Some people might say that Enlightenment is dangerous. Well. So is driving a car yourself or riding in a bus or flying on a plane. But unless you want to walk, if you want to get to the other side of the world and see Paris, London, New Delhi, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Chicago or New York City, then unless you want to walk or swim you better get over your fear of flying or ships or buses or cars or else you likely will never get there.
I'd say the same is true of all the aspects of enlightenment. And it might be true that many do not have the courage to become enlightened. However, not moving towards enlightenment I might describe as slowly dying until you reach entropy. In other words if someone is not moving towards enlightenment they are moving towards disorder and chaos.
So, in this sense understanding the universe is the path towards enlightenment, and everyone trying to understand the universe tends to be on some kind of path towards enlightenment. (However, until someone feels compassion towards all life in the universe this path might be sometimes very painful). And after one learns to have real compassion towards all life in the universe things might still hurt but somehow things hurt a lot less if you are not alone suffering and understand that in some ways life is suffering for all beings. So then you have group compassion and you are not alone anymore as you are the universe and the universe is you. So you are no longer alone suffering. And you have peace in this shared compassion because all beings in the material universe suffer in some way, and in mostly the same kinds of ways.
This last paragraph in some ways is almost more important in the long run than to embark upon the path towards enlightenment. You see this wanting to understand in babies and puppies and kittens. It is why we love them so. It is pure and new and fresh and the essence of the path to enlightenment. It is sort of Where am I and What is this? And what amazing place am I and what am I? This is the essence of the path to enlightenment, of beginning to want to know the answers to everything. Though many or most beings get sidetracked from this pure "Wanting to know", it is the essence of everything man, or any kind of creature on earth has ever discovered at any time past, present or future.
There are some things even though they are true that are uncomfortable to know. Things like "The world is overpopulated and there may not be enough food for everyone anymore!" Well. It was that way when I was born to. We just developed more efficient ways to grow more food on less land.
Or "The world is round?" How do we stay on the Earth? And then we come to what I call an enlightenment discontinuity (there are many of these-thousands) So we hit "There is no up or down in the universe really" And then picturing that we begin to get nauseous for awhile until we decide, "Well. That's enough of that. I'm just going to pretend that Earth is down and the sky is up!"
There are a lot of points in really evolved enlightenment that are just like that. Some are so much like that that if you stayed there you might disappear and never be heard from again. It's really like that if you go far enough into what enlightenment really is. So enlightenment generally is better if mature adults do it. But not always.
Sometimes, there are very special people (or animals or creatures) that are just born very naturally intuitively gifted right off the charts. And they may live really amazing lives that there really isn't any explanation for that I can presently think of. They are just amazing! So it is my sense that people like Jesus and Buddha, and maybe Lao Tsu and a few others were really amazing people down through history. But most of the most amazing of all likely were never recognized generally by the public because they didn't want to be. That's kind of like it is with the truly enlightened. There are all kinds of enlightened people everywhere. And you would never know unless they wanted you to. That's how amazing life really is!
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