Wellness Calendar: Monday 3 November

Enlightenment
It’s estimated that some form of religion has been around for the past 100,000 years but did not become organised until the Neolithic age, some 12,000 years ago. At its height, it would have been life-threatening to challenge the narrative of there being a God, or there being alternative way to go about one’s life. We still see tyrannical aspects of religion in certain countries and within certain laws or cultures, but generally speaking there’s a tolerance for atheism and humanism.
When Charles I was beheaded in England in 1649, the notion that a king had a divine right to rule, having been anointed by God, ended abruptly. Whereupon the arts, the sciences and the humanities flourished and new discoveries about the nature of things gained traction.
The eighteenth century became known as the age of enlightenment, thanks to thinkers challenging the existing status quo with new ideas that would improve the quality of people’s lives: such as feminism, individualism, reason, natural law, liberation, etc.
Enlightenment, within a spiritual sense, draws on this work and explores notions of self-realisation, of breaking out from social confines and conditioning, of awakening, discovering the essence of one’s own being, of liberating oneself.
Is this a word that sits comfortably with you?
How enlightened do you see yourself?