Forget enlightenment as a grand spiritual trophy. Suppose somebody asks:
Okay, I wake up. I evolve. I become more conscious. What do I get?
The first answer we already stumbled onto is extremely practical:
You get a chance to make less of a mess of your life.
But I think there are several deeper payoffs.
You get more choice. If you can see the machinery operating while it’s operating, you don’t necessarily have to obey it. Anger can arise without automatically becoming an argument. Fear can arise without making the decision. An old habit can start without necessarily finishing.
You get more life per lifetime. That’s a big one. If much of ordinary life is lived automatically—thinking yesterday’s thoughts, reacting yesterday’s ways—then awakening doesn’t necessarily give you more years. It gives you greater possession of the years you’ve already got.
You get a better seat at your own life. Instead of finding out afterward what “you” apparently decided, said, bought, married, ruined, promised, ate, drank or drove into, you’re occasionally present while it’s happening.
And perhaps you get access to capacities that aren’t very useful while you’re asleep. Attention. Intentional action. Sustained presence. The ability to observe without immediately interfering. Maybe eventually things considerably stranger than those—but there’s no need to advertise the advanced course before we’ve demonstrated Lesson One.
Then there’s a peculiar payoff:
You begin finding out what you actually are.
Not what you’ve been told you are. Not your biography, opinions, preferences, memories, body, profession or personality. You begin experimentally separating the thing being observed from whatever is doing the observing.
That’s where “evolution” starts becoming an interesting word.
Evolution in this sense wouldn’t mean becoming a nicer version of the same automatic machine.
It would mean developing whatever can wake up inside the machine.
And there may be one enormous catch, which I think makes the whole subject more credible:
The payoff isn’t necessarily happiness.
Waking up may occasionally be inconvenient as hell. Once you’ve seen yourself doing something automatically, you’ve lost a little of the luxury of pretending you didn’t see it.
So if somebody asks:
“Will enlightenment make me rich, healthy, happy and irresistible?”
Probably not.
“Then what’s in it for me?”
Maybe this:
More choice. More presence. More actual life. Less mechanical suffering. Fewer unnecessary disasters. And a chance to discover whether there is something in you capable of becoming more than what you presently are.
That’s not a bad return on investment.
And there’s a wicked little advertising slogan hiding in there:
ENLIGHTENMENT
What’s in it for me?
Possibly, for the first time—YOU.
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Here’s the Bardo bus!
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