Spiritual enlightenment is something that can’t be adequately described in words, but the least inadequate definition of it might be something along the lines of: it’s an experience of oneness with the divine, and with all things through the divine. It’s the state of perfection, wholeness, and eternity that we all yearn for in the bottom of our hearts, as well as the only way of directly realizing the absolute truth that lies behind the everyday appearance of things. It’s the centerpiece of all religions, which hold the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment to be the meaning of life and the goal toward which everything else in religion ultimately points. Mysticism is the type of spirituality that leads particularly directly to enlightenment.
First, let’s consider the universal nature of the experience of spiritual enlightenment itself, with numerous quotes from classic spiritual texts from various religions from all around the world. Then let’s examine how those religions characterize spiritual enlightenment within their own specific systems. And finally, those who are interested can embark on a more philosophical investigation of how we can know that spiritual enlightenment is the ultimate truth, from which all other valid truth claims must follow.
The Contents of the Experience
Classic spiritual texts from the world’s religions describe the experience and effects of spiritual enlightenment in such startlingly similar ways that they leave no doubt that the same underlying experience is being described in all this literature, despite the great differences between the religions from which these texts come.
More or less all of them emphasize that spiritual enlightenment is a state of oneness in which the barriers that we usually experience between ourselves, other beings, and the divine collapse. All religions teach that the divine is the only thing that truly exists, and that our seemingly separate existence is really just an illusion or at most a provisional state. Spiritual enlightenment is the direct realization of the truth of those teachings.
For example, the Christian saint Teresa of Avila describes “spiritual marriage” with God in the following way:
But here it is like rain falling from the heavens into a river or a spring; there is nothing but water there and it is impossible to divide or separate the water belonging to the river from that which fell from the heavens. Or it is as if a tiny streamlet enters the sea, from which it will find no way of separating itself, or as if in a room there were two large windows through which the light streamed in: it enters in different places but it all becomes one.[1]
Another famous Christian mystic and saint, Hildegard of Bingen, relates her own experience of spiritual enlightenment in the voice of the Holy Spirit, which took her over and nullified her separate “ego,” one could say:
I am that supreme and fiery force that sends forth all the sparks of life. Death hath no part in me, yet do I allot it, wherefore I am girt about with wisdom as with wings. I am that living and fiery essence of the divine substance that flows in the beauty of the fields. I shine in the water, I burn in the sun and the moon and the stars. Mine is that mysterious force of the invisible wind. I sustain the breath of all living. I breathe in the verdure, and in the flowers, and when the waters flow like living things, it is I. I found those columns that support the whole earth… I am the force that lies hid in the winds, from me they take their source, and as a man may move because he breathes, so doth a fire burn but by my blast. All these live because I am in them and am of their life. I am wisdom. Mine is the blast of the thundered word by which all things were made. I permeate all things that they may not die. I am life.[2]
Likewise, the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most revered texts in Hinduism, has the god Krishna say,
[T]he sage unites with me, thinking,
“Krishna is all that is.”[3]
Another one of Hinduism’s most important scriptures is a collection of poems known as the Upanishads, which are filled with discussions and descriptions of spiritual enlightenment. One of those poems, the Isha Upanishad, says:
Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no fear.
Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no grief.
How can the multiplicity of life
Delude the one who sees its unity?[4]
And Yunus Emre, one of the foremost Sufi (Islamic mystic) poets, describes his own experience of spiritual enlightenment:
But poor Yunus fills the earth and sky,
and under every stone hides a Moses.[5]
Classic spiritual texts from the world’s religions are also unanimous in describing enlightenment as a state of bliss – not just great pleasure, but a state in which the very distinction between “pleasure” and “pain” vanishes into something far beyond either. Nothing in our ordinary lives could possibly compare to it.
For example, another one of Hinduism’s Upanishads, the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, declares:
All your desires will be fulfilled in him
Who is One without a second.
Know him to be enshrined in your heart always.
Truly there is nothing more in life to know….
