# A speculation on enlightenment

*Epistemic status: pure speculation, generated by taking a dubious scientific theory and an uncertainly historical story and knocking them together.*

I believe that simply stating in plain words the idea that I want to communicate here cannot succeed. Consider the following hypothetical utterance:

"Everyone is enlightened already. Enlightenment is no different from ordinary consciousness. There is nothing to gain, nothing to strive for: this is your ordinary state."

Alas, these words pattern-match to frequently occurring woo. A sign that the speaker were actually doing woo would be if they went on to say that "the hard part is realising this." But the idea that I want to communicate is, I hope, easy to understand, once I place enough Go stones to block the pattern-matching. To do that, I shall have to take a run-up to the topic.

Recall [Julian Jaynes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes), who claimed that in the age of Homer, people were not conscious in the way we are today. They were incapable of introspection. Their left and right hemispheres did not communicate as they do now. They experienced their own motivations as hallucinated messages from gods. At some later point, this no longer happened, because people had become conscious of themselves as selves. They could think about their thoughts.

I am not sure how seriously the theory is taken these days, or ever was, outside of [a dedicated group that keeps the flame burning](https://www.julianjaynes.org). But never mind, I am referencing these ideas only as context. This is the "dubious scientific theory" I mentioned up top.

The "uncertainly historical story" is that of the Buddha's awakening. Jaynes does not discuss or (I think) even mention the Buddha in his book, but give or take a few centuries, the Buddha lived at a similar time to the supposed development of consciousness in ancient Greece. So let's run with the idea that consciousness also appeared then in India. What might this have looked like in that culture? It might have looked like the Buddha's awakening. There were many who practiced various sorts of meditation and asceticism in the Buddha's time. The Buddha (according to the story) was the one who finally succeeded at what they were blindly groping for, by achieving consciousness. His title means "the awakened one". Then he spent the rest of his life helping others to achieve the same thing.

Nowadays, we get it just by being brought up in a culture where everyone has it.[^1]

The historical accuracy of the story of the Buddha's achievement is not the point here. It does not matter whether the story tells how it happened, or if it was invented afterwards to explain what had happened. *Something* happened. The speculation that I am presenting is that the Buddha's awakening was exactly the development of consciousness. The ordinary consciousness, the awareness of our own selves, our thoughts, our presence, that we take for granted. In the Buddha's time, this was an enormous revelation. Now, it's Tuesday.

There is no "enlightened" state beyond that.

That is the idea that my opening quotation could not succeed in conveying.

I don't necessarily believe this idea, but it's a hypothesis that is always in my mind when reading about "enlightenment".

[^1]: Except radical behaviourists, of course.