What really takes place in the human brain when we reach the state of enlightenment?

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It’s really anybody’s guess. I have a lot of ideas about neurology and enlightenment that I think are really good, but it’s going to take dedicated science to really flesh out our understanding and validate or discredit those ideas.

Almost certainly there are various sectors in the brain that are responsible for certain types of experiences. The ego part, and the identification part seem to be the operative ones. If I had to make my best guess, I’d say that the ego part gets dissociated from the identification part upon enlightenment.

You still have ego, you still identify, but you no longer identify as your ego. That whole complex of programmed wants and desires no longer has the same hold on you that it did before.

It is believed by some people that the amygdala has the power to override your conscious response. This is held to be the mechanism behind the fight or flight response. It’s not hard to find stories of the conscious mind getting overridden. The exact method is unknown, but it almost certainly happens. It’s just hard to study in a laboratory setting so not much is known about it.

Being enlightened, I can say that I’ve never felt like I was ever not in complete conscious control of my thoughts / actions at all times. The effect of the amygdala on the lived experience of the enlightened mind appears to be seriously blunted.

Again, it’s still there, but the mind gets robust enough to route ‘energy’ wherever ‘it’ wants. This is where it starts to get awfully spiritual / philosophical. I liken it to how we always talk about evolution doing things with a particular ‘purpose’, when in reality evolution can’t want anything, because it’s not a conscious process. The ego used to direct, but instead something ‘else’ takes over that role.

That something is diffuse, whereas the ego is concrete, it has patterns and is predictable. When I’m dealing with humans, I often choose a predictable response because it’s easier for humans to understand. I could start going crazy and spouting silly nonsense, but I choose not to most times. Normal ego-driven humans are very predictable in their motivations and that predictability is relied on for culture and society to work. So in order to participate, I act predictably.

The best name I’ve seen for that ‘else’ that does the directing after you’re enlightened is the spiritual Self. To discuss much further gets far afield of the physical so I’ll leave it there. Suffice it to say that the Self is much more attuned to things than the ego is. The ego can only want what it knows and wants. The Self has access to the entire being.

Ultimately, I believe enlightenment has more effects on the non-physical side of being than it does on the physical. You literally leave the normal human plane of wanting and accomplishment. Experiencing happens primarily on the spiritual. You can’t fully understand that stuff from a purely rational frame. So the enlightened look at logic and rationality as meaningless.

But not me. I think it’s very very important to be rational. The newly enlightened think they don’t need logic but they’re very wrong about that. Eventually they’ll learn.

I personally don’t know what it’s like to not be enlightened. I’ve never been able to tell a difference between an unenlightened state that I experienced and the one I possess now. At times I’ve thought I might be psychopathic. But the more I studied it the less I considered it.

The judgment of whether someone is enlightened or not is forever bound to be a subjective one. Even if you worked out the physical traits, there are still the non-physical ones to consider. How can you ‘prove’ that someone is operating on Spirit rather than ego? Very, very difficult.