As a dusty mirror shines bright when cleansed,
So shine those who realize the Self,
Attain life’s goal, and pass beyond all sorrow.[6]
The Dhammapada, one of the most celebrated texts in the Buddhist Pali Canon, remarks that even the most enviable pleasures of this world are nothing compared to the bliss of enlightenment:
Better than the sole rulership over the world,
Better than going to heaven,
Better than lordship over all the worlds,
Is the fruition of the streamwinner’s path.[7]
Attar, another one of the greatest Sufi poets, uses the same example to make the same point in his magnum opus The Conference of the Birds:
If the world’s sovereigns could taste
a sip from that boundless ocean,
they’d keen in grief and avoid
each other’s eyes from stinging pain.[8]
Turning to the Christian world, the anonymous medieval mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing concurs: “It is God, and he alone, who can fully satisfy the hunger and longing of our spirit.”[9] Or in the words of Meister Eckhart, another medieval Christian mystic, “The more you give of yourself to God, the more God gives Himself to you in return, and the more you divest yourself of self, the greater your eternal bliss.”[10]
Spiritual enlightenment is so blissful in large part because it frees us from the burden of the craving that ordinarily defines our existence. Craving is based on the perception of some kind of lack, some kind of flaw in ourselves or in the world around us, that needs to be remedied. But in spiritual enlightenment, such imperfections are finally seen for what they really are: illusions that stand between us and the realization that everything is one with the divine and its perfection.
Thus the Bhagavad Gita proclaims,
Sense-objects fade for the abstinent,
yet the craving for them continues;
but even the craving vanishes
for someone who has seen the truth.[11]
Or in the words of the Chandogya Upanishad, “One who meditates upon the Self and realizes the Self sees the Self everywhere, and rejoices in the Self. Such a one lives in freedom and is at home wherever he goes. But those who pursue the finite are blind to the Self and live in bondage.”[12]
The Christian mystic Saint John of the Cross makes the same point in Christianity’s language:
Oh, what a sheer grace it is for the soul to be freed from the house of its senses! This good fortune, in my opinion, can only be understood by the ones who have tasted it. For then such persons will become clearly aware of the wretched servitude and the many miseries they suffered when they were subject to the activity of their faculties and appetites. They will understand how the life of the spirit is true freedom and wealth and embodies inestimable goods.[13]
Attar, too, makes this same point:
Open your aspirational eye and see the Path,
then step forth and behold the Great Court.
When you reach that lofty place, its glory
will undo the world and its grasp on you.[14]
Of course, there are countless other ways of characterizing an experience that can’t be directly characterized in human language at all. But these few examples should hopefully illustrate how universal the goal of spiritual enlightenment is in religion, as well as give some kind of general indication of what enlightenment is like.
Spiritual Enlightenment in Specific Religions
Although all of these religions point toward the same underlying realization, they conceptualize that realization and its pursuit in what are often very different ways.
Buddhism calls spiritual enlightenment bodhi or nirvana. The Sanskrit word bodhi means “awakening,”[15] and it’s the root of the word “Buddha” (“one who has woken up”).[16] Like the Buddha, Buddhists strive to “wake up” themselves. Bodhi is framed largely in terms of gaining experiential (rather than just intellectual) knowledge of the ubiquity and nature of suffering, as well as the means of transcending suffering.[17] The Sanskrit word nirvana (Pali nibbana) literally translates to “blowing out” or “extinguishing,” and refers to the quenching of the fires of craving and the delusions that sustain that craving – since craving, in turn, is what sustains suffering.[18]
Hinduism calls spiritual enlightenment moksha, “liberation.” Buddhism and Hinduism both teach that beings are reincarnated again and again into this world (Sanskrit samsara), in different bodies and with different life events in accordance with the good or bad karma they’ve accumulated over the course of their present life and all of their past lives. While both religions hold that good karma is preferable to bad karma, they also assert that best of all is “liberation” from karma and samsara altogether, which happens when one achieves spiritual enlightenment. According to Hinduism, this happens when one realizes that one’s soul or Atman is one with Brahman, the divine. The soul then ceases to reincarnate.[19]
