My Enlightenment

Within a few weeks of my final exams for a degree, I had to face up to a major intellectual problem. In the pure mathematics section I was unable to understand the subject of complex analysis, even after years of trying. If I still had not mastered it by the time of the exams, that would be sufficient to fail them.

So with about six weeks to go, I began almost to live in the university library. I was there when it opened in the morning and left when it closed at night; ten hours a day, six and a half days a week, for three weeks, having a break only for meals. All this time was given to studying complex analysis. With hindsight I can see that I subconsciously began to follow the traditional pattern of solving a Zen Buddhist koan. As the deadline approached I focused more and more mental energy on the problem, while gradually reducing the extent of the coverage of the mathematics that I was studying. As I increased the mental energy, the area of mathematics that I focused on shrank smaller and smaller; but still no understanding developed.

After about three weeks, symbolically I was focusing a mountain of energy on a pin-size problem. Finally I intuitively made the mental shift that this method of contemplation requires. And then the doors of perception opened.

In the blink of an eye, a problem that I found totally incomprehensible suddenly became perfectly clear, amazing in its wonderful simplicity, and so obvious as a way of structuring this field of mathematics that I was baffled as to why I had never been able previously to understand it. I could look at a mathematical proof and know within seconds that it was correct, without having to labour through complex calculations. I had accessed the feeling of truth. Even more amazingly, my head was filled with a vision of mathematics that persisted as long as I wanted it. Equations and mathematical symbols flowed endlessly through my mind. However, my understanding extended only to complex analysis; all the rest of my vision that was beyond this field was totally incomprehensible to me.

The feeling of truth is an incomparable wonder, and underlies all high-level spiritual experience. But how does it compare with our normal view of truth? In order to understand how truth appears to me, I later split truth up into two modes, those of feeling and of cognition.[¹]. The latter mode is that of intellectual understanding. The cognition of truth occurs only through sufficient intellectual study. Once cognition occurs, once understanding happens, then the thinker can intellectually explain what he knows. He can present reasoned arguments for his ideas.

The feeling of truth has limitations, the primary one being that the thinker cannot explain what he knows. The feeling of truth means that I could tell whether a mathematical proof was true or false, just by looking at it. But the feeling of truth cannot by itself tell me why the proof is true or why it is false. To be able to do that requires mathematical ability. The feeling of truth is independent of subject matter – it is just high-level intuition that can be applied to whatever problem is the focus of study by the thinker. However, intuition is no replacement for technical ability.

This was my intellectual illumination, at the age of 22, which I subsequently labelled satori on analogy with Zen illumination, since the method of attaining it was similar. In Zen, a koan is a stratagem used to dis-engage the intellect by giving a person a problem to solve that appears to be incapable of intellectual solution (for example, what is the sound of one hand clapping?). The Zen approach focuses on feeling what the problem is; the successful practitioner attains to spiritual feelings, even to spiritual illumination. I focused on intellectual understanding, so I achieved intellectual wisdom.

Contemplation of my Enlightenment

When years later I came to develop my analysis of consciousness I was able to understand some of the limitations of spiritual visions because of the special character of mathematics. The problem of spiritual visions is that they are not quantifiable. This means that the practitioner is unable to estimate with any reliability how much his intelligence and wisdom have increased. So the vision is usually described as being ineffable, and intellect is descried as being of little value to the attainment of such visions. Whereas, mathematics is quantifiable, because the practitioner can reliably estimate the degree of attainment achieved.

In my case, the vast range of my vision remained incomprehensible; lucidity was achieved in only a tiny part of it. The vision illustrated the vast potential available to consciousness, but does not of itself develop that consciousness to any great degree. Precisely because it was a vision of mathematics, and mathematics can be understood, it illustrated that what was incomprehensible to me was, nevertheless, under different circumstances capable of being understood. Because some mystics find their visions to be ineffable, this is only a reflection on those practitioners, and not on the visions. Although these visions are not always understandable to modern consciousness, nevertheless, as mankind evolves the intellect they will increasingly be capable of cognitive explanation.

The development of any technical science requires the development of a suitable technical vocabulary with which to describe experimental results. One of the reasons that nothing came of my satori till decades later was that I lacked a suitable technical vocabulary with which to explain what I was seeing.

My satori did not extend to physics. When I left Reading in 1967 I left with the lowest grade of a degree, a pass. What is important to understand about illumination is that the practitioner’s wisdom increases only in the area of his study. He does not achieve wisdom in domains of ideas that either did not previously interest him or which he did not study as intensely. Enlightenment is not a cure-all for every problem under the sun.

Limitation to Science

Another psychological insight that I derived from contemplating my satori was that science in general does not produce understanding of life. My vision simultaneously posed the problem of meaning: there was none in it. My vision, which can be construed as the quintessence of the scientific mentality (mathematics has the dominant role in science), had no meaning in it, no purpose in it. Within a few weeks I had come to the conclusion that science offered no explanation of life; it offered only a mechanistic explanation of how life operated, but not of life itself. This is the limitation to science. So, without regret, I rejected the primacy of science and began to seek for another philosophy or another way of life that might offer meaning to me. I retain my fascination with science and mathematics, but they are not the centre of my universe.

I have little sense of aesthetic appreciation; that part of my vision that was outside my comprehension was really just an aesthetic experience. Within about three weeks from its birth, I was mentally exhausted from my intense intellectual labours; I became bored with my internal film show. As boredom came, the vision went!

It was to take me about 50 years to increase my understanding of my satori. It represents a psychic level of consciousness (jhana-1) that I now call the Flow of Ideas [²] , and is the level of consciousness from which each creative thinker or artist draws his ideas and/or expressions of art from.

Isaac Newton

The possibility of a purely intellectual illumination is one that I have never come across in all my subsequent reading and study. Perhaps the reason is that brilliant intellectuals do not have the conceptual framework in which to place such experiences. Has any other thinker experienced an intellectual satori like me? – I am 99% sure about one person, but no-one else.

A little before his death, Isaac Newton remarked “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Newton did not have the concept of enlightenment, but his anecdote is about the nearest you can get to describing an intellectual enlightenment in ordinary language. I have always considered that he must have seen more or less what I saw in my mind.

[1]. Paul Brunton, in his book The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga, gave a good description of philosophical idealism, the view that the whole of reality is just a mental phenomenon. He described the two ways of thinking, the feeling of truth and the cognition of truth. Reading his book in the late 1980s was a major intellectual experience for me.

Wisdom and Jhana

The Moods of Jhana

Morality in the Jhanas

My Enlightenment

The Jhanas and Enlightenment

The Jhanas and Relativity

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.	Satori at Reading University A particular interest that developed in me during my 20s was the desire to compare and understand high states of spirituality, those grouped around ideas of enlightenment or satori. Such a comparison would enable the spiritual seeker to know how near to, or how far from, journey’s end he is. This interest arose from my own transient experience of satori at the age of 22. (In my early life I used the Japanese term "satori" instead of "enlightenment"). I went to Reading University to study physics when I was 19 (in 1964). At university I did the minimum academic work possible, since a degree did not interest me. I only wanted one in order to satisfy the expectations of my parents.
Sub - Headings
Contemplation of my Enlightenment
Limitation to Science
Isaac Newton
References