What steps did you consider to clarify your doubt or answer the question of your own belief to arrive at your enlightenment? How did you feel about your decision?

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Really good question. As it’s asking for a personal perspective, I will keep it as focused on me and my journey as I can.

It’s important to not just take in spiritual literature intellectually. You need to engage with it, make it a part of your life, if only to work out the intentions of the author. One of the first barriers I found in doing so was just in figuring out how to take it all seriously. I mean, nobody is a born meditator, someone has to teach you and then you have to spend a lot of time on your own actually doing it. Then you have to get over that hump where you’re putting effort in and not getting much out. All the while the temptation is to just read and think, not read, try it out, then think.

Getting over this, producing a spiritual journey in which I don’t merely think about topics, where I have a reliable way to experience them for myself, this took me years. Enlightenment during this building period was the farthest thing from my mind. Investigating what I was reading, working out the world and languages of the mind, how they produce novel and out-of-the-ordinary states, that was the focus. Enlightenment was a sort of ‘touch point’, if you will, uniting the world of spiritual achievement.

As my journey progressed it became clear to me that I was, at the very least, quite talented with spiritual things. I’m able to make progress where many people struggle. More than that, once I understood what the people I was reading was talking about, I realized that most of the time, the explanations felt over-complicated. And that became the second big hurdle. I needed not just ways to explore what I was reading, but also to communicate my findings.

I always have maintained a writing outlet on social media. At the moment, that’s Quora, but before it tended to be various private web forums. Sharing my journey with others allowed me to find others like myself. This was the next big part of my journey, matching my own experiences with others. There’s only so much you can glean from people who don’t do spiritual exploration. By asking questions of others about how they perceive things since they’ve initiated their own spiritual journey, and comparing with my own experiences, it let me hold up a mirror to myself so I can examine how I perceived and believed.

Once I had enough info, I was able to hack away at a ‘baseline’ that I could start building on that’s not going to just change based on new information. It let me construct definitions that didn’t rely on just one person’s experience. And when people would describe their own experience, I could use my own meditative experience to understand it, and occasionally offer clarity.

Throughout all of this, there was the near-constant parade of spiritual ‘highs’, or satori states, that manifested. Each one brought with it an opportunity for more insight, and I would naturally encounter resources to help me to a new level of understanding.

Eventually my mind kept bumping into a weird barrier that would keep me from going further. How am I doing this stuff? Where does this talent come from? How far does it go? Enlightenment came up over and over again as the answer. But it didn’t make sense. Everything I’d read pointed toward an “enlightenment moment” where a person suddenly discovers a new world and they’re now enlightened.

The strange dichotomy needed to be resolved, and I would, years later, eventually come to separate out the phenomenon of awakening from enlightenment. But at the time I was running up against this, it felt like a leap of faith to actually consider and thus believe that I’m enlightened. The only answer to the question of ‘when’ was “since birth.” This episode happened soon after I started posting on Quora, if you go back and read some of my very earliest spiritual posts, you’ll see me struggling with finding the words to state that I considered myself enlightened in a way that didn’t make me sound conceited. Now, obviously, that concern is gone.

As I mulled over the big milestones of spiritual achievement in the years since, having simply gotten over the hump of internal recognition and belief in my own enlightenment, made further realizations in the direction of awakening vs. enlightenment easier. Paradoxically, without acknowledging personal enlightenment, I would have to continuously figure out exceptions to my determinations. Which would feel really weird because whenever I’m investigating, I often hold mini-meditative sessions to look directly into whatever little thing I happen to be writing about.

Now, it’s super-simple. All “enlightenment events” are in fact awakenings, enlightenment is in fact a gradual process that determines your background ‘potential’ while awakening is a God-given experience that allows us to celebrate, recognize, and directly experience that potential. Everybody who has an awakening has it subject to their level of consciousness, and a person can go completely unaware of their spiritual potential their entire lives, should they never turn their minds to spirituality.

I had an awakening some 8 years ago. But I’ve been enlightened since birth, as have most people we consider to be enlightened. The time they consider to have become enlightened, was them awakening to their preexisting enlightenment.