Christianity calls spiritual enlightenment “union with God” – or, especially in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, “deification” or “divinization” (Greek theosis).[20] Humanity fell away from God with the first sin, and that separation from God is sustained by sin. So God became incarnated in a sinless human being, Jesus Christ, thus unifying matter and the divine and enabling others to reach the same union with God if they follow Jesus’s way. As Saint Athanasius, one of the Church Fathers, writes in his masterpiece On the Incarnation, “For He became man, so that we should become God; and He revealed Himself through the body, so that we should take knowledge of the invisible Father.”[21] Many of the other Church Fathers have made almost identical statements.[22][23]
Islam calls spiritual enlightenment by a double name: “annihilation” (Arabic fana’) and “subsistence” (baqa’). The individual “ego” is “annihilated,” as is the “veil” (hijab[24]) that ordinarily hides God, and one becomes aware that one “subsists” only through God.[25] This is the direct realization of the pivotal doctrine of Islam: tawhid, the “oneness” of God, whose absolute reality and uniqueness preclude the possibility that anything could truly exist outside of God.[26] As Ibn Arabi, one of the great mystical philosophers of Islam, puts it, “Glory be unto Him who hides Himself by that which is none other than He.”[27]
Naturally, lots of other examples of how religions conceptualize spiritual enlightenment within their own specific systems could be cited and discussed here. But surely these relatively few, short examples illustrate the point that although the underlying experience is the same, different religions have different ways of approaching that same experience. And that’s as it should be, because in practice, there’s no “one size fits all” approach to the quest for spiritual enlightenment.
Spiritual Enlightenment and Truth
Is spiritual enlightenment just a blissful experience, or are the world’s religions right to claim that it’s also a realization of the ultimate truth?
When you attempt to rationally prove that anything is true, you quickly run into a problem called “infinite regress.” Even a statement as seemingly obvious and banal as “This shirt is blue” requires proof if your argument is to be rigorous and well-founded. But any rational line of thinking you might come up with to justify the belief that “This shirt is blue” must begin with an assumption – for example, a definition of the word “shirt.” But how do you know that your definition of “shirt” is sound? That requires an additional proof of its own, and that proof must begin with another assumption, which requires another proof, and on and on and on.
The only way to overcome infinite regress is to find an assumption where the buck stops: an assumption so self-evidently true that there’s no need to provide a separate proof for it. Since reason is utterly dependent on such an assumption, such an assumption can only come from a source above human reason, and also above any and all “facts,” because how you characterize any given “fact” depends on the pre-factual assumptions you bring to the table (What is a “shirt,” what is “blue,” etc.?). If you can’t look to reason or “facts,” where could you possibly find an assumption where the buck truly stops?
The only even potentially viable answer is divine revelation, the epitome of which is spiritual enlightenment. A truly unassailable assumption could only come from a God’s-eye view of things, which means that either the divine has to impart that assumption to you or you have to achieve union with the divine so that you can see things from its perspective.
So there are only two possible options here: either truth must come from divine revelation, especially spiritual enlightenment, or there’s no truth at all. What, then, are the grounds for believing that spiritual enlightenment does provide true insight into the nature of reality, rather than just begging the question like all of our mundane, everyday perceptions of things do?
The belief that there’s no truth at all is difficult to maintain in the face of a clear pattern that we’re all intimately familiar with from our own lives: some ideas consistently work in practice much better than others do. Evidently, those ideas that are more successful in practice have a firmer grasp of something fundamental to life than the ideas that are less successful in practice. What could that “something fundamental to life” be other than, well, truth? So some ideas are evidently truer than others are, in a relative sense. But is there any absolute truth?
Everything we do in life is an attempt to fulfill desire. To say that an idea works in practice is to say that it enables us to fulfill a desire we have. An idea is true, therefore, to the degree that it enables us to fulfill desire in practice. To be clear, it’s not enough for the idea to merely make us feel good when we think about it, which is often just wishful thinking; taking concrete actions in accordance with the idea has to produce concrete effects that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to produce. If an idea is relatively true to the degree that it enables us to get what we want out of life, any absolute truth would have to enable us to fulfill desire absolutely. That’s quite a tall order.
