reality. So it can appear like levels in some regards.
Each level brings a new way to understand the universe. It is not that everything fundamental shifts to a new view on everything, but more like the old view is there, but now you understand the connections throughout the old view which gives new understandings. This is experienced as a transformation, and it become hard to explain that view to someone who has not gone through the transformation themselves.
As soon as I find all the answers, they change all the questions.
The Collective Journey
The goal is then the complete understanding of the universe, but there is one tricky thing: we are part of the universe, and as we learn more, we add to the universe and to the things that must be learned. It is quite possible that such learning can never be complete because the act of learning about it adds more to what there is to learn.
Still, the entire human race is collectively learning how the universe works. Each new generation starts with a little more of a head start, and then, if lucky, leaves behind a map of just a little more.
This is ultimately the meaning of life. I am sure this is what Carl Sagan meant when he said “We are the universe made manifest trying to figure itself out.” The universe is expanding physically. It is also expanding in increasing complexity. Part of that increase in complexity is the emergence of thinking being you can then ponder the nature of the universe itself.
Manifest Destiny
Can anything save us from death? Sadly, each of us individually will die, and there will be others who take our place in the journey. Death is a natural part of life, and though we desire it dearly, there is no escape from death.
Yet the things we leave behind do honor to spirit of the life that created them. We are truly a social species, and we don’t succeed individually, we succeed collectively. Our manifest destiny is to come to understand who we are, and what the universe is.
This is your quest. You are a map maker.