What Does Spiritual Enlightenment Look Like?
It might involve burgers and trash TV
Burgers, unicorns & butterflies
Take a moment and ask yourself a strange little question.
Actually, I’ve got a song for you to listen to while you ponder it, one of my favorite bands, This Will Destory You with their epic, The World Is Our ____ (and I’ll add, I dare you not to fall in love with this song).
So, yeah, have a moment with this tune and ask yourself: If you woke up tomorrow spiritually enlightened, what in the name of all that is holy would you actually be like?
Take a few moments there with the song and come back to me…
Question time, would you still like the things you liked yesterday?
Would you still lust after the guilty pleasures of ordinary mortal life? Would you still crave a burger on a wet Wednesday evening? When the rain is so harsh that it bounces off the pavement back up at you, vengeful rain, as I call it.
I mean, you know fast food burgers aren’t for you, but dear God, an occasional greasy treat can feel like a major sacrament at times.
Would enlightenment mean giving up trash television? No more Ancient Aliens. No more America’s Got Talent. No more shouting at the screen because some lad with a brazen moustache and 17 self-published books insists the pyramids were built by interstellar contractors from Alpha Centauri.
Or would enlightenment transform you into some mild-eyed celestial lamb who floats about the gaff murmuring barbarous-worded blessings at the toaster, eyes glazed with cosmic empathy.
Here is the bit that troubles the sensible mind. Would you be blissed out all the time, so overflowing with compassion for all living and dead beings that your family starts whispering behind your back at social events? Ah Christ, she has gone start-raving doolally. Someone call a doctor or a monk or both.
There you are now, suddenly farting cartoon unicorns and butterflies of love swirling in the ether, and they are so enamored with one another that they begin making out.
Then, because the universe is fond of plot twists, they have sex and produce hybrids called buttercorns. These buttercorns float about, spreading love like divine spores, blessing everything they lay eyes on with a faint scent of lavender and lunacy.
And then you think to yourself, ah Jaysus, if that’s enlightenment, I might go absolutely cuckoo bananas.
Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.
The great misunderstanding
This fever dream reveals something important. We’ve turned enlightenment into a kind of spiritual cartoon.
We imagine that we’ll be consumed by a state of permanent bliss with a smile plastered onto our gobs so tough that even grief bounces off it like hail on a chapel roof.
We’ll be above desire, above anger, above all of the petty human irritations of being human. We imagine becoming so saintly that the neighbors start avoiding eye contact because you seem like a person who might bless their wheelie bin without being asked.
This version of enlightenment is as realistic as the buttercorns themselves.
Social media spirituality hasn’t helped matters. It promises serenity on demand, compassion without complexity, and a personality polished to such a sheen that you begin wondering whether the enlightened have skin or simply well-varnished souls.
But, look, we really should be referring to the sages, both ancient and modern. They never described enlightenment in these sugar-coated terms.
What the wise actually said
The ancient Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu said that the Tao is everywhere, which is a polite philosophical way of saying it is already under your arse as you sit reading this.
The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi insisted that the self is not attained but revealed. Another Indian, the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, said that enlightenment is simply seeing your own nature, and then wandered off into the mountains like a man who had no time for nonsense.
The American monk and writer Thomas Merton said the world is stuffed full of hidden radiance if we stop judging everything as useful or useless. The German theologian Meister Eckhart declared that the divine eye and the human eye are one in their seeing.
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung claimed we are born whole and only forget that wholeness beneath the rubble of childhood and culture.
Not a single one of them mentioned unicorns. Not a single one asked you to renounce burgers or bin your television. None of them suggested that you have to smile through your grief like a malfunctioning oracle.
They all said the same thing: the treasure is already here. You simply forgot where you buried it.
The true obstacle is the muck, not the light
If enlightenment is already present, why do we not feel it? Because most of us enter adulthood carrying more inherited burdens than a particularly annoyed donkey in the Co. Kerry rain-soaked mountains.
Trauma settles into the bones like cold rain. Cultural conditioning teaches you which parts of yourself are acceptable and which must be hidden.
Family patterns shape you long before you know the word for shame. Religious guilt, if you were raised with it — and most of us Irish Catholics certainly were — burrows deep and whispers its old script whenever you try to lift your head above the other poppies.
So, what do you do? You trudge through life thinking you’re banjaxed or fallen or incomplete when all that has happened is that your original clarity, the natural awareness you were born with, has become obscured by layers of fear, memory, and survival.
You are not unenlightened, lads, you’re overburdened with balderdash.
The true obstacle is the muck, not the light
If enlightenment is already present, why do we not feel it? Because most of us enter adulthood carrying more inherited burdens than a particularly annoyed donkey in the Co. Kerry rain-soaked mountains.
Trauma settles into the bones like cold rain. Cultural conditioning teaches you which parts of yourself are acceptable and which must be hidden.
Family patterns shape you long before you know the word for shame. Religious guilt, if you were raised with it — and most of us Irish Catholics certainly were — burrows deep and whispers its old script whenever you try to lift your head above the other poppies.
So, what do you do? You trudge through life thinking you’re banjaxed or fallen or incomplete when all that has happened is that your original clarity, the natural awareness you were born with, has become obscured by layers of fear, memory, and survival.
You are not unenlightened, lads, you’re overburdened with balderdash.
What enlightenment actually looks like
Enlightenment isn’t the production of mystical fireworks. It’s not cosmic anesthesia. It’s not the death of human quirks. It doesn’t require you to float on a cushion of bliss or renounce all earthly appetites.
Enlightenment is the wee recognition of what has always been true. It’s ordinary presence without the fog.
It is:
• Noticing your thoughts without being devoured by them.
• Feeling an emotion without assuming it’s the whole story.
• Watching an old pattern rise and thinking, ah, there it is, but I’m not bowing to it today.
• Seeing people clearly because you no longer see them through the lens of your own wounds.
• Feeling compassion, not because you’re saintly, but because you understand the shared human ache.
Enlightenment still lets you enjoy a burger, well, a veggie-burger at least, possibly a haloumi burger. It still lets you watch trash television. It still lets you mutter curses under your breath at slow-walking American tourists, although with slightly less venom.
Enlightenment isn’t perfection. It’s freedom from the nonsense you’ve learned to shoulder because you thought you were supposed to be carrying it.
The sages return to drive the point home
The Upanishads said that atman is Brahman, meaning your innermost self belongs to the same essence that birthed the stars.
Meister Eckhart said the ground of the soul is the ground of God. The Indian guru, Nisargadatta Maharaj, insisted you’re not the mind but the witness of the mind.
British philosopher, Alan Watts, liked to remind us that you are something the universe is doing, the way an apple tree apples, a potato potatos and a bison bisons and a star stars and you you.
None of this requires you to become someone else; it requires you to stop fleeing the person you already are.
The ordinary miracle
So don’t dramatize enlightenment. It’s not a descent into unicorn madness or a transformation into a celestial dope who can no longer cope with earthly life.
Enlightenment is simpler than that. It’s the lifting of an inner veil. It’s the rediscovery of your own unburied clarity. It’s the recognition that the light in you never left.
You will not become strange; you already are. You will become yourself.
And if your newly unveiled self still wants a cheeseburger and an episode of Ancient Aliens, well, that’s grand, fair play to it.
Even the saints need a bit of craic. St Fintán, patron saint of my local village, used to turn water into wine, so he and the blind leapers in his care could have a giggle. He had a magic cloak to disappear too, so I reckon that came out after a few Beaujolais.
Enlightenment isn’t the death of personality, it’s its liberation. And you, my dear reader, you were luminous long before you knew the word for it.
I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.