Enlightenment is a curse.

Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

-- Adyashanti

(An ancient^WCupertino mystic.)

In alternative phrasing: the truth hurts.

Your paraphrasing still misses the point: enlightenment is not a curse, and enlightenment does not hurt. But nobody actually wants to be enlightened.

I'd argue it that does hurt (a lot) to let go of what you belive in, and that is why people do not desire englightenment.

As far as I can tell, the thing about enlightenment is that once it's happpened, it causes this very strange change in you...

There's a very strong similarity in the meanings and origins of the words "enlightenment", "catastrophe", "revelation", and "apocalypse". Most of them have a sense of an overturning or of a revealing. There's the similar terms and expressions "the scales fell from my eyes", "I saw clearly", "flash of insight". They're not unrelated to concepts of creativity, genius, or intelligence. And there's the sense of the world "prophet" as "one who receives a message" (usually with a connotation of divinity).

In almost all of these, you might substitute a modern psychological concept: that of a dramatically changed world-view. The things you once believed, they are no longer true.

I watched the 1950s version of the RMS Titanic story some months back (I've not seen Cameron's remake), A Night to Remember. One lens through which to view that film is of the gradual revealing, the enlightenment, if you will, or lack of same, of various characters to the plight and fate of the ship, including that of several of those not aboard (and ultimately the world via headlines and news reports).

The first to clearly grasp the situation (as portrayed in the film) was the ship's designer, aboard for final adjustments as a shake-down. Then the captain and members of the crew. The contrast between the observers on the Californian and Carpathia, remote to the Titanic, struck me particularly (the first being utterly ublivious, the latter understanding, and also understanding that despite their own best efforts, there was no way to reach the ship in time).

Some passengers responded with denial, some with anger, some with outrage, some, assessing the situation and recognising their fate, with equanimity.

It's quite the film.

Enlightenment can be devastating.

That's a big part of it, yes,

I don't know about "enlightenment" as that means different things to different people, but there are models of the world you can arrive at that appear more truthful to you than the models of other people that can be... very, very painful.

And that's another big part of it.

Enlightenment is basically just being woke on a much larger scale.

Really good piece. I've touched on a similar theme, a couple of years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/240xss/the_dop...

NB: the direct blog link to yours appears dead, though I turned up the essay at the Internet Archive.

The url for the essay appears to have changed. It's now at http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is...