What is enlightenment?
If you read widely and analytically about enlightenment, you will find that it has been defined or described in almost as many ways as there are spiritual traditions or “enlightened” individuals. There are even claims that it doesn’t exist. To a disconcerting extent, what enlightenment is seems to depend on how you define or describe it. And, however you define it, others will certainly disagree, including “enlightenment police” who claim to know who is enlightened and who is not (according to their own beliefs, of course). Unfortunately, there is no universal authority to set standards. And, contrary to popular and naive notions, spiritual traditions are, more often than not, saturated with politics, rivalries and disputes. For example, I once had a teacher (obscure then, but now very well known) who, after being declared enlightened by his own teacher, turned around and publicly declared his teacher to be unenlightened. Not even the most revered teachers, such as J. Krishnamurti and
Enlightenment is the ability to see reality as it is, without the layers of interference and interpretation imposed by the mind. It is freedom from the perceived notion that we are separate from God. It is the dissolution of our belief in our small self. It is living with full awareness of our divine nature.
Enlightenment means being fully present and engaged in the moment; means letting go of our personal ideas, condition and situation in order to attain a clear mind, a clear view of the world around us. With a clear mind, we can act appropriately under all circumstances. Clear, compassionate and spontaneous interaction with each moment as it arises, is already enlightenment.
Let us linger a few moments over Kant’s text. It merits attention for several reasons. • To this same question, Moses Mendelssohn had also replied in the same journal, just two months earlier. But Kant had not seen Mendelssohn’s text when he wrote his. To be sure, the encounter of the German philosophical movement with the new development of Jewish culture does not date from this precise moment. Mendelssohn had been at that crossroads for thirty years or so, in company with Lessing. But up to this point it had been a matter of making a place for Jewish culture within German thought — which Lessing had tried to do in Die Juden — or else of identifying problems common to Jewish thought and to German philosophy; this is what Mendelssohn had done in his Phadon; oder, Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With the two texts published in the Berlinische Monatschrift the German Aufklärung and the Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history; they are seeking to identify the c
