How do you know if you're enlightened?

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It took me a long long time to realize I was enlightened. I read a lot of books and parsed through the difficult and contradictory language I kept seeing, pushing through to find something I could understand. I had kind of suspected it but didn’t want to accept it, because that felt like the end of my spiritual journey.

There never was any big realization. Just a big piling up of small realizations. For example, when I read Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now, I was nodding along, enjoying the narrative. It hit me at some point in my reading that I wasn’t having the same experience most people have when they read that book.

No, Tolle was already describing my life and my thought processes. The sublime peace he experiences, is what I experience.

Naturally, he’s just one writer. I won’t go into specifics on all the ones I’ve read, I’ll just say that I’ve never read a description of enlightenment, that I can’t pierce through the muddiness of the language to find some concrete descriptions, that I didn’t already match.

When I came across Dr. David R. Hawkins, I was struck by how clear his writing was compared to all the others. But more than just describing the state of enlightenment, he also provided a framework that you can use to understand the mechanics of the phenomenon.

Mechanics are very important to me. Instead of just fumbling around with incoherently-defined words, I can relate everything back to the framework and see what stacks up and what doesn’t. I can use my own mind to test everything. This took me many years. I had to develop a new kind of logic to deal with spiritual ideas.

Now I’m trying to normalize all this with the current scientific understanding of the brain and mind. In the future I want to reconcile it all with philosophy, and then perhaps math.

Questions like these give me the perfect opportunity to reflect back over everything and see what kinds of new insights I can come up with.

I suppose I could come up with a checklist based on my pitiful understanding of the neuroscience of the state. Honestly though I think the Buddhists do a better job of it, if you can get through their language.

I do think that there are physical, brain functioning changes. No architectural changes that you could see on an MRI, as you see with psychopathy, but I do think enlightened brains operate slightly differently than normal ones.

Spiritual techniques push the mind closer and closer to that state. I think there’s simultaneously a functional and a luck aspect to whether you actually manage to get there.

But to essentialize enlightenment, to get to the core of what’s going on, it’s the dissociation of identity from ego. We identify with and as lots of different things. The principle thing humans identify as is the complex of programmed responses called ego. The ego creates and holds attachments to things.

When we identify, we think that we are our attachments. So the time you spilled milk in fifth grade and all the kids laughed at you becomes not just a pleasant childhood memory but as just part of a large sequence of events that has you in the present being lonely and self-hating.

The dissociated mind does not hold on to these attachments. Thoughts do not develop into complexes. They remain as thoughts.

Instead of obsessing over the self and all the attendant joys and pains, you can simply deal with everything as it is. If you have a nice experience, you enjoy it and move on, If you have a painful one, you experience the pain and move on. Things don’t build up automatically, you never feel like you’re truly forced into anything.

Through spiritual techniques you can develop the quality of distancing yourself from ego. Most of us have some ability to do it. But the enlightened can do it at will.