The Road to Enlightenment

decorative gravelDriving a car on the highway is an allegory for the highway we all travel on the road to enlightenment. When a person drives a car he or she must maintain a focus on the activity of operating the vehicle. At the same time he or she may not be acutely aware of what he or she is doing. This is because driving (particularly on the highway) becomes a sort of meditative activity. The driver of the car maintains an awareness but is also operating instinctually to a large degree.

Obviously, the driver cannot loose all appreciation of reality lest they find themselves in a collision repair Salt Lake City. If they are lucky they will be there and not in a hospital. But meditation is by no means a loss of contact with reality. Indeed, meditation is a focusing of attention upon reality itself. It is an exercise in seeing reality for what it actually is independent of judgment, bias and other intellectual overlays the human mind tends to paint it with. Accordingly, it become imperative that the driver and the meditator perform their activities impeccably otherwise they may find themselves in a state of extreme danger.

But who can truly differentiate between the driver and the meditator? In a solipsistic universe the mind is all there is. All perception of an outside world is merely a projection of the mind perceiving it. This includes the world itself, all other people seemingly acting within the world and perhaps even God himself. Within this framework the question arises as to whether it is important that a driver crashes a car and ends up in a collision repair Salt Lake City? There is the sense that in the solipsistic universe the crash did not “really” happen. But when the mind is all that exists and a crash happens within that mind is the crash not as important as it otherwise would be?