Enlightenment: What is it, and is it for all of us?

2,500 years ago in ancient India, a man named Siddhartha Gautama attained a state of liberation that today we call ‘enlightenment’. Siddhartha became known as a 'Buddha', a fully awakened one, and following his experience he no longer succumbed to any of the misery we often associate with everyday living. He was truly free of emotional pain, anxiety, stress and all associated unpleasant feelings–forever. But what actually is enlightenment, and how does it affect us mere humans who haven’t dedicated our lives to meditation and insight? Is it a real thing, or is it a noble carrot waved in front of us to keep us on the spiritual straight and narrow–something akin to a Christian heaven, the promise simply transferred to our time here on earth, instead of the afterlife?

A depiction of the awakening of the Buddha underneath the Bhodi Tree

The seemingly nebulous concept of enlightenment (a.k.a. ‘awakening’ or ‘liberation’) is one that can easily pass us by as far too esoteric to be relevant to our everyday needs. Indeed, it’s a state–let’s call it that for now–that’s almost impossible to comprehend from our point of view here in the fetters of mundane (non-enlightened) existence. A state of supreme peace, suffused with infinite compassion and wisdom, entering nirvana–what does this all mean? If all we’re after is a bit of release from the anxiety we feel in the day to day–a side order of less stress and depression, please–why should we care about something that’s seemingly out of touch and almost beyond comprehension? 

Before we get any further I have to caveat what follows with the fact that–and I can already hear the protests from some of my closest friends 😉–I am not enlightened. One usually likes to write about things one has experience with, and while I have achieved some level of freedom from the beliefs and behaviours that held me back earlier in life, I cannot give you any direct experience of what enlightenment feels like in its entirety. The emphasis I will use here is not all mine–much is borrowed from people who have achieved far more liberation than I. That said, the central theme here will be that enlightenment is just the far end of a continuum that starts somewhere near cycling in almost continuous day to day anguish. I’d say that I, like many who have made progress along their meditation journey, have got a pretty clear idea of the direction in which to act if this ‘goal’ is to be ‘attained’. So, keeping in mind that I am not the definitive well of knowledge here–as much as my unenlightened ego would like to think it is–let’s start digging into what enlightenment, liberation or awakening really is and why we should all hold it, at least loosely, as a very real possibility for our lives.     

What is Enlightenment?

The classical view of enlightenment has many facets, and it might pay for us to imagine a person, perhaps ourselves, with the qualities of an enlightened being in order to paint the picture. What are often posited as the central qualities of enlightenment are infinite compassion and infinite wisdom. So what do those look like? Imagine your most compassionate self, the most loving, understanding and accepting person that you have ever been. Imagine boundless, unconditional care, as soft as a mother holding her only child. Now imagine that state is utterly unshakable. No matter what happens, no matter how much someone attempts to hurt you, divide you, break you, all that you give back is immovable love. You see the pain in the person or the situation that is trying to hurt you and, like an ocean accepting a river, you embrace it and diffuse it, not by force, but by sheer vastness of heart. This is infinite compassion. 

Now imagine having clarity of mind like the purest diamond. Whenever you look inside yourself you see with absolute certainty the reasons for the way things are. Second guessing and rational analysis no longer exist. When asked a question, clear and compassionate answers are always precise and forthcoming. You are able to shine light on the worries and concerns of those around you with the absoluteness of the sun as it clears away the night. Your words relieve suffering for those that they fall upon. Nothing at hand is unknown, the deep nature of reality as at your fingertips. This is infinite wisdom. 

Then comes the end of personal suffering and immovable peace. It is said that on the journey to liberation one sees all the conditions of the mind that create suffering, all the mental formations–thoughts, beliefs, attachments–that keeps one bound to non-awakening. Seeing these, one gains insights and lays new neural pathways, allowing the release from all conditioning and the cessation of suffering forever. No longer driven by craving, aversion and delusion, one rests in a deep inner freedom–free from the compulsions, ego, fear, and identity that drive the wheel of suffering. One is fully present and life has a characteristic of simplicity and stillness amongst surrounding activity. This is where one enters nirvana and liberates themselves from ever being reborn into a world where suffering exists. Release is absolute.   

Perhaps most appealing (maybe because I’m a bit lazy) is the sense of effortlessness that begins to pervade one’s life. There is no longer any need to try. Life unfolds in front of you with the inevitability of a wave crashing on a shore and washing back to the ocean. Your reflections–pure and imbued with love and non-attachment–give rise to seemingly serendipitous events, unfolding in the most complete and joyful way.

