Date of Award

Summer 9-20-2024

Document Type

Thesis (Master's)

Department or Program

Earth Sciences

First Advisor

Elizabeth Tremmel

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This thesis deals with the possibility that the emerging concept of Major Mindful Moments — Lightenment™ — could further drive mindfulness from a tangential activity to a more central societal concept. I coin Lightenment™, an arising wisdom related to the mindful state as a thought process that positively affects people's happiness and lessens suffering and changes how they interact and behave in the world. These changes, on a broad scale, affect culture and influence the world. Enlightenment, a concept that dates back thousands of years, is a state of continuing wisdom as opposed to Lightenment™ 's intermittent wisdom. I explain the benefit of accessibility of Lightenment™ to the non-monastic. For the paper, I use the unique format of Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) (Nash, 2011), academic writing that incorporates personal experience as well as scholarly references. To accompany the written text, I include three videocasts—stories which include interviews of guests' experience with a Lightenment™ moment and benefits. In similar fashion to others' experience presented in the videocasts, this paper contains my story of a journey in discovering mindfulness and Lightenment™ to enhance wellbeing and life circumstances. These stories demonstrate that individual experience can ripple out into the collective to address current floundering political, social, environmental, and cultural attempts to create social justice and wellbeing.

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