When a kid asks you a question, they have formulated it by using a bottom up perspective. They are the main character in their story and they’re trying to understand the world around them. When you answer that question, you’ll give a top down perspective and combining the two satisfies the kid’s curiosity. Linking the top down and bottom up perspectives about a concept is the quickest path to enlightenment. Enlightenment is when you can view a single idea from multiple perspectives, making the details seem obvious.
You become enlightened nearly every day as you learn and complete neural clusters to better understand your surroundings; though your daily enlightenment is usually on a small scale. When you learn someone else’s perspective, you understand their reason for their actions and everything seems to make sense. You were able to see the person’s actions from a top down perspective and learning their point of view gives you the bottom up.
People mostly care about themselves and gaining multiple perspectives about yourself is called self-enlightenment. Religious people find a their path by using stories that offer a top down perspective to link with their own bottom up one. Think about it, you know you exist and learning that you are just “one of god’s children” gives you another perspective of yourself. Multiple perspectives of yourself allow you to synapse your own character to a grander story, releasing pleasure. There’s a reason we find comfort in religion.
Religious practice is just one path to self-enlightenment but it takes time to think through the intended messages of the religious text. A story is a form of art meaning the artist’s intentions must be interpreted by the audience. The writers of religious texts truly intended to show a path to enlightenment, but one that requires so much work, you’re basically finding it on your own. Religious stories act only as a source of ideas that you can apply to your own life in order to find enlightenment.
When you finally reach self-enlightenment, you will feel as though everything makes sense, based on the top down perspective you just learned. Minor details of your life become obvious and you think yourself foolish for not having seen it before. In the case of religion, those minor details play into the story given. When you choose to learn the truth about your universe, the minor details make sense based on scientific evidence. The world still seems more obvious, but it a much more sensical way. Science never claims that things work in “mysterious ways,” science knows there’s always a reason.
Learning about your world and understanding your place within it stimulates a neural path that accesses a huge amount of your knowledge and synapse it to yourself. The global synapse will release a huge amount of pleasure which has been mistaken for “transcendence to a different realm.”
Some who have experienced self-enlightenment believe their minds travel to a place, called heaven, and they often speak with god. The global synapse simply means more neurons are activated throughout your brain. Many thoughts will trigger and the ones outside your consciousness are seen as separate from you.
Enlightenment is to become aware of your place in this world. Empathy and education are your keys to reaching enlightenment. Once you understand your place in the world and can interpret the intentions of others, you can more accurately anticipate the future and determine how you can affect it. Many people spend their entire lives searching for this feeling, interpreting the words and stories of others to find it. Enlightenment can be attained through learning, meaning you can train yourself to turn on the feeling whenever you want.