

What is Enlightenment? (Kant) - psawaya
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html

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crazydiamond
> "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of
> enlightenment.

But what if our understanding is a result of conditioning.

I think it was Descartes who once said "I think therefore I am" which is
flawed in several ways. He was stuck in thought. Someone else later figured
out that the person thinking is apart from the thought. But he too was stuck
in thought/mind.

Enlightenment is seeing that you are not the mind or the mental story or
concept of yourself. And being totally free of that. Enlightenment is when the
misidentification with the mental self is broken. The mental self acts out of
fear and insecurity and a constant wanting of something else. This is a sure
recipe for being unhappy and causing unhappiness in others.

I don't know which kind of enlightenment you wish to discuss, but I would
rather you read Eckhart Tolle instead of Kant.

~~~
blinkingled
I will heartily second reading Eckhart Tolle instead of a whole lot of
different spiritual books - he gets to the heart of it all without the
needless digressions. Next to it J Krishnamurthy is good if you want to go
deeper. But yeah after you've read Eckhart's Power of Now you should not feel
like adding more knowledge to your self :)

To me PoN was a fundamental shift - in the way I think, the reasons that
prompt me to think, the decisions I make, everything. I found the concept of
utilitarian thinking very helpful in terms of actually being able to stop
useless thinking - if you keep a bit of consciousness always in the background
and ask - what is this thought giving me, is it changing my circumstance -
that to me is a huge balancing force.

~~~
crazydiamond
I actually came to PON _after_ finding the silence and I-am ness through a
process of questioning beliefs. I was glad to find someone who could explain
simply what was happening.

Tolle was great for me because he asks us to stay in this I-am'ness or Nowness
and not just dispel it. And that has led to a huge "fundamental shift" as you
say.

Just because some of these things have been known for thousands of years and
have been talked of by Christians, Buddhists, Hindus etc, does not mean they
are a set of beliefs (as some are suggesting).

~~~
blinkingled
Beliefs have traditionally come with blind acceptance - either due to very
complex disposition or due to its origins in fear (sins/hell etc). To that
extent, I agree that what Tolle is doing falls outside of beliefs - it is a
paradigm change in that the path he charted to get to enlightenment is much
more scientific in nature - verifiable, logical and something that can be
easily experimented with. And most of all it doesn't have its origins in fear
or authority.

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sz
I'd like to see Socrates' take on this.

------
angrycoder
[1784]

