How does one know if they have reached enlightenment?

Home - Quora Link

Coming to the awareness of enlightenment carried some weird connotations. I knew all about it through books where numerous descriptions of the enlightened state all carried similar connotations, but were vague enough to where it’s easy to fool oneself into believing things about it that may or may not be true.

I really wanted to build an understanding of spirituality that could truly be said to be independent of personal conviction. Naturally it wouldn’t be rigorous, no way could be found to prove that someone was enlightened or not. But it could still be a rational perspective, that could be fit into a modern philosophical framework.

Most of the people I’d read of and about were from the East, western spirituality that I’d been exposed to was all occult and gnostic and Christian. I didn’t see any rationality to be had in that morass. My primary conduit for Eastern spirituality was Osho, whose amazingly-prolific output wove a picture of a precocious youth who never stopped questioning his elders.

Dr. David R. Hawkins was the first mystic who seemed to understand the Western desire for rational exploration. Osho was great and all, but he had never been more than descriptive when it came to enlightenment, and what I wanted was theory. Theory was something I could sink my mental teeth into and devise tests for.

Hawkins more than delivered on theory, not only providing a map but also a technique to explore it, consciousness calibration. Having already done the groundwork for meditative mysticism, I added consciousness calibration to my toolset.

I dived into consciousness calibration using the tool of the muscle test. Without the map, the scale that Hawkins had developed, I wouldn’t have really been able to make a crucial insight, that the scale works better in the abstract than it does when you try to take it absolutely.

I realized that every idea and thing could be connected to every other idea and thing, and I could use the muscle test to explore the connections. I could also ask simple yes or no answers of the muscle test, not just ask for numeric calibrations.

With this experience came my spiritual awakening. The muscle test became a conduit through which I could communicate with an entity that seemed to have limitless access to knowledge and wisdom. Through meditative techniques I learned how to communicate verbally with it, though I only use it rarely.

A few years later I was sensitive enough to the sensations that the muscle test provoked all over my body that I was able to stop testing and yet still obtain this ‘external’ communication at will, eventually reducing it to an extra sense, which is how I primarily use it today.

At some point on this journey I reconsidered what it meant to be enlightened. I had stood on the shoulders of giants and created a form of gnosis that had eluded even Hawkins. I had often remarked at how Osho’s students often seemed more enlightened than he himself seemed. And how much human attention and perception plays a role in how we perceive things like enlightenment.

Soon I would pick up books by other mystics and their explanations would be instantly apprehended. I had not just obtained personal gnosis, but also a sort of universal spiritual understanding that allowed me to recognize to a fine detail what anybody was going through simply by focusing on the words they were using to describe that experience.

I had put down Hawkins scale for years before I was able to fully understand how to make binary determinations on a person’s state of consciousness. I had already made by then two determinations, first, that if I wasn’t enlightened, then I really didn’t know anything about it at all despite my careful study and exploration. That didn’t make any sense at all to me.

Second, that all the descriptions pointed to a ‘moment’ where someone became enlightened. I couldn’t point to any such moment, my whole life was a smooth gradual progression in acquired experience and knowledge, I’m the same precocious kid now as I was before.

The aha moment came on Quora, some 7 years after my awakening, when I realized my long-held suspicion that enlightenment and awakening are not the same thing. Enlightenment refers to a state of deep and constant surrender, where awakening is a kind of sudden perceptive change. They’re related, but, as programmers like to say, orthogonal.

Enlightenment can be present in a person without them ever knowing they possess the state. This is because surrender can take just about any form the person wants, whatever they find themselves drawn to.

Awakening, on the other hand, is a conscious process, unmistakable to the person going through it. People who are awakening often think they are becoming enlightened, only to nearly instantly fall into what is generally referred to as the Dark Night. Similarly to awakening, the Dark Night is unmistakable. And it feels as far away from enlightenment as one can possibly get.

And this is the cyclic spiritual journey. Normal existence to awakening to dark night and back to normal. Enlightenment is when the highs and lows smooth out to the point where they’re almost indistinguishable from each other. Many times I’ll find myself in states which feel like both heaven and hell at the same time.

I recognize the signs of this in some people, even here on Quora. In fact, unrecognized enlightenment seems to be somewhat common. These people remind me a bit of Dr. House. Absolutely brilliant, without a filter, and capable of throwing caution to the winds. They manage to turn normal existence into a spiritual journey, even if they themselves don’t believe in spirituality.

Where I don’t find a whole lot of it is in the enlightenment / spirituality section on Quora. More than in other sections, of course, but still a low signal-to-noise ratio. Spirituality is really hard to write about, and theology and dogma rear their ugly heads far too often. Most often I see people who have had one or two profound experiences and think that because they’ve gotten a taste of enlightenment that they’ve attained it.

So, let’s lay out my map to spirituality as it pertains to personal growth. You can have a spiritual bent to your personality, meaning you’re looking for spiritual meaning to your experiences. This isn’t the same as awakening, and it certainly isn’t enlightenment. This bent may make you more apt to have spiritual experiences, or satori states.

These should not be confused with awakening or enlightenment. Awakening is a heady, life-changing experience where spiritual reality makes itself painfully clear to you. If you’re wondering whether you’ve had a spiritual awakening or a particular experience qualifies as one, you haven’t and it doesn’t.

I liken the experience as suddenly finding yourself transported to Vegas. Having a dream of going to Vegas is most spiritual experiences. Awakening is actually going there. You’re going to have the time of your life and you will get back broke. Awakening means there are actual stakes at play. If you don’t think at some point that you or your sanity might not survive, you’re probably haven’t awakened, yet. An awakening is a satori state that doesn’t go away even during your Dark Night.

Enlightenment on the other hand, concerns the relationship you have with these experiences. Awakening is the biggest high you’ll have in your life, the Dark Night that follows is the worst low, but if you’re enlightened, well, I’m not going to say you just shrug it off, but the intensity of the experiences isn’t identified with. When enlightened, awakening is something you do rather than something you become. It’s almost like you’re watching someone else get go through these experiences even though it’s happening to you.

To become aware that one is enlightened appears to be quite rare. Everyone I know who is enlightened either isn’t aware of what enlightenment even means, or does, but doesn’t believe they’re enlightened and has some kind of weird mental block keeping them from the realization even though their actions and thoughts are just like every other enlightened person. This dynamic feeds into what I call the “spiritual ego,” where your primary block to surrender is the one keeping them from viewing themselves as phenomenally talented and capable people. Something I’m intensely familiar with.

To be enlightened and have the knowledge of it seems to rest on the crossroads of three highly-unlikely journeys. One first needs the capacity to be ruthlessly rational, highly spiritual, and then they must actually be enlightened. If they’re not spiritual, then they’ll never think in frames of enlightenment so they’ll never get there. If not rational then they’ll never be able to fully grasp the concept, and even if they do, will let the spiritual ego get in their way.