How can enlightenment be one objective thing?

Acharya Prashant
4 min readMar 27, 2023

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question (Q): Sir, how does a mind that is enlightened look at life? What happens to its thoughts? Does its wiring change in response to fear? Does it change its response to emotions?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Assuming a sufficiently good understanding of the brain and sufficiently developed scientific processes, anything can surely be done with the brain. That involves all kinds of neural rearrangements and the rest of it.

Do we understand enlightenment? Can enlightenment ever be ‘understood’? Even with the best of science, you can only do as much to the brain as you have knowledge of. If the scientist does not know enlightenment, how can he devise a neural circuit for enlightenment? Can there be a scale of enlightenment, metrics of enlightenment? When exactly would you call a person enlightened? To replicate something, one must first define it.

Think of the problems in the identification of enlightenment. Is it an aspect of behavior? Is it a way of being? Is it a particular kind of expression? Or is it just a personal claim?

At the base of it all, the assumptions are that:

1. Enlightenment is something that happens in the brain.

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