Enlightenment Pt 1

I am enlightened every time the sun shines down on this poor earth and pulls her out of the night of her forgetfulness.  I am enlightened by the glimmer in the dark of streetlights and distant stars.  I am enlightened by an endless stream of photon waves in the visual spectrum.  I do not have to seek enlightenment, since I have been bathed in light since that moment my eyes first flickered open and I yelled at the world in astonishment.  What I do seek is understanding.  I want to understand enlightenment in the way I want to understand my experience inside a human body.

I have a pet theory, based on what I have cobbled together from secondhand hand yogic philosophy and firsthand empirical evidence.  It is a comprehensive theory of everything, minus the equations, that exists only to delight me with the wonder of complex properties emerging from the chaos of constant sensual bombardment.  It is a theory of light and emotion, sense and feeling.  It is a theory of qualia in it's broadest definitions, with an intrinsic physicality of perception, which categorizes experience by connections between seven chakras, seven colors, five elements and five senses.  This is not to say that I am a pure physicalist, who would reduce the entire universe to material properties.  Instead I subscribe to a kind of neutral monism that reduces both mental and physical processes to a third universal substance, conveniently referred to as "energy" by secular New Agers and "God" by devout religionists.

I'm guessing that some of the people reading this are nodding their heads, thinking "Yes, now what is your theory already?" and the rest, if you are still reading, are thinking "What the hell are you talking about?" or even "Is this some kind of New Age bullshit wrapped in a veneer of only partially understood philosophy and neuroscience?"  The answer to that last question is a resounding, "Yes!  You should have figured that out at the beginning when I mentioned secondhand yogic philosophy.  Just remember, if you will, bullshit is the primary fuel resource for rural India and has been a valuable commodity for thousands of years.  Spreading it increases the yield of any garden plot.  I am just doing my bit here for the fecundity of thought."

Now that you are on the edge of your seats, I will tell you:  perception is a prismatic process that differentiates the pure motion of energy into a spectrum of mental imagery.  Wavelengths of light correlate to a constellation of associations that stimulate specific neural clusters within the body.  Those clusters in turn relay impulses throughout the body which then returns physical, visceral, and sensory responses to the brain to excite or inhibit particular mental states.  There is a similar correlation between the activity in other sense organs and the appreciation of the experience.  All this activity takes the form of electrochemical pulses, waves, cascades of motion, electrons, photons, muons, bosons, and all those other ons that split the quantum universe into measurable fragments.  The mind in its infinite complexity integrates this stream of information into a constantly renewed, self-referential, recognition pattern we call consciousness.

I intend, in subsequent posts, to take you on a journey through the chakras, the senses, the elements and the colors, building my case for their intricate interrelations.  It is a kind of alchemy to play within that network, as a shift of hue can be all it takes to alter an experience, and to be master of one's senses is to master the universe.