What Is Enlightenment?

It is possible that everyone's definition of enlightenment is different. But, for me, enlightenment is experimenting with either methods tried and true for thousands of years already and/or developing specific ways of obtaining enlightenment for yourself based upon your own nature. For example, one person might become enlightened surfing on a wave, and the next person might become enlightened wind surfing, and the next person might become enlightened sitting Za Zen in a double Lotus. etc. etc.

And what is enlightenment? You might have a certain definition of what it is and it is either something you want or something you don't care about at all(at least for now) or some other answer.

For me, enlightenment made more sense to me at age 17 than any other thing I could think of. I looked around me and everyone kind of looked like they were insane or going there pretty quick. I thought to myself, "These people need someone to become enlightened or the whole world is going to nuke right out of existence like it almost did when I was 14 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I can remember a rich lady my father and I doing some electrical work for. She was shaking and could barely speak she was just so very very scared. She said she was going to her cabin in the Sierras that she hope would withstand the nuclear blasts when Los Angeles was incinerated she expected quite soon.

I turned to my father and asked him "Are we all going to die in a nuclear blast?" He said what many men from the Great Depression and who had lived through World War II would say, "That's a bunch of BS" (Of course this was after she drove away to her cabin in the Sierras. No need to make the rich lady feel bad and ridiculous. So though I believed my father a side of me also felt what that lady was saying. Because I had already read "Alas, Babylon" that was published in 1959 by age 14.

begin quote from Wikipedia regarding the book "Alas, Babylon":

Alas, Babylon is a 1959 novel by American writer Pat Frank (the pen name of Harry Hart Frank). It was one of the first post-apocalyptic novels of the nuclear age and remains popular fifty years after it was first published. The novel deals with the effects of a nuclear war on the small town of Fort Repose, Florida, which is based upon the actual city of Mount Dora.^[1]

end quote.

So, one of my reasons for wanting to become enlightened and the reason many of my generation decided to become enlightened also was that we saw the world headed quickly or slowly towards nuclear Armageddon and thought it was a stupid and insane idea.

After I found out about the Soviet Probe during the 1970s to the Asteroid Belt and that it found that the Asteroid Belt had been caused by a thermonuclear explosion(s) that destroyed the planet that the asteroid belt used to be I redoubled my efforts to become enlightened just like the Russian Intelligentsia   moved in the same direction towards the fall of the Soviet Union directly and indirectly in order to prevent world nuclear Holocaust once they found that likely humans had blown up another planet in the solar system 65 million years ago. They didn't want to see this again this time on earth.

So, enlightenment is a way to become the change you want to see. In observing humans you can't teach them anything. But you can be an example, a good example that others might emulate. So through clear thinking and kindness and being commonsensical and intuitive we ALL move towards enlightenment if we are kind and wise and intuitive. And this then creates a good example in case there is anyone else who wishes to move towards enlightenment to help save the human race and all life on earth from eventual extinction.