I don’t know what the author means, that’s kind of my point. I wanted to state that the Buddhists do have a well-defined rather specific concept of enlightenment, because many people don’t know that. Many people in the West think it’s some mysterious vague state of spiritual awareness, as does the author of this blog post. I don’t think it’s uncharitable to point out that the word largely entered popular culture through people importing Buddhist, Hindu, and Vedic ideas, such as Alan Watts, Robert Thurman, Chogyam Trungpa, Richard Alpert, hippies returning from India and East Asia, and Tibetan refugees. Ideas from these people all got loosely meshed together to form what many call “new age” spirituality. I do think there was a lot of misappropriation in the sense that these ideas were taken out of context. A perfect example of that being Timothy Leary reinterpreting the Tibetan Book of the Dead to describe an acid trip.

And here we are, a Rabbi talking about enlightenment as something that can be born into, which contradicts the Buddhist and Hindu concept. I’m sure he means well, but it seems to me he’s talking about this “new age” notion of enlightenment, which is arguably a misappropriation of Buddhist and Hindu ideas.