Yet that’s precisely the effect that spiritual enlightenment, and only spiritual enlightenment, produces. The quotes we’ve seen earlier in this article from various classic religious texts about the incomparably blissful nature of spiritual enlightenment attest to this. It’s as if everything in our nature, and everything in nature as such, had spiritual enlightenment as its ultimate goal and purpose – as religions also claim.
Furthermore, in the experience of enlightenment, one’s “ego” is absorbed by the divine “Self” of all things. It’s impossible to even formulate a doubt concerning the truth and reality of what you’re experiencing, let alone to seriously entertain and develop that doubt. All thinking is suspended. This isn’t a case of passionate conviction getting in the way of a clear perception of the truth, because the “ego,” the source of all passion and conviction, is out of commission. With no unfulfilled desire remaining, the “ego” has nothing left to grasp for or pursue, so it just “sits” there in awestruck silence and passivity. Intellectual errors of all kinds are impossible. This is another aspect of how spiritual enlightenment fulfills the aforementioned necessary criterion of coming from above reason rather than from below it.
Therefore, the inarticulable Something that’s experienced in spiritual enlightenment must be the only absolute truth and absolute reality – even though it’s impossible to adequately describe what that Something is to anyone who hasn’t experienced it for themselves. All we can do is point toward that absolute reality in various relative ways, which is what religions are here to do.
(This argument is expanded in Why All Religions Are True.)
If you haven’t experienced spiritual enlightenment for yourself – and only a tiny percentage of people have, so there’s nothing particularly “wrong with you” if you haven’t – it’s understandable if you’re still skeptical. To such people, I would say simply: earnestly practice some kind of mystical spirituality, such as the mystical path of some particular religion or another, or, if no available religion is suitable for you, a more independent approach. Sooner or later – it could take an hour, or it could take decades – your own experience very well may confirm this argument.
References:
[1] Teresa of Avila. 2007. The Interior Castle. Transl. E. Allison Peers. Dover Publications. p. 153.
[2] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1990. Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man. Unwin Paperbacks. p. 102-103.
[3] Mitchell, Stephen (transl.) 2000. Bhagavad Gita. Harmony Books. p. 103.
[4] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Isha Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 58.
[5] Helminski, Kabir, and Refik Algan (transl.). 1989. The Drop that Became the Sea: Lyric Poems of Yunus Emre. Threshold Books. p. 26.
[6] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 161-164.
[7] Maitreya, Balangoda Ananda (transl.). 1995. The Dhammapada: The Path of Truth. Parallax Press. p. 49.
[8] Attar. 2018. The Conference of the Birds. Transl. Sholeh Wolpé. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 279.
[9] Johnston, William (transl.). 2014. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling. Image Books. p. 41.
[10] Walshe, Maurice O’C. (transl.). 2009. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. The Crossroad Publishing Company. p. 102.
[11] Mitchell, Stephen (transl.) 2000. Bhagavad Gita. Harmony Books. p. 57.
[12] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Chandogya Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 140.
[13] John of the Cross. 1991. The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross. Transl. Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez. Institute of Carmelite Studies. p. 429.
[14] Attar. 2018. The Conference of the Birds. Transl. Sholeh Wolpé. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 160.
[15] Samuel, Geoffrey. 2012. Introducing Tibetan Buddhism. Routledge. p. 45.
[16] Gethin, Rupert. 1998. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford University Press. p. 8.
[17] Ibid. p. 15.
[18] Ibid. p. 78.
[19] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 65-66.
[20] Lossky, Vladimir. 1976. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 9-10.
[21] Sherrard, Philip. 2022. The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian Tradition. Denise Harvey. p. 44.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Bonner, Gerald. 1999. “Deification, Divinization.” In Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Allan Fitzgerald. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 265-266.
[24] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. HarperOne. p. 48.
[25] Chittick, William C. 1983. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. State University of New York Press, Albany. p. 179.
[26] Murata, Sachiko, and William C. Chittick. 1994. The Vision of Islam. Paragon House. p. 68-74.
[27] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. HarperOne. p. 44-45.