I’ve heard it said that descriptions like these express but a fraction of the truth of enlightenment. Sounds pretty good. Sign me up. 

Can we get there?

While all this might sound lofty and out of reach, we must realise they are descriptions of extremes, of end states, and actually, parts of these descriptions may not be as out of reach as we may initially think. Imagine yourself as just a little bit more compassionate, a little wiser, a little less attached to the delusion that your possessions are the things that make you happy. Enlightenment exists on a continuum, and descriptions like the one above only serve to show us what the potential of a complete end state looks like, but it’s not an all or nothing event. Enlightenment should be seen as a progressive unfolding, a continuous deepening of our understanding of the true nature of reality and our relationship to it. We can make incremental progress along this continuum in our everyday lives, each small piece of effort taking us a little closer to the promised liberation, and a little further away from the wheel of suffering that cycles here in the plane of reality that houses things like work, traffic and taxes.

Indeed, it’s easily argued that any seriously practicing meditator should get rid of any ‘goal’ labelled ‘enlightenment’ in the first place. In line with all the paradoxes of spiritual development, holding enlightenment as the goal will only ever push it further away. We are better to aim for certain checkpoints of realisation along the continuum that signal we are moving in the right direction. Can I gain a deeper understanding of my own suffering and so liberate myself through my actions? Can I gain insight into the impermanent nature of existence and so grasp onto things like possessions and relationships with less conviction? Can I glimpse the true nature of my “self” as not defined by the house-of-cards-like set of stories I tell myself about myself, not defined by my “identity”? Can I harvest the benefits of my meditation practice and just feel a little more at ease with the world? If I can, then I am working my way along the continuum, down the road from suffering to awakening. That knowing, in itself, gives more energy to the pursuit, and releases us from any need to have a “goal”. 

If you want any proof that this possibility is not something strictly limited to an Indian man who lived 2,500 years ago in a world very different from your own, absorb yourself in the story of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. In his book In Love with the World, Yongey describes his first hand experience of enlightenment. He never calls it that, but it’s obvious to the reader what’s going on. As an abbot of a Tibetan monastery, Yongey, at the age of 37, absolves himself of his responsibilities to his monastery and disappears one night to start a three-year wandering retreat through India–a not uncommon pursuit in some eastern lineages. I won’t ruin the story for you, but to say that the book concludes with Yongey’s dense, intimate and luminous description of his liberation is entirely underselling it. Even now, it gives me goosebumps to recall. That this process has been captured in a modern literary account is almost beyond comprehension itself. We don’t think about these things as happening these days, it’s easy to believe that they are experiences confined to history. This happened in 2011.  

When I started going to the gym again last year I had no real idea what to do, but I knew what I wanted to achieve. I typed into Chat GPT, “I’ve just started going to the gym again and I need a workout program that’s going to make me look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club”. Now of course I have no real expectation that I will ever look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club (if you don’t know it’s worth a Google), but we have to thank Brad for showing us what the potential of the human body is, and I knew that some point between him and where I was then was achievable. Like going to the gym and slowly becoming leaner and fitter, awakening is also a gradual process that we can make very small and achievable steps towards in our everyday lives, even as we navigate the realities of daily existence. What the Buddha achieved 2,500 years ago, and what many people have achieved since is simply a representation of our ideal selves. Why would we not want to become acquainted with this possibility? 

They say that there is a point in our practice when enlightenment becomes inevitable, and schools of Zen Buddhism take it a step further. A Zen teacher might say that our true nature is already enlightened–we simply fail to see it because of delusion, habits, and attachment. We should see enlightenment as not something to attain from the outside, but rather as a recognition and realisation of what’s always been true. Just like Brad Pitt’s abs, which were always there beneath the surface and only needed to be uncovered through good diet, exercise and perseverance, our own awakening is already within us. Like a blossom waiting for the right moment to open to the sun, enlightenment is a natural process that we don’t need to try to make happen. Our task is simply to provide the blossom with an environment that’s conducive to opening–an environment that is nutritious and not poisonous–the flowering nature of the blossom–the desire to open–is already inherent within it. Our task isn’t to force anything, it’s to work quietly and diligently along a path that gradually, but surely sets us free. The seed of awakening is already within us–our only job is to create the conditions for it to bloom. When it does, it'll be unimaginably brilliant and indescribably serene.