What is 'Enlightenment'? Options

[Shawn]

It's certain that enlightenment means different things to different people, and so I'm curious what it means to other people, and also to throw out a few questions to provoke thought.

Is Enlightenment an experience, process, realization, way of living, or what?

Is Enlightenment a multi-faceted word that is context-dependent and relative, or are there absolute truths that are invariably associated with any type of Enlightenment?

What are the 'truths', if any, that would invariably be realized/experienced thru Enlightenment?

Is Enlightenment an all-or-none experience (AHA experience) or is it a gradual accumulation of wisdom?

What is the relation of Enlightenment to mystical experience?

Please note that the above constitutes a partial list and is not meant to exhaust the range of questions that could, and should, be asked.

Personally, I believe the statement, "We are the Universe conscious of Itself", is on a par with Buddha's "All that we are, is the result of what we have thought" from the opening of the Dhammapada, and that both constitute part of a collection of truths that are invariably experienced during what I think many would call Enlightenment.   The task at hand, though, is to clarify this notion of Enlightenment to the best of our abilities thru mere verbal communication.  Is anyone up to this challenge?

[Timothy_417]

To follow up and just to be clear - in Darwinism, the discrete biological organism is seen as the fundamental unit of replication.  This theory is being superceded by the view that sees the individual gene as the fundamental unit of replication.  And now, some people are arguing that the genetic configuration of humans has set the stage for a new kind of replication which upon reaching critical complexity will broaden what we consider natural selection.

I think some scientists, Lynn Margulis to be specific, believe that most cells are the evolutionary product of differing bacteria strains forming symbiotic relationships and eventually merging through the process of becoming more and more dependent and thus less and less distinct.  The product is a new information package able to replicate itself.  In the same way, the human gene pool and the meme pool of ideas exist in a symbiotic relationship.  Marx asked does the individual determine consciousness or does consciousness determine the individual.  His answer was that consciousness, which for him meant the cultural/physical environment one is born into, determines to a large degree (although not same degree as tabula rasa, or blank slate, theorists).  But at the same time, the individual is an inseparable element of consciousness.  If you view this relationship from a neodarwinist perspective it looks like a symbiotic relationship that is approaching the threshold a new kind of 'organism.'  That is, the organism of consciousness, which is merely a hyper-complex unit of self-replication employing human genes as its sub-structural components.  What if we are the mitochondria of some future 'organism'?

The term, organism of consciousness is confusing because it is not really an organism, nor is it conscious.  It is just a self-replicating information structure, although in principle, there is nothing to stop it from achieving self-awareness, at least not that I know of.