What is Enlightenment? website offers information about getting to know yourself, nature and God.  With this website, you can learn about the philosophy of getting to know yourself, looking inside your soul and having the courage to be yourself.

"Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" is a short piece written by Immanuel Kant in 1784.  It is a profound and candid explanation of the importance of being your own self, and thinking for yourself.  He describes this as a state of enlightenment.  Kant explains in What is Enlightenment that; “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.  Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.  Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another…Have courage to use your own enlightenment…” 

“…Over 2,000 years ago Plato suggested that there was something special about each individual; that there was something magical that lay within each of us, something that gives us happiness, knowledge, and the key to the world.  That magical something is our soul.  He said that so many people are caught up in the world around them, that it is as if they are chained within a cave with reality being so distant and blurred that it can only be seen as shadows on a wall.

     Throughout the years many other philosophers and physicists, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, have repeatedly suggested the same thing.  They say that to find peace, comfort, passion and happiness, people must look inside and get to know themselves, or their soul.  And that within our selves lay limitless knowledge about what we cannot see or touch in the physical world. 

     Our soul exists somewhere that is beyond empirical reasoning.  Many believe this is where God resides.  Others simply call it the Other World.

     This book examines these theories and suggests ways to help everyone turn away from just seeing shadows on a cave to seeing full reality; to seeing ourselves and our soul… “ (From the introduction of the book).

Kant and Plato both feel that fear of walking down an unknown path frightens most people away from truly living their own life.  Kant explains; “After having made their domestic animals dumb and having carefully prevented these quiet creatures from daring to take any step beyond the lead-strings to which they have fastened them, these guardians then show them the danger which threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone.  Now this danger is not really so very great; for they would presumably learn to walk after some stumbling.  However, an example of this kind intimidates and frightens people out of all further attempts.”

Furthermore, around 2,000 years before Kant, Plato discusses a similar state when our consciousness is awakened in the Allegory of the Cave.  Plato explains that after people see the light coming out of the cave, they may experience pain; “When any of them is liberated and suddenly compelled to stand up and turn around and walk and look toward the light, he will suffer sharp pains.  The glare will hurt him and he will be unable to see the realities of which, in his former state, he has only seen the shadows.  Then imagine someone says to him what he saw before was an illusion; but now, when he is approaching nearer to reality and his eye is turned toward more real existence, he has a clearer vision.”

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What is Enlightenment? website offers information about looking inside your soul and finding your true self, and then having the courage to become that person.  It also offers information about where our soul or spirit come from, the A Piori or the other world. 

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Kant, Immanuel, Basic Writings of Kant, edited and with a Foreword by Allen W. Wood, (New York:  Modern Library, 2001)

Plato, A Guided Tour of Five Works by Plato, translated and edited by Christopher Biffle, (Mountain View, CA:  Mayfield Publishing, 2001), 83-86, and Kant, Immanuel, Basic Writings of Kant, edited and with a Foreword by Allen W. Wood, (New York:  Modern Library, 2001)