What is the psychology behind awakening or enlightenment?

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Enlightened people are mostly immune to psychology. They have no psychological problems to solve.

That’s not to say they don’t have minds or that those minds can’t be studied. I see a therapist. When I first started seeing her, I was pretty hung up over a girl. We talked it out. Eventually I got over my hangups and started dating other people.

I would have gotten over the hangups with or without her. I don’t really need her for anything. I keep seeing her because it’s nice to have her around and I don’t mind paying a few hundred dollars for the privilege. I can get a professional perspective on things that I would otherwise have to do a lot of Googling to get.

Enlightenment brings with it a kind of awareness that is expansive and deep. While I was hung up on this girl, I was aware on many levels of both what I was bringing to the situation, and what she was. Psychology mostly revolves around bringing issues to awareness that the client is hiding from. I do not hide from my issues, so there was nothing for her to really do.

Awakening can happen to anyone, enlightened or no. I was enlightened before my own awakening, and I remained enlightened afterwards. What an awakening event does to you is alert you to a new kind of existence that’s an order of magnitude more compelling than your previous one, and so it changes your life irrevocably.

My go-to example for the difference between awakening and enlightenment is the eighties movie The Karate Kid. If you haven’t seen it, or if it’s been awhile since you have, you should go re-watch it or at least go look up clips on YouTube.

Daniel was awakened as a result of the events of the movie, when it finally dawned on him that the chores he’d been doing were actually karate techniques.

Miyagi, on the other hand, achieved enlightenment when he was finally able to let go of the past through his mentorship of Daniel. It’s not real enlightenment, but that’s the movies for you.