A metric for Enlightenment

Viggie Rege
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

This builds up on an earlier post about Enlightenment not being an end state.

Enlightenment is characterized by Equanimity. Equanimity is a state of being where emotions generated by events are restricted to the time frame of the event.

Eg. if a car cuts you off while driving, your anger is restricted to that event itself and subsides once that ‘car cutting you off’ event has ended.

The quicker an emotion subsides after the event ends, the more equanimous one is and the farther one is along the path of Enlightenment.

I’m sure you’ve seen people like this around you. They seem zen as fuck. Nothing seems to faze them and they are able to act in the trickiest of situations. They’re just farther along than you are on this path and just as is the case with most skills, concerted effort can get you (and me) closer to or even ahead of them.

Assuming an exponential decay of emotions, we could define a ‘half life’ for them (akin to radioactive half life). The half life value will vary depending upon the emotion and the Identity trait that generates it.

So the metric I propose for Enlightenment is the median half life of emotions.

Some emotions tend to have a longer half life than others. Eg. anger and sexual excitement vs happiness. If you want to reduce the median half life of your emotions, it would thence make sense to leverage the emotions with longer half lives.

Anger and annoyance can shed light into pieces of your Identity and your insecurities. There are many ways to tap into sexuality for spiritual growth which I’ll write about later.