What is liberation or enlightenment about, fundamentally? It is not about an experience, no matter how sublime. It is about the questioning and destruction of an unconscious and unexamined assumption.
Our mental life is full of unconscious ideas. It is not a mute, mechanical, flesh biology.
It is a structure made out of ideas.
The root of these ideas is the idea of the “I.”
Normally, for most people, this root idea goes unexamined. The tools aren’t even there to think about why one would examine it, what it would mean to examine it.
The great mystical philosophies of the world have provided those tools. The assumption of the I is brought up, out of the unconscious, and articulated, and investigated.
Expressing the concept, thinking it, and then seeing to what it relates in one’s experience — this is the process that goes on in the intellect, but goes beyond it. It employs logic, but goes beyond it. It uses words, but ends in silence.
The investigation of the unconscious web of beliefs that make up the mind… this is the work of liberation, and it is the crowning glory of that very same work that also has operated throughout the arts and sciences, throughout more academic philosophy, throughout psychoanalysis, and throughout human thought as a whole.
it is also why no experience, no matter how mind-blowing, can complete its work. Ultimately thinking alone can unravel thinking and reveal the splendor within which thinking lies.