Enlightenment is a strange concept. It's more myth than reality. What is enlightenment? Is it a thing? An experience? A state of being? It's hard to grasp what it really is.

The Buddha is said to have been enlightened. If you study Zen Buddhism, you might be on a path to "achieve" enlightenment. Some call this "nirvana". Some describe enlightenment as a state of self-realization, and nirvana as a state of overcoming greed and lust, of existing with emptiness, and especially of overcoming karma.

But what is enlightenment? Is it something specific? Or just a general concept? Can it be measured? Can it be confirmed or verified? Is it debatable? Is it objective or subjective?

How does one achieve enlightenment? How does one even know they want to achieve enlightenment? Maybe it's a trick? Maybe it's a delusion? Can you lose enlightenment after you have achieved it?

Some say that ignorance is bliss... and why not? Those who are ignorant, not aware, locked in their own world, exempt from certain parts of objective reality, adjusting and manifesting their own subjective experience. Maybe there's something to learn from them. But isn't their existence thin? Less rich? Less meaningful?

Everyone needs to decide. Do you just want contentment? Do you just want a subjectively positive experience? Then be ignorant. Ignorance is not a necessarily bad state of being. It just means, by definition, that you ignore certain aspects of your experience. By removing the outliers, the stuff you don't like, or don't understand... you can focus on the positive aspects, focus on the thin contentment.

But what if you are curious. What if ignorance isn't in your DNA? What if you must know... you have to understand. What then? You can't live ignorantly, because the curiosity eats away at you. You must search... for meaning, for understanding, for deeper contentment. Sometimes that search is external, about things in the world, things in nature. These people are usually scientists. They search for a deeper truth than we understand today, and they seek to identify and eliminate bad understanding, irrationality, and superstition.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Those who search internally are like scientists, but are more like Buddhists. They seek to understand subjective experience, motivation, reaction, emotion, rationality, irrationality, and so on. Conducting experiments within themselves, they are like scientists. Deriving theories of "why". Testing those theories, revising them, and re-running the tests. It's a highly contemplative journey.

But what of existence? Where are the scientists and Buddhists searching? Are they searching some kind of true reality? Some kind of objective reality? And what is an objective reality, anyway? Truly, all scientists are really just Buddhists, searching within their own minds, because how can they know that anyone else ever exists, anyway? Aren't they just searching their own senses, their own minds, their own experiences? Do their dreams not include sensations, thoughts, experiences, memories? Yet, somehow, we agree that dreams are not objectively real. But other experiences which include sensations, and thoughts and memories, we ascribe a truer reality to those. The difference, however, seems to be just a slight difference in the quality of the experience, at least for those who are sober. But what about when the conscious mind experiences a so-called intoxication? Those are conscious, but also less real? Thus, reality appears to be a spectrum which we can use to describe the quality of various experiences.

Perhaps enlightenment is nothing more than a realization or series of realizations, about ourselves, about reality, about the nature and quality of subjective and objective experiences. Perhaps it is all of that, but the process and experience is not "nothing more than", but is instead, a deep and rich experience that shifts our perspective and paradigm of understanding?

But what are we? What are you? What am I that I can think these thoughts? What am I that I can appear to reflect on existence? What am I that I can remember? What am I that I can ruminate on the internal and external? What am I that I can appear to have qualitative experiences? And what are you? Are you anything? Are you in my dream? Is my dream just a layer? Maybe reality is just a dream? And my dreams are just a deeper dream? How would I know? How could I know?