my buddhist blog number 143

Hi Everybody,
Find it hard to believe that I've been posting this blog since 2013!! Amazing how time flies when...you're seeking to create value. During that time the book has been published in English and Spanish, and seems to be very popular, particularly in the USA., for which I'm deeply grateful. OK so we're in the midst of this discussion about faith, what can it possibly mean in a religion that has no gods to have faith in? One hurdle we have to leap over before we get to that is the subject of Shakyamuni's enlightenment. What's that all about? Enlightenment is ina  sense a technical term in Buddhism and I think it really helps to see it in that light. Indeed the word Buddha itself essentially means the enlightened one, it comes from a Sanskrit verb that means to be awakened. or to be aware of or to know deeply. And the key thing to note is that those are quite human-scale activities aren't they? Nothingn divine about them. We can all wake up, or be aware or know deeply.

So how should we deal with the fact of Shakyamuni's enlightenment? In many ways the concept of a state of being, or a state of mind labelled enlightenment is strange to us, not to say alien. It's a word we're not likely to use often, if at all. In an essentially intellectual and materialist age we are much more attuned to, and likely to be much more comfortable with down-to-earth explanations and scientific patterns of  proof. But of course as we all know, there is much more to our humanity, particularly our humanity when it is lived at the highest level,than can be observed and measured in a laboratory. So we have to accept I think that in using an unusual word like enlightenment, we are reaching out in an attempt to describe something that may be very difficult to actually pin down, but which nevertheless remains a wholly valid part of human experience. Put simply we might say that enlightenment involves a completely different view of reality. One analogy that comes to mind is the sort of phase change as it's called in physics that takes place when water turns to ice for example. It is exactly the same stuff so to speak, precisely the same molecular substacne, nothing has been added or taken away, but it is also a complete transformation.

Is that similar to what happens to ordinary people when they achieve a measure of enlightenment? They are exactly the same people. But they are also transformed.

Enough for one swallow.
Hope it makes sense.
See you next time.
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available in paperback on Amazon and a download on Kindle.