enlightened

comparative more enlightened · superlative most enlightened

1. Educated or informed.
2. Made aware of something.
3. Freed from illusion.

   Yet in the worst, there is still a divine spark of Universal consciousness buried deep within them, and in the best people, except for the enlightened ones, there is still the seed of selfishness.

   1997, John Peniel, chapter 10, in The Children of the Law of One & the Lost Teachings of Atlantis, page 128

4. Extraordinarily wise; having an exceedingly great wisdom.

   An enlightened mind does not need external authority.

   3 more examples

   Such were the sources of an opulence which we must do Raleigh the credit to say was expended not on debauchery or display, but in the most enlightened efforts to extend tlie field of English commercial enterprise beyond the Atlantic.

   1886, Edmund Gosse, Raleigh, Longmans, Green, page 30

   Many of the differences between nations are settled by discussion, and we hear little of them. Some are settled by arbitration, to the avoidance of many wars. But international arbitration of aggravated disputes is not much to be relied upon except between the most enlightened nations having predominant moral sense.

   1909, Andrew Sloan Draper, American Education, Houghton Mifflin Company, page 375

   These men lived through the Arctic cold of the glacial climate and hunted wild beasts, many of which are now extinct. They doubtless represented the most enlightened people of the earth at that time and had taken long strides in advance of their more primitive forebears. They had acquired a fair degree of skill in making stone implements, and, most important of all, they had come into a mastery of fire, as is shown by the hearths left in their cave abodes. Their flints were beautifully fashioned in a distinctive style. We know, too, that this was a reverent race in whom had already been implanted the belief in immortality; for they buried their dead with much ceremony, providing them with ornaments and implements and an abundance of food, as though for a long journey.

   1925, Floyd Lavern Darrow, Through Science to God, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, pages 136-137

1. Someone who has been introduced to the mysteries of some activity, religion especially Buddhism

1. participlepastsimple past and past participle of enlighten