Destructive Enlightenment

Once, when a budding sculptor approached his expert master for guidance, he received an interesting reply. In humility and eagerness, the young craftsman enquired: “I would like to sculpt a beautiful elephant – can you give me any advice?” Without the blink of an eyelid, the master set a block of stone and some tools in front of the young boy. “Here is some marble, a mallet, and a chisel” the master said, “all you have to do now is carve away everything that doesn’t look like a beautiful elephant!” Simple as that!

There is a deep principle here. The French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, once said, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” We often think spirituality means to become something. The spiritual journey, however, is not so much about becoming something, but rather unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place! The scriptures explain how we are littered with unhelpful traits (anarthas) and artificial identities (upadhis). They block us from seeing the real self. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of such untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretence. It’s the complete annihilation of everything we imagined to be true. To remember who we really are, we have to forget everything that the world told us to be. This is destructive enlightenment.