sudden or gradual

Before enlightenment, enlightenment is sudden

After enlightenment, enlightenment is gradual

This is a classic, recurring question with regard to spirituality and enlightenment. Is this transformation – enlightenment – sudden or gradual? Some people have said it is sudden, some have said it is a gradual change. Most have said it can come suddenly or gradually. But here is another answer: that before enlightenment, enlightenment is a sudden thing, and afterwards, it is a gradual thing. This seems very strange and paradoxical. Does the nature of enlightenment change with enlightenment? Yes and no.

To understand this response to the classic question, we have to understand that before enlightenment, enlightenment is only a mind object, just a concept. And enlightenment is all about one’s own personal experience, so before enlightenment, we have the word enlightenment and we may have some preconception as to what that word refers to, but we do not have the direct experience yet. Then, at some point, with luck, enlightenment comes and with it the concept of enlightenment disappears. Instead, in its place, there is one’s own direct experience.

So, the word enlightenment after enlightenment either ceases to exist or is used to refer to this direct personal experience. But look, it is a personal experience, no one else’s personal experience, just one’s own. So, to have a word to try to convey it to someone else is missing the point completely.

Before enlightenment all we have is a word and a concept and some preconceptions as to what that word refers to. And words like to have firm boundaries, they like to delineate one thing cleanly from another. So our preconceptions about enlightenment tend to have a sudden feel to them, an edge – at the moment I am unenlightened and at some future moment I shall become enlightened. This is the normal preconception. Of course enlightenment, whatever other attributes we give it in our preconception, will tend to be well delineated from the unenlightened state. So we may preconceive enlightenment to mean no thoughts coming to the mind; or we may preconceive it to mean totally at peace the whole time and never becoming angry or disturbed. There are any number of preconceptions we can have about enlightenment, definitions. But it is a mind game and meaningless because enlightenment is one’s own direct experience of life, incomparable, unclassifiable, totally beyond words. So, after this transformation in the psychology and in the being – the lived experience of life – afterwards enlightenment is just one’s whole life experience in the moment, now. The past and the future have lost all significance. Any other state of consciousness than what one is experiencing right now, in the moment, is of no consequence. So, of course the word itself has lost its previous meaning. If we use it after the event, it is to try to convey something to others who have not yet experienced their own moment to moment reality of life. That is a bizarre and crazy thing to do. Yet that is exactly what is happening here with this talk.

So you see, before enlightenment we have the word, the concept. After enlightenment we have direct reality as a lived, felt, experience in the moment. These are two quite separate things, so we should not confuse them by using the same word. Of course, this lived experience is in the moment but at the same time it is ongoing, eternal, timeless. So, rather whimsically we can say enlightenment is a gradual affair. That is after the event.