I came across a book by Alexandra David-Neel, a French female mystic, who visited Tibet and participated in their initiations in the 1930s. The book is called Initiates and Initations in Tibet and the picture it offers of Tibetan spiritual culture seems starkly honest and undressed-up.

She writes that in Tibet (or what was Tibet in the 1930s), enlightenment was thought of as "growing up."

I find this to be one of the most startling and practical definitions of enlightment that I've ever heard. But if you read the book, which shows that a lot of the spiritualism in Tibet was selfish, and that many Lamaic lines formed alliances with otherworld beings generally considered to be evil, the definition makes a lot more sense.

We live not in one world, but in a world interpenetrated by many worlds inhabited by many types of beings -- some nice and some not so nice. When we become enlightened, we begin to sense and see the great web of worlds. Enlightment is learning how to interact with all of these worlds, and beings, like a spiritual adult -- to cross the street by ourselves as it were; resolve conflicts by ourselves rather than appealing to mother or father figures, etc.

Thinking about this concept, too, has actually allowed me to see the value of both paths of dark and light. Undertaken consciously, a so-called dark path could be a very realistic attempt to cope with the realities of our world.