There's also something that is often mistaken for enlightenment which is a kind of insanity. Often, people will have some kind of weird experience which is quite abnormal and think, "Oh my God, that's it, I understand everything" because they start seeing things in a very weird way and think that's how enlightened people see things as well.

It's sort of another innovation, probably a good innovation, of Western culture to separate the ideas between science and philosophy, but it's important to remember they weren't always separate realms of inquiry.

I'm not sure that Eastern culture does either, but I've never lived in India etc so I couldn't tell you. I can say we definitely don't. So people will sometimes come in contact with something strange and think, "Oh, it must be like this" and have a lot of fantasies about it, and somebody who sort of looks like our fantasy version of what enlightenment is can be very convincing in seeming like they've got something and then play that role.

If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?

Consider this: 1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD? And here's a bonus question: 2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?

I was very attracted to the way that Zen did not go into the imagination land. And now I've forgotten what your first question was and how we were going to tie this together.

Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don't match how they really are.