this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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Absolutely, people who achieve enlightenment interpret the experience through the lens of their own culture. Buddhism is that truth seen through the lens of Buddha's Hinduism, Christianity (minus anything Paul wrote) is that truth seen through the lens of Jesus's Jew upbringing.
There's even people who have achieved it nowadays that interpret life as a sort of video game.
You seem pretty certain that this "single truth" is achievable and that people have done so.
What if their reported experiences are just delusions?
If people across time and space who have sought the answer to the question "What is the nature of the universe and what is the meaning of life" all came to the same delusion, then fuck it, let's all be delusional together because it's apparently inherent to human nature.
My point is that we have no idea they all had the same delusion. What each refer to as Enlightenment may be very different.
Even so, they may have all watched the same film, ingested the same chemical compounds or suffered the same childhood injury.
Your hypothesis would be comforting if true (particularly as we are not discussing supernature) but I remain skeptical.
You have no idea that they did, and you have no idea they didn't.
That's why I said before that if you can see how religions rhyme, you can find a core message in all of them. And that, I think, is the truth.
Given we haven't even defined Enlightenment between ourselves it's unlikely everyone else who claims to have achieved it will agree have the same definition/experience.
You are correct I have no idea, but my prior expectation is that these experiences are independently located within each person's brain, without any external connection.