I want to compare the western and eastern enlightenment. The western superpower is the reason, and the eastern superpower is the mindfulness. It was hard to find a word for the eastern, so maybe you can find some better, but I have to describe the conceptions.
Enlightenment, in the east, is a personal process, and enlightened individuals creatively create the developing relations. They use positive logic, envisioning the positive goals and progressing further with them. Enlightenment, in the west, is a collective process, where there are revolutions of science, democracy, and other high values. In east, the individuals accumulate better and better karma, and this influences the collective slowly. In the west, the collective achieves the karmic machine, which controls the people to accumulate good karma; the west solves karmic process by regulations and rules. Democracy and science guarantees that people in general have better karma, even if they do nothing personal to achieve that - police and the doctors would simply fix the karma of a criminal, and taxes would make all the people help the poor somehow.
In the process of wars, all different nations have won some wars in history, but lately the west have been spreading it's political system - and it has strong carmic accumulation to win the wars. We can see the western enlightenment is very strong, because a weak karma can not win the political process so easily. Where in the east, everybody has to be very enlightenment to form a good collective, in the west, collective is very enlightened and the members are guided in the karmic process, so that their collective karma works out. Karma is behind the superpowers, and a Buddhist karma of individual development can not so easily form a governing process.
Meditation, in the east, you become observers of your mind - in the west, you observe the intellectual reason. After the meditations of Descartes, you have very high level of critical intellectualism. Intellectual is able to build a machine of the collective thought.
Superpowers, in the east, you achieve superpowers personally - then, you can have some contact with aliens, you reach psychic powers etc. In the west, largest civilized units such as, lately, Soviet Union and United States, reach the high civilized levels and there are said to be a superpower. This superpower is constantly seen as expressing contacts with aliens, psychic powers hidden somewhere in it's corridors, and other things associated with very high levels of accumulation of good karma. No single person represents those superpowers, but you can find over and over that they must exist somewhere, somehow, and that the karma collectively accumulated creates this collective effect of having superpowers somewhere. Somewhere in the government of a superpower, there is something, which deeply understands you, with supernatural abilities; you can sense that - it's more powerful, than the individual governors, and more stable than your current government, an entity made up of tradition.
I have found out the western enlightenment is very powerful, and the east and the west learn from each others constantly. The west intellectualizes the eastern thought, and the east is becoming more mindful about the western intellectual pursuits. I think in the future, we need to become enlightened in the collective and personal level. Who is completely eastern, appears potentially mad or dangerous, when they do not go through the collective enlightenment; who is enlightened only on the collective level, becomes simply a part of the machine, and weak thereof. In the magic of words, we often see the words independently appear to point to different conceptions with similar-sounding words - then we can see the underlying principle is the same, almost by accident.
We can see spiritual people are not easily in government, science, etc., with all their goals and dream; they practice their enlightenment alone - a politician might say they personally believe in such things, but those are not to participiate in their work. Who is only collectively enlightened, becomes gray and part of a mass on personal level, extremely boring person. We need to work hard to become enlightened on personal and collective level, and most of us carry the western enlightenment in our blood and family culture, so we should keep this development. When we can connect this yin and yang - eastern, personal yang and collective yin; western, personal yin and collective yang; those should be made rotating like circles. We need to build both collective and personal karma, so that the superpowers would form on all levels to heal us.
Christian Paradise is a machine, which collectively generates the good karma - you want or not, but being part of the western system, you are not allowed to have very bad karma, and system as a whole accumulates this paradise effect. Buddhist heavens are more individual, as you reach higher and help the others, you do not bring it to earth necessarily - Christ saying that you bring heaven to earth, meant that it becomes available for common people. The christian enlightenmen, like the western one, is collective, so it builds a system and you are intellectual having a little part in this, working hard on your own cog. When we are not serious about the Christian powers, our Buddhism is not very strong - individual enlightenment can only help, but when we manage both of them, we are decent persons on the path for something deeper. Why are the enlightened spiritual people not active in governments, business, and medical system so much? Because those are effects of collectively enlightened systems, and not exactly what we are reaching with our enlightenment; the deep force behind the superpowers might understand us deeply - but without going through meditations of Descartes, all the revolutions of west, and without understanding their deep, collective meaning, in their machines, we are partial. We are archaic people to be destroyed in the modern war, monkeys in the city.