Enlightenment? Or a Cold Beer Instead?

MAYA, MIRROR OF ILLUSIONS by A.B. Davies

What is this thing called "enlightenment" and why would one want it?

I've got nothing against the concept: I just want to know what the specific benefits are. As it says in the poem in the previous post (below): One wonders why oneness is set as a goal.

Unfortunately, there's not much hard info on the benefits of enlightenment, nor on what it is exactly or how it manifests or how to achieve it. It's one of those slippery words/concepts, like "God", that can mean many things to many people. Conveniently though, we can identify a small number of broad themes to help make sense of all the detail.

Enlightenment is believed to involve:

• escaping the endless cycle of reincarnation -- the recurring samsara of birth, death, rebirth -- in which every soul is believed to be trapped
• quantum entanglement in the biological sense, ie being "at one" with all living things
• getting closer to God (I don't know what "closer" or what "God" means; but some people do, apparently)
• absence of personal identity, or the state in which one finds oneself after losing oneself
• living outside of time / "living in the now", a technique believed to lighten the (alleged) psychological burden of regrets about the past and anxieties about the future
• accessing lost or secret knowledge about how things really work, and our individual roles in the process
• seeing through the illusion, the maya, of a time-bound, material world in which everything is relative to every other thing, and nothing stands still long enough to be real.

Free Willy in the United States of Personhood

I downloaded this image a number of years ago, can't remember where and can't provide attribution: apologies to the copyright-owner. Actually it's unclear as to whether dolphins were granted legal personhood status, or whether India "merely" banned the use of dolphins in aquatic theme parks. But whatever happened in reality has no bearing on whether cetaceans are or are not persons, or on how they should be treated. This issue is a great example of the relativity of values and the significance of context. The movie, Free Willy, is about the conflict of values and the impact of that conflict on the life of an orca named Willy. Many humans, including myself, believe that cetaceans are as "personable" as humans.

Free will means you are free to choose to do anything that is within your power to do; to think anything that is in your power to think; to experience anything that is within your power to experience. But the most significant freedom of all is the freedom to define your values, relative to the All, relative to Everything and every thing.

That relativity is inescapable, at least for the likes of you and me. You might, for instance, choose diversity as one of your values, except if you were supplying tomatoes to a supermarket, in which case you would want all your tomatoes to be the same size, weight and color. A supplier of tomatoes to a supermarket would prefer conformity to diversity, at least in relation to supplying tomatoes. To echo the "location, location, location" of realtors: context, context, context!