How and when the enlightenment start? I used to be talented when I was a teen but I lost my talent how do I gain it again?

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Enlightenment starts to happen when an extremely spiritually-talented person manages to actually connect all the dots of the various bits of their life and the realization settles into a continual perception of diminished self.

You can have experiences, even quite long ones, of diminished self without being enlightened. And it can take years for the process to ‘settle’ once it starts. In fact, this is quite common among people conducting their lives through the frame of spirituality. This appears to be what happened to you.

Spiritual experiences have the quite cruel nature of being ephemeral, episodic, and short. You get this vision of a phenomenally-vivid world in which the constant, boring mundanity of the world lifts and you can’t help but think you’ve ‘broken through’.

Only to get returned the very next day to the same context you jumped into spirituality to escape.

Spiritual achievement is work like everything else. You have to put in the hours. Talent only goes so far. I consider myself to have been born spiritually enlightened, which I detail here, but I still did an absurd amount of reading, studying, meditating, and integrating in order to produce a spiritual awakening, detailed here.

As a result, daily existence has acquired a profound meaning that just never goes away. Even my mundane, boring moments are mundane and boring in interesting ways. Life transitions are made very quickly and cleanly. When I finally decided in my late twenties I wanted a career, I had a job interview in something like 30 minutes.

But it took work. At the moment I’m closing in on three thousand Quora answers over the last 6 years or so. Most of those concern spiritual topics. I participated in half a dozen social networks before this one and I got spiritual when and where I could find even a single person interested in engaging and discussing.

If you can’t be having what I call a peak experience, that is one of those nondual experiences that are so fun and illuminating, then you need to be thinking about what they are and how to get there again. If you can’t think about it, you should be reading about it. This stuff does just happen to people, but if you want it to keep happening, you need to make it happen for yourself. There’s room for laziness, but only after you’ve earned it by mastering the material. Then you can read six words by someone else and it just triggers another exploration.

I’ll close with a technique I learned from George Gurdjieff. His schtick was that the one thing humans need in order to realize their potential is the capacity to remember. Every single instant, you are either remembering or forgetting. You’re either pursuing your spiritual truth and making connections and growing, or you’re mired in the mundane because you forgot that you could apply the spiritual even to the mundane.

When I grasped the significance of his words, I spent weeks meditating on it. Did I just forget? For how long was I asleep? What could I do to bring it back?

It’s an effort that doesn’t end, just changes forms over the years. Even after achieving enlightenment. Most enlightened people I know can’t get over the Buddhist dogma that there is no self and nothing to achieve. Silliness. You still have agency and the present moment. That means you can still find something to do. So what happens is enlightened people will fill up Internet message boards all yakking their heads off about how they aren’t really a person and don’t have any goals. Yeah have fun with that.