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Keynote Address: Enlightenment and Spiritual Growth: Reflections from the Bottom Up by Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.
A tendency to all-or-none thinking, youre either enlightened or youre not at all enlightened, confuses our understanding of possible aspects of spiritual growth. These ordinary state reflections begin with the difficulties of defining enlightenment, showing how it is clearer to consider endarkenment and work away from that all too common condition. Using the authors model that ordinary (and altered states) of consciousness are biological-psychological virtual realities, analogous with computer-generated virtual realities, various continuous dimensions of enlightenment can be considered. The primary two discussed herein are the available (altered) states of consciousness (ASCs) dimensionwhat ASCs can a person access that are appropriate to various situations?and the within states dimension of intelligencegiven you are in ASC N, how effectively, in how relatively enlightened a way, are you using it? A tool analogy clarifies this line of thinking, where the various tools available are analogous to the available states dimension and the skill in using individual tools is analogous to the within states dimension. The importance of individual differences is stressed, for a person might be relatively enlightened within one particular state, e.g., but not have useful ASCs available, or a person might have access to many ASCs but function neurotically in all of them. As a reminder that this kind of reasoning can only take us so far, even if a useful distance (relative enlightenment within ordinary consciousness), a case of Cosmic Consciousness is briefly described and suggestions for research are put forward.
KEYWORDS: Enlightenment, endarkenment, altered states, virtual reality, spiritual growth
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