What is this fabled state of being he wondered. After many years of contemplation, he thought perhaps he might know.

Is it black or white, true or false, binary or analogue? Wholly on, or altogether off? Or can one claim partial enlightenment, that one has gone some of the way?

What bold and dramatic claims surround this condition. There was an Age of Enlightenment we are told, but our current age is apparently not so blessed. Saints, gurus and mystics untold are described, or worse, far worse, describe themselves as enlightened. What, one might enquire, is meant by so bold a claim.

Is light a metaphor? Or do photons thrown out by a raging inferno in distant space have some real part to play in this curious state of being.

Both perhaps. There are no absolutes it this curious universe, despite the physicists’ assurance that mere matter is all. .

Enlightenment, he was convinced, was a complex and continuing process, not a blinding flash.

Perhaps there were those who had sat upon a pinnacle of rock or underneath a tree, in ages gone by, and achieved in some brief instant of time a transformation so absolute that their very nature switched immediately from dark to light. From apathetic banality to saintliness. From a state of ignorance to blissful awareness.

But somehow he doubted it.

His own internal landscape veered towards the binary. Periods of intense dark would be succeeded by times when the light of the sun would reappear and pessimism would be replaced, if not by outright optimism, then at least by the conviction that somewhere, not so very far away, lay uplands which basked forever in light. Where a soft wind and gentle luminosity played gently upon alpine meadow and the dizzy white height of towering mountains rose towards a sky forever blue and kindly.

And yet change had happened, although his metamorphosis had been halting and sporadic, spread over many decades. Slowly still, but with some faint hint of acceleration, pieces of the puzzle appeared to be drifting almost imperceptibly into their designated place.

Mystery remained – perhaps it always would and yet a clarity began to materialize.

He had no problem with seeking to improve human life (although it had to be said that these efforts, in his case, had ever been more by thought than by action), but would prefer to seek the betterment of sentient species in general.

The very search for enlightenment greatly “improves” human life although that is not perhaps the object of mysticism but a side effect.

He came to believe that gnosis can come by incremental steps and as a result of one’s own efforts. Or at least that had been, and continues to be, his own experience. It had also been his circumstance, that while his inner search had improved his worldly “behavior” it had not (thankfully, perhaps, following St Augustine’s plea) made him any kind of “saint”. Whatever that word is taken to mean.

And so he had come to a gentle and perhaps slightly melancholic acceptance of life and the way he believed the universe to be. Perhaps his worldview was best reflected by the Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Tao te Ching.

In any event, meditation and many years of searching lead him (in his more placid moods) to a serene understanding of the way life “is”.

While wishing for change, he suspected it would occur not through mere human will or in accordance with any individual effort.

But over eons of time and in accordance with the unseen patterns of the universe itself.

In which he found his own conception of “god”. And thus, at times, a sense of profound peace.