Enlightenment is an Illusion Too

Eternity is in love with the productions of time

William Blake

I had quite a deep realization a few days ago regarding the nature of “enlightenment”. That is, enlightenment never happens in the future.

I had heard this type of teaching from many teachers in the past, but this time it struck me more deeply.

Enlightenment is a useful word in one way because it suggests to us that there is a very different way of perceiving the world than the way most humans generally do.

This is very useful because it’s true. There is a very different way to perceive the world.

The word becomes a double-edged sword though, because it then suggests to people that enlightenment is an “event” that may happen to “me” in “the future”.

This is where it becomes problematic, because the future doesn’t actually exist, it is just a collection of thoughts that occur in the present moment.

We have learned from Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity that the nature of time is very different to how we usually conceive of it. It fluctuates depending on the observer and their particular reference point.

Time literally slows down as gravity increases. As an object increases its speed, time runs slower relative to objects moving slower. This was exemplified in the movie Interstellar, where, upon returning to Earth, the inhabitants there had aged significantly quicker than those who travelled at high speeds through space.

Usually this effect is so small we don’t notice it. You need to be travelling very fast for it to become obvious. But it still exists in our world too. Walk from your room to the living room while someone is sitting on the couch watching TV. You have aged less in that time than the stationary person, only so minutely you haven’t noticed it.

Of course, in our universe, nothing is ever truly “stationary” – the person sitting on the couch is spinning around the axis of the Earth at roughly 1,600 kilometres per hour at the equator, which is rotating around the sun at roughly 107,000 kilometres per hour, and our solar system is moving through our galaxy, which is moving through space itself. This is why Einstein’s theories were called “relativity” and not “absolutivity”. Everything is dependent upon the observer and their particular reference point in space-time.

Do you live in an apartment block on the second floor? Because of the (very slightly) reduced gravitational field of Earth where you are, the people living below you age slower than you. Again, so minutely you can’t perceive it except with the most accurate clocks available. And don’t worry about trying to get the ground floor – to you it won’t seem as though you’ve aged quicker, time will appear to you as having gone on at the same rate. It will only be in comparison to the person living below that time will have appeared to go slower. A total mind-job I know.

So, we have learned from Einstein’s equations that time is not a static construct, moving along at a fixed rate, but instead a perspective that changes relative to the person observing.

At the very least, we have learned that time is not what we usually think it is.

Many philosophers, and any enlightened person worth their salt, go further. They suggest time is not actually real at all, it is merely a construct created in the mind of the conscious observer in order to, in a sense, categorise our experiences.

But there is no real evidence for it in our universe. As the scientist Robert Lanza stated, “you can’t put it in a bottle like milk.”

The only evidence we think we have of it is that we have a memory – in the present moment – of something having been one way, and now being a different way, and we surmise that this supposed change that occurred has occurred in “time”.

But as the Greek philosopher Parmenides once annoyingly said to a friend of his, “just because my hand was over here and now it’s over here doesn’t mean that anything has changed.”

This is something that on initial inspection can sound completely ridiculous, but to illustrate this point, I’ll give an example philosophers often use as a model to explain this called the “block universe”. This is the type of universe many philosophers believe we live in (pictured below), where the past and the future both simultaneously exist as set constructs. From this perspective it’s easy to see how someone could claim that “nothing ever changes”.

In my opinion the block universe is an incorrect model of our universe because quantum mechanics still leaves open every possible future state, and even, mind-bogglingly, past states, from the present moment. But it is a useful model to illustrate how it’s possible that time doesn’t actually exist as an independent entity, it is merely created from a perspective in the present moment.

Have you ever experienced this thing you call “the future”? Have you even ever experienced this thing called “the past”? Or have you only ever experienced *thoughts* about these things in the present moment? Have you ever been anywhere else but the present? So why believe in something you have never experienced? In other words, why believe in something there is no evidence for?

This is why enlightenment can never be an event that happens in the future. There is no real future, there is only now. Believing enlightenment may happen in the future will actually prevent you from waking up to the now, which is what enlightenment is.

Enlightenment happens now or never. Because there is only now. Literally.

In love and light,

Will.

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