When we talk about “realization” or “enlightenment” we find ourselves right in the heart of religion with all its political and cultural baggage. Really, though, we should be thinking psychology and practical philosophy. Here’s why.

Religions tend to follow a recognized cycle of development : a parabolic curve of usefulness and decay. Shakyamuni Buddha knew this and forecast that his Dharma (teachings) would last for 500 years, no more. Sure enough, at the 500 mark, “Buddhism” became “Mahayanaism”, and changed out of all recognition … though to be fair, the Mahayana did have many remarkable insights of its own.

The pattern of change is always relentless. The initial spark by an Enlightened individual is taken over by a conservative elite who wish to preserve it in all its literal aspects. Invariably this movement is led by a group of disciples who claim apostolic succession from the now deified founder.

Meanwhile a more adventurous group of young bloods want to adapt the message and make it relevant to changing circumstances … as they see it. This polarization results in a political auction of claim and counter claim, while truth suffers almost grotesque inflation from both sides. The newish “religion” reverses itself and adopts the very infrastructure and corruptive practices that the original movement sought to replace.

All our instituional religions have gone through this disheartening process and are looking distinctly threadbare and careworn in the 21st century.

It seems to me that what most Westerners are seeking today is not an alien culture imposed on them through an ancient apostolic religion, but a simple process of spiritualization : a technology of realization, or “extended mind” in the language of biologist Dr Rupert Sheldrake. The aim would be nothing less than the widening and deepening of our individual consciousness.

By “technology” I mean the artful implementation of a principle that has been proved workable under specific conditions. So it would utilize both art and science — mind and spirit — by acting on empirical data from productive fields of practice. If this sounds rather technical, it’s not. It’s just a way of creating a general definition of something like the Buddha’s “mindfulness” program of recollection. Other types of insight meditation (vipassana) are equally valid as Mind Technology.

Such a technology of realization, without the pressing burden of belief in human-made creeds and ensacredized worship, would remove the pedantry and inherent violence from our religious lives by concentrating our minds on actionable areas for the integration of our divided being.

The scientific journal Science is reporting the findings of neuroscientist Dr Henrik Ehrsson who has succeeded in simulating out of body experiences under laboratory conditions.

The experiments have a lot in common with those of Dr Rupert Sheldrake, whose concept of “extended mind” is one of the more interesting developments in biological research this century. The findings seem to reveal that the mind relies on the senses of sight and touch to locate itself inside the human body.

When the connection is disrupted, whether by illness, drugs or deliberate confusion, strange things begin to happen. The sensation arises that the mind has left the body.

Ehrsson used goggles, a video camera and rods to confuse the brain and create the effect. A sitting volunteer wore goggles linked to a video camera pointing to his back. Looking through the goggles, he saw an image of his back from the perspective of someone sitting around six feet behind him. A technician then touched his chest with a rod, which was unsighted to the camera behind. The split effect then took hold.

Dr Ehrsson tried the experiment out on himself, “You really feel that you are sitting in a different place in the room, and you’re looking at this thing in front of you that looks like yourself, and you know it’s yourself, but it doesn’t feel like yourself. This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience. In other words, we feel our self is located where our eyes are.”

This has an uncanny resemblance to Sheldrake’s experiments on extended mind and certainly supports many people’s experience of being outside their body during sleep or at unusual moments in their lives.

The love of wisdom (Sophia), or philosophia in Greek, began in Ionian Greece in Homeric times. It was a deliberate increase of consciousness on the part of a small number of people who lived close to the land but who recognized that the mind of man had a structuring and ordering facility which seemed to be above the processes of nature. Their often puzzled cogitations gave birth to philosophy which, in turn, spawned science, metaphysics, mathematics and all the other systems of pure thought that bedevil students to this day.

Philosophers were known to be otherworldly and lost in thought. They dressed in simple robes and lived frugally – rich living degraded the mind. Such a life would inevitably produce more than its share of what Buddhists call the enlightened – Plotinus and possibly Plato are two examples.

The Greek philosopher Socrates is almost the perfect exemplar of the enlightenment qualities of simplicity and ethics. He spent his entire lifetime, as far as we know, engaging others in conversations about the need to be good. That was the sum total of his life. Moreover, he was completely unworldly, careless of his appearance, and had no visible means of financial support. In Plato’s Georgias, one listener complains that, if Socrates is right, life would need to be turned upside down. – the enlightenened viewpoint is said to turn our normal conceptions of reality “upside down”.

