How Enlightenment Makes a Seeker Out of You

I bought a book The New Science of Transformation, How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain, by Andrew Newberg MD, and Mark Robert Waldman, in 2019. We will be exploring his journey, to answer the question of what is real Reality. I would recommend this book as well, not just to those who have had the mystical experience/s but also to those who may be searching with burning questions to the nature of God, or consciousness.

Newberg speaks of his own experience, describing it as I too know it to be. He says he is going to try to describe it but at that moment he struggles with explaining it. He goes on to say that any level of enlightenment is almost impossible to relate in words. It is important to keep in mind that enlightenment large or small is an indescribable experience that alters the brain and our awareness of ourselves, and our place in the world, completely rewriting our beliefs and values. His journey was from a young age of questioning. Where we differ is that his questioning led him to enlightenment, my intense and obsessive quest to find answers came after the event.

Newberg classifies enlightenment as the big E and the little e. The big E is the mystical event, the little e is aha moments. As Newberg searched for answers in the Eastern Philosophies, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, multiple great philosophers, I investigated the mystical factions of religion. This would be when it was found that every religion has its own mystical adjunct, Judaism; Kabbalah, Christianity; Christ, (yes Jesus was a Mystic), Islam; the Sufi. There are many books on Kabbalah, this is the red strings that are worn by many movie stars and famous people. I read at least 3 of them, and used to get an email from Rabbi Yehuda Berg, out of New York. The 72 Names of God. As for Christianity one doesn’t have to look far to find “the rapture” and those who have experienced it. The Sufi is an Islams faction of the mystical. I picked up a book in Lancaster, PA at a discount book store called the Sufi Book of Life. The Sufi Book of Life, 99 Pathways of the Heart for the Modern Devish, I used as the book suggests as an oracle for years. I was able to easily substitute God for Allah. There is much wisdom in these books, and a common thread that runs through all of them. All worthy reads if you feel inclined to read them.

Back on track, with Newberg. Once I lay the foundation in science for mystical awakenings, I will start relating my journey. For now Newberg’s journey and medical findings.

He goes on to say, that none of the great exemplars of knowledge brought him any peace of mind. So he turned his attention to science, to see what it had to say about the fundamental laws of reality. To understand reality here, it needs to be said that none of us share the same reality. A classic example is 3 children growing up in the same household, with the same parents, experience it differently, that is a fact. I like to say that it is like when we used to buy a stack of CD’s to save data or music on, there was a clear plastic disk on top, when we are born we have this clear disk, and every experience we have splatters paint on the plastic disk, so we are always looking out upon and through our experiences. they have created our reality. Through those experiences our reality is colored.

He searched evolution, DNA, cosmology, and neuroscience, but even in those he found no answers. For each of these schools of thought, was simply a different system of many beliefs-beliefs that were created an processed by the human brain, an amazing but faulty device.

At this point in his life he was seeking to answer that question what is real “reality” and why do we all experience it differently?

He entered medical school, even stayed another year so as to learn about the newest technology fMRI, he experienced an epiphany a small e as he calls it, that even with the newest technology we can never really know what is going on in someone’s brain.

So his journey turned inward, He found himself becoming very contemplative. It I said if you can not meditate spend some time in quiet contemplation, even though he wasn’t formally meditating, he may have well been. He thought it was a new way of finding the answer to his question on Reality, but it did not and it soon lost its luster and he began to doubt his former insights he found during contemplation.

Important note: This doubt is, by the way, as it turns out to be, an common experience for enlightened seekers. I know I experience these small e’s all the time and yes, then I will question later their validity. I have had the Big E, but the seeking I do, is for different reasons. I seek for ways to share it, since I was told that I would help many, and there is also my own personal seeking, to return to that Big E experience. As Joseph Campbel said in The Power of Myth, we spend the rest of our lives trying to get back there, back to that place of bliss, back to the indescribable feeling of nothingness.

We have these moments of insight, these aha experiences and we think we’ve discovered a fundamental truth. We feel uplifted and incredibly blissful, for a moment, and then our old reality—our familiar habitual mind-set and beliefs—returns. Newberg goes on to speak of how stressful it is to have these moments and think you have just found an insight only to realize that it isn’t as helpful as you thought, it is where he found himself and I find myself often as well. And we doubt every thought and belief.