I don’t remember who I was chatting with when this came up. It was either Aaron or Maria at Esalen. There were so many amazing, open people full of fascinating ideas that attribution is very difficult. Attribution is moot anyways. No idea is original. Your ideas are regurgitated jigsaw puzzles with each piece collected over your lifetime. Each piece in itself is a jigsaw puzzle built by the person you borrowed the piece from.

Anyways back to the idea.

Ever since the Vipassana, I’ve been fascinated by the notion of enlightenment. I understood that enlightenment is a state of being with infinite compassion and complete equanimity. The Vipassana flipped my understanding on the achievability of enlightenment.

That phrasing however implicitly assumes that enlightenment is an end state. That once you get there, there is no more progress to be made. This contradicts my life philosophy. There is always progress to be made. There is no end goal. The process of progress is a way of life.

I suspect the same extends to enlightenment. Building equanimity is and will always remain a work in progress. You can never achieve complete equanimity. Equanimity is defined with response to external events. It’s the ability to be even in reacting to all external triggers. By definition, you can never be ‘completely’ equanimous. Because once you realize you are equanimous towards a certain pattern of triggers, you can break each trigger down into a sequence of triggers and build equanimity at the end of each. Triggers lie along the time axis. Time is infinitely divisible. As you build more self awareness, you’ll be able to observe minute triggers. And you’ll work to build equanimity at the end of this trigger and not just at the end of a set of the minute triggers. And so on.

I suspect that the Buddha didn’t think he had achieved an end state of enlightenment. I suspect he thought there was more to be achieved. It’s just that he was working to build equanimity at a scale that was invisible to the average Ego trapped human. So from the perspective of society, he had “attained enlightenment”.

The same notion applies to almost every skill set you can think of. The average software engineer probably doesn’t think E13 Waseem Ahmad needs to hone his skills further. But if you ask Waseem, he will tell you the stuff he can improve upon. Same holds for cricket and Sachin Tendulkar. Tennis and Roger Federer.

End states are an Egotic concept designed to keep you focussed on a goal in the future rather than developing a system and enjoying the process in the present.

Sept 2018

This builds up on what I wrote above about Enlightenment not being an end state.

Enlightenment is characterized by Equanimity. Equanimity is a state of being where emotions generated by events are restricted to the time frame of the event.

Eg. if a car cuts you off while driving, your anger is restricted to that event itself and subsides once that ‘car cutting you off’ event has ended.

The quicker an emotion subsides after the event ends, the more equanimous one is and the farther one is along the path of Enlightenment.

I’m sure you’ve seen people like this around you. They seem zen as fuck. Nothing seems to faze them and they are able to act in the trickiest of situations. They’re just farther along than you are on this path and just as is the case with most skills, concerted effort can get you (and me) closer to or even ahead of them.

Assuming an exponential decay of emotions, we could define a ‘half life’ for them (akin to radioactive half life). The half life value will vary depending upon the emotion and the Identity trait that generates it.

So the metric I propose for Enlightenment is the median half life of emotions.

Some emotions tend to have a longer half life than others. Eg. anger and sexual excitement vs happiness. If you want to reduce the median half life of your emotions, it would thence make sense to leverage the emotions with longer half lives.

Anger and annoyance can shed light into pieces of your Identity and your insecurities. There are many ways to tap into sexuality for spiritual growth which I’ll write about later.

December 2024

“So the metric I propose for Enlightenment is the median half life of emotions.”

So cute these old musings on Enlightenment from an analytical mind in a dissociated body. What this essay of mine from summer of 2018 evokes in me is simultaneously an appreciation for how far the analytical mind can take one and how it is still incomplete and those that get caught up in the hubris of the analytical mind _stay_ incomplete.

If you’d like support on your journey towards completeness, I have started offering IFS sessions — a way for you to build steady equanimity with your Self. First session free. Following sessions $155 per hour. Inquire for discounts if you live in India or are family or the times listed don’t work for you.

Schedule first free session here.