What Is Enlightenment?

As a long time Zen student, I have always resonated with Zen teachings that discourage thinking about enlightenment. With practice our minds and lives will become clearer, and that’s enough. Wanting some sort of perfection in our lives, to live a life without problems, will cause more trouble than it’s worth.

Despite this approach, I still had questions about Zen practice. “What’s the point of it?” “If it’s such a worthwhile practice, why do issues arise with teachers who are not clear in their lives?” Given this background, I was surprised and excited to stumble upon a definition of enlightenment that helps me with these questions.

I came upon a new understanding of enlightenment while reading books by Iain McGilchrist. He writes about how our brains pay attention to the world in two different ways. As he puts it,

In the one, that of the right hemisphere, we experience - the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other, that of the left hemisphere, we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it also enables us for the first time to know, and consequently to learn and to make things. This gives us power.

While reading his books, it struck me that his description of the right hemisphere is similar to the state of mind I’m looking for when trying to solve kong-ans (koans.) From there, it wasn’t a big step to theorize that enlightenment is filtering our experience through the right hemisphere. The same could be said for those who experience God - that it is experience filtered through the right hemisphere.

Since reading his books and coming up with this theory, I’ve been able to read Zen and other spiritual works with a new understanding. I can understand many things that didn’t make sense or weren’t clear previously. For example, Zen teaches that everyone is already enlightened. If enlightenment is right hemisphere consciousness, then it is easy to understand why everyone has it! Similarly, Zen teaches us that wanting enlightenment is a big mistake. Since our desire mind usually activates our left hemisphere consciousness, and enlightenment is about activating our right hemisphere consciousness, it makes sense why wanting enlightenment is a mistake.

Of course any definition of something like enlightenment will be a simplification, so it is not a complete understanding. Any left hemisphere model or concept is incomplete, which is why the left hemisphere needs the right hemisphere. This explains the point of Zen practice - get out of our left hemisphere experience into our right hemisphere, where we can have a more holistic and complete understanding and context to our lives.