What Is Enlightenment And How To Attain It?

What is Enlightenment?

Enlightenment is one of the most misunderstood terms, inside and outside of spirituality. For some, it conjures images of monks in deep meditation and gurus radiating peace. For others, it’s a state of freedom from suffering and a state of cosmic bliss. But what is enlightenment, really, and is it something you can actually attain? This article explores what enlightenment means across traditions, clarifies some common misconceptions, and offers a grounded look at how you might attain it.

What Enlightenment Is Not

Before we describe what enlightenment is, let’s first debunk a few common misconceptions:

• It’s not an escape from life: Enlightenment is not about avoiding pain, floating off into eternal happiness, or escaping the world.
• It doesn’t make you perfect or a saint: Enlightenment does not mean you’ll never get triggered or upset again.
• It doesn’t stop “bad” things happening: Life will still send challenges your way, but you’ll probably be able to handle them better. So, you’ll still feel the pain, but you won’t suffer so much.
• It’s not just for the spiritual elite: You don’t need to be a monk or guru, or spend decades alone in a cave to attain enlightenment.

These misconceptions create unrealistic expectations that can become barriers to awakening. A strong desire to become enlightened is also a hindrance, because it comes from a place of lack or discontent, which reinforces the distance between where you are now and where you want to be in the future. It also highlights your lack of acceptance that you are exactly where you need to be, even if that feels unpleasant in some way.

When it comes to awakening and enlightenment, the journey is more important than the destination, so focus on where you are (and what you feel) right now, rather than dreaming about an idealised, enlightened future. You’ll make better progress with this approach too, because healing, growth and awakening all require presence – they all require us to be embodied in the here and now.

What Is Enlightenment?

Enlightenment is the recognition of our true nature beyond our mind, personality and separate sense of self. It’s essentially a shift in our identity:

• From being an apparently separate conceptual-self to being a living field of presence, awareness and uniqueness.
• From doing and seeking to being and becoming.
• From resistance to radical acceptance of what is.

Realising our true nature requires us to drop our identification with our false/egoic nature, our attachment to our thoughts and feelings, our illusion of separation, our resistance to “what is”, and our mind’s need to understand and control everything. Realising our true nature brings us greater peace, presence, stillness, clarity, intuition, non-attachment, nondual awareness, a quieter mind, more psychological stability, and less emotional reactivity.

What Blocks Enlightenment?

It’s said that enlightenment is (and always has been) our natural state, but it’s obscured by layers of identification, conditioning and beliefs. The metaphor of the sun constantly shining no matter how many clouds are obscuring it, is often used, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

The thing that obscures our true nature is our identification with our conceptual sense of self, also known as our ego-self. Our conceptual sense of self forms in early childhood when our brain develops to the point where it can conceptualise things, including our sense of self. Prior to that, we were our true nature, but somewhere around 18-24 months, our conceptual sense of self was “born” (mentally created), which blocked our direct experience of our true nature. We went from directly experiencing ourself and life, to indirectly experiencing our self and life via conceptualised versions of them. We went from nonduality to duality.

If nondual perception or realising our true self / true nature was the definition of enlightenment, then all babies are enlightened, but that’s not really the case. To become enlightened as an adult, we have to liberate our “Self” from its mis-identification with our conceptual-self / ego-self. And unlike a baby, we have to do that with a fully developed and fully functioning mind. In order to transcend our identification with our conceptual mind, we have to activate our soul’s higher mind, which is non-conceptual. This occurs when our level of consciousness reaches 600. If you don’t know what I mean by that, please refer to this article about Levels of Consciousness.

The Path To Enlightenment

Enlightenment isn’t quick or easy. It requires time and dedication, but it can’t be forced, because it’s more about “being” than “doing”. In fact, it can be described as process of undoing – undoing a lifetime of conditioning. The following practices prioritise letting go and relaxing into your beingness, over striving and attaining.

1. Meditation: Practice Vipassana meditation to observe thoughts and sensations without attachment. Notice how they arise and dissolve back into pure awareness, which is the unchanging backdrop of all experiencing.
2. Self-Inquiry: Popularised by Ramana Maharshi, repeatedly ask “Who am I?” to trace the sense of self back to pure presence and awareness, beyond the mind, heart and body.
3. Contemplation: Reflect on nondual teachings (e.g. Advaita Vedanta, the Upanishads) to intellectually grasp unity, then internalise through direct experience.
4. Surrender: Let go of egoic control and resistance, and trust the natural flow of life, which can lead to spontaneous glimpses of oneness.
5. Inner Work: Do lots and lots of inner work to clear your psychological baggage and develop your spiritual presence. Working with the right spiritual teacher significantly expedites and eases the enlightenment process, but it can still take many years (depending on your starting point).

