Last Updated on January 25, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org
Satpal Singh talks about enlightement in the Sikh tradition:
- Satpal Singh sais the temporary self can never be enlightened.
- Jesus said I am the messenger of God.
- The Sikh Guru never said I am the messenger of God.
- Jesus said I am the son of God.
- Jesus also said if you want to know God you can only go there through me.
- Jesus saw himself as the only messenger of God.
- But at the time when he lived there where also other prophets as for instance John the Baptist.
- Satpal Singh sais that for him Jesus Christ was an absolutely enlighened being.
- We personally learned a lot from spritual teachers such as Guru Nanak about about “God” and how to interpret the word “God”.
- Then it was also easier to unterstand Jesus for us personally.
- We unterstood Jesus much better after we studied Guru Nanaks enlightement and Oshos view about Jesus.
- Osho said that Jesus was a bit schizophrenic, this made us thing about about this topic.
- We wrote down our observations and questions in our journal.
- Satpal Singh sais the Sikh Gurus never spoke about their own enlightement.
- The term enlightement is not clearly defined scientifically and is used differenty in different spiritual traditions.
- For us personally topics like «enlightement» became much clearer when we studied the books of the Buddhist monk with a PhD. in Cellular Genetics Matthieu Ricard who talked with brain scientist Wolf Singer, and we do not use the word enlightement anymore if possible.
The book Matthieu Ricard and Wolf Singer , Brain Research and Meditation, here the German edition:
https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/hirnforschung-und-meditation-t-9783518260043
- Helped us a lot to unterstand these phenomena, as well as the books Happiness and Meditation by Matthieu Ricard.
- For instance, what are the causes that we do not see clear and are not constantly happy and feeling well? If we remember correctly, Matthieu Ricard answered to Wolf Singer, because of thoughts and negative emotions.
- Thoughts are generated in the pre-frontal cortex, and we can eliminate thoughts by practicing meditation, for instance breath meditation.
- Brain researcher Richard Davidson said mental suffering is mainly caused by the pre-frontal cortex where for instance thoughts are generated.
- Animals without a pre-frontal cortex do not have these kind of mental suffering, for instance depressions.
- The other cause of mental suffering are negative emotions. These are generated in the brain stem. Check the scientific literature for the correct details.
- Emotions, especially negative emotions always depend upon an object and leave us not in a good state.
- We can withraw our attention from the object which causes the negative emotion and focus on the negative emotion itself.
- Anger for instance is a negative emotion. And if we focus our attention on anger it melts like snow in the sun, since anger has no object anymore.
- Positive emotions to not cause suffering and do not disturb our clear sight.
- Check the books of Matthieu Ricard for the correct details which are the positive emtotions according to the Buddhist view.
- If we are a free from thoughts and negative emotions we are clear concious, happy and do not suffer. And if we can reach this mental state through practicing meditation, our hypothesis, is that this increases the gamma wave activity in the left prefrontal cortex of the brain.
Daniel Goleman described this state with increased gamma wave in the left pre-frontal cortex as following:
«in the classical meditation litterature it is called enlightened, liberated, awake, we do not know what that means how to experience this, but we do know that it is quiet extraordinary»:
This is the summary of this PNAS paper:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407401101
If we are free from thoughts and negative emotions, our ego is gone and we are in a state of pure awareness. Our personality is not split, we are one with ourselves and sometimes also one with the world around us.