Why ‘Enlightenment’? Seeing the Big Picture

October 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Binding, Elephant, Enlightenment, History, Light |

The term ‘Enlightenment’ refers to both a particular period of European history in which rational enquiry and the concept of a human-centred approach to knowledge became privileged, and also to the individual experience of ‘awakening’ that is found in many spiritual and religious traditions including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity.

This term, Enlightenment, is part of a complex set of metaphors which structure our relationship to knowledge. In this structure, light is associated with knowing, and darkness with not-knowing, hence the period preceding the historical Enlightenment is sometimes referred to as ‘The Dark Ages’. This association of light and knowledge may be because the presence of light allows one to be able to see, and in the absence of light one is effectively blind; this then correlates with a related metaphor, KNOWING IS SEEING, in which the abstract concept of knowing is comprehended by a mapping from the visual sense. So when we wish to indicate that we understand something we say ‘I see’, and when we do not understand we say ‘I just don’t see it’. In such circumstances we may even say we are ‘in the dark’.

What the light allows us to see, presumably, is ‘the big picture’; as the parable of the four blind men feeling their way around an elephant, all of whom take away different impressions, suggests, the visual sense confers a unity on experience which is absent from other senses. To ’see’ means not only to experience more but also to experience a unity.

In terms of personal Enlightenment experience, the darkness that one is assumed to be emerging from represents an inability see a unity of self and other, an inability which is resolved by the turning on of the light which allows the unity of all things to be percieved, just as one sees the unity of the world using the visual sense. The Enlightenment process allows this unity to be metaphorically ’seen’, resolving the apparent differences to produce the state of ‘non-duality’ or advaita, or divine union spoken of in scriptures.