What Does Enlightenment Get You?

Last summer, I had a job for two months that was in a small office building in an industrial park. I was a temp worker, and had a mandatory lunch hour to fill. I quickly got into the habit of eating for half an hour, then taking a half hour walk around the mile-long sidewalk loop that ringed the industrial park. It was summer, and it was often a hot but quick walk -- the park was young enough that there were no trees tall enough to offer any shade.

One of the places I would pass, aside from the offices of All Music Guide, my go-to website for music info, was Jewel Heart, a center for Tibetan Buddhism. Since I would often have at least fifteen minutes of walking left when I passed it, it almost always got me thinking about eastern meditation, and the quest for enlightenment. I know that Jewel Heart is not a Buddhist temple, and instead strives to find ways to incorporate the wisdom of Buddhism into everyday life, but my mind got churning anyway.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of "enlightenment". I know that it's the goal of eastern philosophy, but what exactly does it mean? What would it feel like to be enlightened? In my mind, it must be the ability to see the world from a universal perspective, to completely understand that one person's life is both insignificant and profoundly connected to all other living things, and to live mindfully in that state at all times.

My second thought would be wondering who would want to live like this. I like to think of myself as having a somewhat global perspective on things... I'm always trying to think of things in the long-term. I'm not the sort of person who will get bent out of shape because things are taking longer than they should to come into effect. I believe (and explain it further in my post "How to Live Forever") that for the sake of sanity people should in general concentrate on the long term. It's the best way to keep from being stressed, and also to focus on staying "in the moment". However, when I think of the Buddhist monks who shut themselves away from the world in monasteries on the top of mountains, spending their lives contemplating their place in the universe and constantly meditating to try to comprehend it, I think they may be taking it too far.

Because shutting yourself off from the stresses and instability of life isn't the same as living. To dedicate oneself to being celibate, childless, and sheltered kind of exempts you from actually having experienced life, doesn't it? What's left when all the things that really define participation in the human race are consciously taken out of the equation? If "peace" is all you're looking for, sure, you're probably going to find it, but death is an even easier way to achieve the same end. I don't mean to sound harsh, and I know that there is value in regular meditation, fasts, retreats, etc. But if these periods of introspection don't take place in the context of the usual stresses and trials of life, then don't they become meaningless?

As I understand it, one of the goals of Buddhism is to remove desire from one's life. Desire, it teaches, is the basis of all evil and unhappiness. If you want something, anything at all, then any choices you make from that point are in the interest of you getting that thing, not in the interest of living in a way that benefits all. But isn't desire the thing that defines us as human beings? We're the only living things on the planet that aren't at the whim of our desire for things 24/7. The entire animal kingdom has been fueled for billions of years solely by the drive to obtain food and sex. So why are we, the only beings on the planet who are able to realize this fact, trying to pry ourselves away from it? If our goal is to establish and be mindful of our connectedness with all things, I don't see how striving to make ourselves separate from the rest of it is a reasonable goal.

I could have it all wrong. I might be totally misreading the intentions of Buddhist enlightenment. And I'm usually of the mind that if a belief system makes you happy and doesn't infringe on any else's beliefs or rights, then good luck and more power to you, because you’re already ahead of a lot of people. In that, Buddhist monastic life is the perfect lifestyle. But in the end, I don't really know what enlightenment will get you if you don't also live life as the rest of us do.