I don't know much about physics anymore, though I aced it in high school. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what Einstein's theory of relativity means or what it relates to: is it something to do with E = mc2? No idea, honestly.
One thing I do know, or at least I reckon, is that in the mental world we more directly occupy, the qualities of things are largely determined relative to others. This may seem obvious, or it may not.
Take movies you consider great. They do have some tangible quality of their own, but their greatness is generally judged in comparison to movies that aren't so great. In a world where all movies were equally great, they wouldn't be great, good or bad; they'd all just be movies.
So why am I writing about this on a blog mostly concerned with meditation, philosophy and spirituality? Seems like a random topic. But it couldn't be more important to the world of mental phenomena those pursuits exist within. So much of spiritual pursuit is concerned with attaining states of a certain subjective quality, and if we don't keep that in check, we can go down an endless rabbit hole, chasing an elusive state called "spiritual enlightenment" that gets so pedestalised it stays forever out of reach.
What is enlightenment
For those who don't know, let me give a brief overview of what spiritual enlightenment allegedly is. First, and most important for this post, it's the ultimate goal of most meditation traditions, particularly Buddhism and Hindu yoga. Traditionally it's seen as the end of suffering, and liberation from the cycle of rebirth we're all bound to, known as samsara. In a modern, new-age spiritual understanding, it more attractively comes with the realisation of spiritual powers and of one's unity with all of creation. That promise draws people onto the path of becoming a spiritual seeker, and keeps them there indefinitely.
The trouble with the idea of spiritual enlightenment is that, though originally proclaimed to be a state categorically different from a samsara-bound being's, it may just exist on the plane of relative subjective experience.
The maths problem
To go deeper, we should look at the main claim about enlightenment that does make it categorically separate from non-enlightened states, the claim, as taught in Buddhism, that enlightenment is a permanent state once reached. The issue is that this doesn't sit well with other aspects of Buddhist cosmology. In Buddhism, souls have existed for infinite time, and every soul has some chance of becoming enlightened in any given life, however small. That's a simple maths problem: if all beings have existed for infinite time already, and there's a non-zero chance of reaching a permanent state of enlightenment, they all would have by now, and being permanent, they'd all still be enlightened and no longer bound to samsara.
For the record, I'm not trying to denounce Buddhism. Of all the major religions, it's the one most aligned with how I see things, based on the experiences I've had, both in my external and inner world. I'd generally say I'm a Buddhist except for a few small deviations.
For this essay, the main deviation is that I don't believe enlightenment exists as a perfect, permanent, attainable state. That said, I have no real problem with the idea of samsara as something one ought to escape in the first place. I think there's profound beauty in creation, and I've generally enjoyed my life as a human.
Lila
The universe forgets itself entirely and get utterly absorbed in the experience of some 'lower' life form.
I resonate with Alan Watts when he talks about Lila: the eternal game played by the singular universal consciousness, in which it experiences itself in endless forms, often getting lost along the way as part of the game. In Lila, according to Watts, the universe begins each cycle of the game totally absorbed in divine light and self-knowledge. Then, to up the ante, it starts playing roles in epic dream scenarios where the wildest and most incredible things happen. Then it decides to do something really crazy: forget itself entirely and get utterly absorbed in the experience of some "lower" life form, like a human. In this view, true enlightenment happens cyclically, at the start of the game, and sometimes temporarily within a "lower" life, depending on that incarnation's spiritual inclination.
The yugas
If we want to stay closer to a traditional religious standpoint, we could look at the Hindu concept of yugas, or eras. In Hinduism, the universal Self is said to move through a never-ending cycle of four distinct yugas, the shortest of which lasts 432,000 human years. The first in the cycle is the Satya Yuga, the era of truth and perfection, lasting 1,728,000 years. Like the beginning of the Lila game, which in many ways is a storified version of the yuga cycle, this initial era is a time when the Self is fully aware of its nature, with no ego delusion. So even in this Hindu cosmology, where liberation through spiritual enlightenment also exists, there's a cyclic pattern in which "enlightenment" is a perpetual state of the Self for almost two million human years. We're said to be in the final yuga of the cycle now, the Kali Yuga, the age of darkness, in which beings are generally disconnected from their higher self, and self-realisation is rare. It's the age when beings are fully embedded in the material world.
Even without belief
Say you don't believe in any of this eternal-self stuff anyway. Then enlightenment doesn't exist as a categorical state either: there's no cycle of rebirth to escape, and no oneness to realise, because it's all made up. I don't hold that view, as already mentioned, but even from the atheist perspective, there's no categorically separate state, only the illusion of one.
What are the seekers looking for?
Now for the meat: if there's no absolute state called enlightenment, what are the seekers all looking for?
Without a doubt, there are states of higher spiritual awareness than others. There are states that are incredibly blissful, and states where we perceive messages between the lines, where we feel we understand the nature of the universe. But rather than being an absolute state reached at some threshold you never have to cross again, it seems to me such minds are cultivated over long periods of practice, bit by bit, on a spectrum.
The paradox
It's in the darkness that even the faintest light seems bright.
The problem with viewing enlightenment as the goal of spiritual practice is that it leaves you chasing a goal that may never be reached, and is rarely well defined. The great paradox of enlightened states is that they're a return home to something that feels deeply personal. Pedestalising some grand "final" state adds a degree of perversion to the idea, and desperate seekers soon start coveting experiences with a psychedelic or mystical flavour.
Going deeper on the paradox, you could argue that the person most desperate for enlightenment is furthest from it. Who is truly further from suffering: the non-religious but well-to-do person fully content in the material world and their circumstances, or the ascetic who denies his reality and physical urges with tunnel vision on EnLiGhTeNmEnT? It's in the darkness that even the faintest light seems bright.
Maybe I'm relating this too much to my own experience of searching for enlightenment. For years I was obsessed with the idea of becoming spiritually enlightened. I went through periods of meditating hours a day, but still had plenty of hang-ups, and you could say I was maybe compensating for a lack of social life. The idea of one day finding enlightenment let me cope with all the perceived failures in my life.
Everest
Hey, I'm just Everest, man.
Everest is the tallest mountain in the world, measured from sea level. If Everest could feel, would it be aware of its own stature? Through reference to smaller mountains, it might well feel large. But life as Everest? "Hey, I'm just Everest, man." From the perspective of actually being the sought-after thing, it's your grounded, everyday reality. When you're yourself the great thing, you're no longer looking up at anything. The climb to grandeur becomes something you can only see as an artefact in everything else that hasn't arrived there yet.
Everest represents spiritual enlightenment. Ever-rest: eternal rest. It's the tallest mountain in the world, and it's fitting that it carries this name, because to humans, the idea of attaining spiritual perfection, entering heaven, becoming "enlightened", is the highest achievement one could possibly reach. Perhaps it's only through the difficulty of the climb that we come to savour the feeling of the summit, having known all the low places along the way. So the experience at the top is itself a relative, subjective experience, shaped by everything that came before it, and still existing in the same world as everything else.