Imagine the night sky. What we can all observe is a multitude of little shining points, the stars. Now... imagine the blackness inbetween the stars as your available belief-space and the stars as what you can actually and factually know about life in this world. As there are a lot of stars, so is there a lot of possible lines of connection inbetween them.

Believing things is like drawing lines between stars. Sure enough, everyone can see the same night sky and agree on that, but we start disagreeing as soon an anyone is suggesting how they are "connected". An intelligent person will immediately realise that there are multiple options for connecting those dots, not just the ones that are being hailed as "the truth" by the few or the many. We can say that there is a multitude of perceptible subjective variables in the same objective observation.

Illumination, then, is an act of erasing the lines and seeing reality for what it is. Little shining points of truth against the vast blackness of the belief-space. Illumination isn't about learning how to correctly draw those lines through the empty belief-space and make the correct conclusions about how it all hangs together; rather it's a question of detaching from all assumptions that can be derived from subjective observation alone.

In the words of Krishnamurti: "The highest degree of intelligence is observation without subjective evaluation."