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The danger of enlightenment is often underestimated by people, for obvious reasons. The common idea of enlightenment is that it is something positive and wonderful that makes people consequently feel better afterwards. This is a big mistake. For enlightenment always happens a little later than when you expect it to happen, usually when you're already on the way back home in your car. But then it is actually so overwhelming that you are quite busy with all these feelings and thoughts of, "Yeah. Right. So that's what it's all about" going on inside you. In other words, you are in absolutely no condition to reliably control a vehicle, so you'll very likely end up hitting a tree head-on. This is why enlightenment is so dangerous. But luckily, nature was smart enough to foresee this foolish human behavior, and has therefore installed a safety measure: it's not easy to get there. This ensures that only experienced people who know how to handle it get enlightened, and thus humankind is prevented from self-extinction through enlightened drivers causing car accidents. For you as an average Hitchhiker however, these risks most likely pose no extraordinary threat compared to your usual lifestyle, so you might try it out as well. You have the option of several methods: 1) Ask a Guru or Master to show you how it works. This requires you to first find such a person, which shouldn't be so difficult, since they seem to be all over this planet lately. Watch out for fakes though. If the person smiles a lot, is not embarrassed by any of the stunts you pull to test him and asks for no or little money in exchange for teaching you, then you probably found one. The second part is a little more tricky. The definition of enlightenment claims that you cannot understand what someone else tells you about it if you haven't been there yourself. It also claims, however, that you don't have to be told, because you already have the potential to eventually figure it out for yourself, which brings you back to where you started. This obviously leads to the question why you would need a guru in the first place, since he can't explain it to you. So all this guy usually does is tell you to meditate (see method 2, below) and whack you on the back of your head or perform some other mysterious action that he claims will speed up the process of getting you there. 2) Meditation. Besides often taking a lifetime or longer to yield any decent results, you usually have to stand incredible pains in your legs or other parts of your body, plus possibly being tortured by a guru with whacks on the back of your head (see method 1, above). You are advised to try this only if you have masochistic tendencies or you have tried pretty much all other pastimes known to you and found them all boring. 3) Drugs. Since humans have become rather lazy, our technically advanced society has invented means to make even the hardest of tasks possible. Many people want to feel as positive and wonderful as someone who is enlightened, but they don't want to put up with all this lifelong meditation and whacks on the back of their head. This is why drugs were invented. While some purists claim that drugs are not the same thing, and nowhere near as good as true enlightenment, this argument has never been scientifically proven, so it can be discarded. The high rate of people causing car accidents while under the influence of drugs proves that there must be some effect of the same quality. Besides, you can always cover the bad side effects of drugs by taking more drugs, whereas you can't cover up the pain in your legs through more meditation, so drugs obviously score better on this part. 4) Instantaneous enlightenment. This is by all means the best way to do it. Unfortunately, so far no one has found a reliable way to successfully trigger it off. It appears to just happen somehow, and before you even really notice, it's already gone again. Hopes are high for neuroscience to come up with a device that will be able to record and playback such a condition of mind, but you might as well try some of the other methods while you wait.