The key is not in striving to get something, but in letting go of everything that’s not your true nature – identification, core beliefs, deficient feelings, conditioned behaviours, etc.

Additional practices are described in this article: What is Nonduality? And How to Experience It

Enlightenment Is Not The Death Of The Ego

Enlightenment is often associated with the death of the ego, but that’s not the case. It’s actually about disidentification from the ego-self, conceptual-self or I-thought. By disidentifying from who we think we are, we naturally realise what we actually are.

• The Ego-self, conceptual-self or I-thought is a thought-form that our conceptual mind created and we have since become mis-identified with. We were about 2 years old when our young developing mind first conceptualised us as a separate self – separate from our parents and the world around us. It created this mental version of our self in order to make sense of the world and understand our place in it. In addition to conceptualising our self into a separate object (known as the subject), our mind also conceptualised everyone else and everything else into separate objects.
• The Ego is the sum total of all the parts of us that have been mentally separated from the wholeness of our being, as a result of distress and trauma, and fear of their recurrence. The ego-self is the nucleus or central core of our ego, and it is surrounded by layer upon layer of wounded parts, deficient feelings, core beliefs, reactive behaviours, defensive strategies, coping mechanisms. All of these “parts” of our consciousness have been conceptualised into separate thought-forms (known as ego structures), which are often also imbued with emotion and tension. The ego is a massive, unstable super-structure of all these wounded, fearful, deficient and self-deprecating parts of us. It’s like a labyrinth or prison that our true-Self gets stuck within (identified with), and the only way out is inner work to dissolve the ego structures to gradually liberate our Self.
• Ego Formation: Ego structures (or parts) are formed within our consciousness whenever we experience something traumatic or distressing. This happens a lot during our early childhood because our (spiritual) heart and mind aren’t fully developed, so they simply don’t have the capacity to handle challenging and overwhelming experiences. When an experience is too much to handle (or process), our consciousness contracts and “freezes” to stop the overwhelm and isolate it from the rest of our consciousness.
• Ego Dissolution: When an ego structure is processed or metabolised, its “form” dissolves, which frees up all the consciousness and soul essence that was “frozen” inside. The more inner work we do, the more soul essence we free up. Enlightenment becomes possible when we have more free soul essence than frozen soul essence.
• Ego Death: Enlightenment becomes possible when 51% of the ego has been dissolved, because that’s the tipping point when free essence (51%) outweighs frozen essence (49%). Prior to this, the ego holds the balance of power, which makes it difficult for us to dis-identify from. So, at enlightenment, almost half of the ego can remain, which is why it doesn’t equate to ego death. And even though we aren’t identified with the ego like we were before, the remaining parts can still get triggered. This means enlightened people aren’t necessarily saints, and they still need to continue their inner work. I’m not aware of anyone who has processed 100% of their ego structures, and I don’t think that level of perfection is possible or required.

Gradual vs Sudden Enlightenment

For most people, enlightenment is a gradual process that is the result of dedicated practice and inner work. As we near enlightenment, we begin to get brief tastes of the enlightened state. And the closer we get, the more frequent and prolonged they become, until one day it becomes permanent.

For others, enlightenment is a sudden event that happens spontaneously, usually in their early 20s. Some have been aware of the spiritual world since childhood, but others haven’t done any spiritual work at all, and it just comes out of the blue. These people tend to believe that enlightenment requires no inner work, which is true for them, but it’s not true for the rest of us. These people actually attained enlightenment in a previous life, and became re-enlightened in this life when their consciousness naturally reached the required level.

Living With Enlightenment

Enlightenment, nonduality and a quiet mind are a bit of a novelty at first, but they soon become our new normal. As the Zen saying goes: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” In other words, life continues as before, but the one experiencing it is subtly yet profoundly different. Living with enlightenment is about embodied presence, expressive essence, allowing each moment to be as it is, and experiencing it deeply. It’s not escaping anything, but being here fully, with an open heart, mind and soul.

Enlightenment isn’t the final destination on the spiritual journey, nor is it just a one-off event that marks the end of our spiritual journey. It’s just one of a series of spiritual initiations.