Furthermore, Socrates claimed to have a “guardian spirit” who frequently advised him not to follow certain courses of action. All this suggests to me that he had tasted “Nirvanic” experience and everything that goes with it. Nothing else adequately explains his extraordinary behaviour.

Socrates lived a simple life – it could not have been simpler – and an ethical one. His simplicity was that of a philosopher. He cared little for material goods and was frequently fed at other people’s tables, where he demonstrated the philosophic rules of argument and inquiry, no doubt as the evening’s star turn.

Ethically, Socrates believed that to do good conferred happiness, while wickedness – which arose in every case from ignorance, not evil – led to misery. He spent his 70 years of life perfecting the craft of living well, making the rather large claim that “nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death”. He seemed to subscribe to a kind of karmic reckoning, as well as the continuation of life after death. When he faced his executioners without fear, he demonstrated these virtues in the toughest of arenas.

Socrates’s proclaimed virtues were courage, moderation, justice, piety and wisdom. Wisdom indeed was the Queen of virtues since it conferred the others by default. The soul, he thought, was “mutilated by wrong actions and benefited by right ones.”

How much then does enlightenment depend on simplicity and an ethical lifestyle? A frugal life will free up psychic energies for a more concerted intention towards the ultimate goal of seeing into one’s own self-nature.

Socrates exemplified the qualities of simplicity and ethical living to a remarkable degree. His life in the so-called Axial Age seemed to anticipate some of the ideas of the Buddha, and of Christianity more than 400 years later.

The work of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) is still revered by many who refuse to subscribe to a mechanistic view of the universe and human life. But who was he?

The Himalayan ice-roof of the world has produced many of the great sages of the East. Numbered among them are the Indian rishis of the Upanishads, the lama-savants of Tibet, and even Gautama Buddha, in nearby Nepal. By a curious symmetry, the snowy peaks of the Swiss Alps were the setting for the life of arguably the West’s most enlightened man of the 20th Century — a claim, it has to be said, much disputed recently by some in the psychotherapy establishment..

C. G. Jung is often described as a psychiatrist and physician. In fact his work matured into an all-embracing vision of human life and its relations with all there is (the Absolute). His phenomenal intuition constantly came up against the numinous in everyday affairs and, being the man he was, he courageously based his post-Freudian work on the god in Man and the man in God. Born of Swiss Protestant stock, he became a bridge between western and eastern psychologies that will surely prove seminal for the future.

In his long and fruitful life, Jung trod a careful path between the crusty scientific establishment of his day and the more adventurous thinkers on the fringes of eastern mysticism and religion. He went to enormous lengths to avoid being classed as a Theosophist, a group he regarded as having swung irremediably towards psychological extremism. His published works are always models of empirical analysis, drawing living structures from a mass of precise medical observations. And yet he is never statistically arid like many scientists today. There is a life in his work that can only be described as religious, in the best sense of the word. His main “problem” was that the inevitable conclusions arising from these tireless investigations applied just as much to so-called normal people as to his pathologically disturbed patients.

The basis of Jung’s work was the process he called individuation, a naturally occurring progression in everyone, leading to psychological integration. Individuation, as expounded by Jung, is clearly related to Buddhist enlightenment, in that though his ostensible concern was with empirical psychology, Jung went beyond Freud’s shallow personal subconscious (a repository of repressed mental contents), to what he called the “collective unconscious”, which took in the whole of the psyche, a term he used in the same sense as Buddhists use “Buddha-mind”.

Jung believed that nothing in the cosmos is incapable of psychological inclusion given the necessary insight and balanced vision. Thus he sometimes seemed to scorn the notion of the metaphysical with its transcendental exclusivity, a notable characteristic of many in the psychotherapy movement of his day.

The balance then between what is psychological and what is metaphysical is dangerously subject to all the vagaries of definition, making comparisons between viewpoints all the more perilous.

“One cannot grasp anything metaphysically, but it can be done psychologically. Therefore I strip things of their metaphysical wrappings in order to make them objects of psychology … if finally there should still be an ineffable metaphysical element, it would have the best opportunity of revealing itself.”

How would it reveal itself? Is the viewpoint arising from the non-working of the senses (which includes “thinking” in Buddhism) in the state called “nirvana” to be called psychological?

Jung always uses “psyche” to embrace all experience, normal and trancendental.