Into the light

 Enjoyed our first Enlightenment class last night, we mostly just introduced ourselves and shared our respective notions of what "enlightenment" might mean. I wanted to emphasize the point that enlightenment in the western philosophical sense is decidedly not about finding a singular sage or guru with privileged insight into reality, truth, and meaning. It is about the collaborative conversation that attempts to corral as many points of view and fields of experience as can be gathered, so to yield a wider comprehension of (in James's phrase) "our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means."

And, I wanted to highlight the distinction between The Enlightenment, as a particular historical era, and enlightenment per se as an attitude and approach to reason and feeling, head and heart, science and humanism and progress etc. that transcends any particular time and place... (continues)