All of us that ever started a self improvement journey, probably considered at a point in time enlightenment. You can only get so good at meting your needs, but eventually something is going to go "wrong" and you will encounter some pain. Which is enough to dramatically lower the quality of your life, human have a bias towards negativity. One bad experience is enough to ruin your entire day. While in order to have a good day you need multiple positive experiences.
Trying to become enlightened is like going on a treasure hunt. The stake is enormous and the odds are small, very little people that set this goals actually accomplish it.There is a chance that we don't have a good enough map of it, we simply don't understand enough of it to have an exact step by step process to follow.
After all this is what happened with so many things like curing alcoholism for example. Before AA, alcoholism was considered impossible to cure, until Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith created a process for people to follow. It didn't cure everybody or made the act of giving up alcohol easy, it just made it possible.
So now instead of just the occasional cases of spontaneous healing considered almost a miracle, we have a considerable higher number of people that are successful.
Before we understand how to get there we have to know where do we have to arrive. So what is enlightenment?
The word "enlightenment" was used for the first time in translation of spiritual texts of Buddhism and Zen, for a replacement of words like Gautama's moment of enlightenment of seeing the morning star for the first time or Satori of which literal translation is the gap in the clouds that happens during a cloudy day that allows the sun rays to shine through.
Words that refer to short lived momentary moments that allows you to have a momentary shift in perception over the nature of your own existence.
The word becomes very popular during the 60's and 70's in the psychedelic revolution, where a lot of people sought to understand their experiences by looking at Buddhist texts. As a possibility that maybe drugs like LSD and other psychedelics are a way to reproduce enlightenment experiences.
As this religions and philosophies were imported all over the world a lot of misconceptions were formed.
One of the most prevalent is that the person that is enlightened it is happy all the time or doesn't have any problems.This is of course false there are various stories that depicted Buddha as experiencing grief or physical or emotional pain. The philosophy was never about escapism or about reaching the end of your pain.
Another misconception is that the enlightened person is somehow good at anything, he or she can master any skill or even gains magical powers or the capacity to perform miracles. This was never proven, it is hardly ever mentioned in most texts, there are some interesting cases of people with impressive meditation skills that gained more control over certain abilities of their bodies. But this was achieved through a life time of practice and is far from being magic.
There are also cases of fraud where various individuals made various spectacular claims, just to attract crowds. The way i like to think of it as being the primitive form of click bait. The same way most article online make extraordinarily claims but under deliver.
Having an experience like a Satori is not necessarily the goal as much as what you learn from it and how your perception about life changes.
Unfortunately we don't have any conscious control over our capacity to experience certain things, you can at best engage in certain practices and hope that something useful is going to come out of them.
Traditionally practices like yoga, meditation or asceticism were used as vehicles to create enlightenment but they are far from being efficient.
As far as my experience goes i start to experience satori type experience couple years ago at low moment of my life, where i was under a lot of emotional pain. I had suffer from depression and had a couple of suicide attempts. Form time to time i would experience a spontaneous huge release from my pain, it would also feel like time slowed down the colors look a lot more vivid and bright and it just felt like nothing was wrong in the world i would be completely detached for a while.
I remember once waiting at a traffic light just waiting to cross the street and it suddenly happened, my body almost start convulsing with pleasure to the point that i was worried that other people will notice and think that i am on some sort of drugs.
For years i hardly understand what i was experienced or how can i reproduce or make it last longer. I some how always would end up back in to my depression. I start reading almost everything that i could get my hands on, most of the information i found was various old spiritual texts or sort of new age philosophies written by authors like Eckhart Tolle. They were contaminated with mysticism and often confused me more than clarified anything.
After years of struggle and study i am getting closer of finding a balance in my life, i don't claim to be enlightened. There is nothing special about me at best i just have a fairly advanced set of skills. I am still not sure exactly what cases this type of experience at best i can only speculate.
My take on it, is that from the observation that most spiritual practices that claim to make you enlightened are often painful practices, that requires the practitioner to expose himself to pain in a controlled way and the fact that all my experience came at moments where i was in almost complete agony. I think the pain is used in such a way to stimulate your endocrine system to secret endorphin's which also explains why the experience feel in a similar way to actually synthetic drugs, that mimic the effect of your hormones.
As far as what i learned out of this experience i learned that there is no end to pain, no matter what do you accomplish pain and death are inescapable and unavoidable. Which gives me a sens of comfort and detachment because now i know that the outcome of my life no matter what i do is the same. I will still eventually experience pain and eventually die. Somehow this now stays in the back of my mind almost constantly, in the past i used to get distracted by the details of life and lose the big picture of it, and eventually end up with a great deal of sufferance.
Also i learned how to gain control over my satori experiences, i found that is not so much about staying with the pain until it ends, as much as going in to the pain and allowing yourself to retreat periodically if you stay persistent and you keep focusing on your pain over and over again, it is almost impossible to don't happen. Now i feel like going to life with a morphine drip attached to my arm every time when life doesn't work out i can just press that button and eventually i will be happy no matter what.
I think the mistakes in most spiritual teaching is that they present pain and all the negative aspects of life as something that you have to purge. Like for example if you meditate long enough on pain you will eventually stop experiencing pain, similarly to when you eat something bad and you need to trow up to feel better after which if you never eat something bad you should never have a stomach ache in your entire life. Avoiding experience like pain it is simply impossible it is more about coming to terms with it rather then find the end of it.
I still find it necessary to practice moderation and maintain a balance in my life. It takes both the matter and the spirit to have a life. Focus to much on either one and you will neglect the other.
