What is the single most important thing to do to become enlightened?

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I’m going to say something that most people in this space will never tell you.

Most people who try to get enlightened aren’t going to get enlightened. That’s not the thing people won’t tell you. In fact, that’s common knowledge. What’s not common knowledge is why they never get enlightened. The common answer is that they just don’t bring enough effort to the table.

But the real answer you never get, that will get you censured if any “enlightened sages” ever try to be real about this, is that most people simply aren’t capable of applying the effort needed to become enlightened.

This should, if you think hard about it, and be rational, shouldn’t be a remotely controversial statement. But religion, and make no mistake, Buddhism is a religion, is predicated on the fiction that its fruits are available to everybody. Anybody can build a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Anybody can become a Buddhist. Becoming a Buddhist isn’t the same as becoming enlightened.

But Westerners are spoiled and not used to hearing no. If you don’t tell them what they want, they’ll go find someone else to tell them what they want to hear. Some Westerners want to hear that they’re already enlightened, no need to do anything, and, well, sure. Whatever. You’re enlightened, take the Bodhisattva Vow and just get out of my hair.

These Buddhist sages, conditioned to telling Westerners that they’ve already achieved the goal that they seek, and taking their money for it, have ruined it for any Westerner who wants the real deal. Westerners are prone to want rational ways to get what they want.

But the pursuit of enlightenment is not a fundamentally rational process. It’s not the same as learning how to get rich. If you want to get rich, then you have an easy metric by which you can tell that you’re not actually rich yet. The big piles of money, you don’t have them yet, so obviously you’re not rich.

Not so with enlightenment. Nobody can tell you that you’re not enlightened if you’re dead set on telling yourself that you are. There’s no giant pile of cash that actual Buddhists can point to that you don’t actually have. Worse, you can’t point to a guru’s giant pile of enlightenment cash to tell whether or not you should be listening to them or not.

If you really, actually want enlightenment, you need to throw your rationality out of the window and just go by your gut. Your gut is going to tell you what the right way to go is. And if you can’t tell your ego from your gut, then you need to throw away the worst part of your ego’s reactions to things, and that’s its tendency to be negative about the process you’re following.

There’s a reason why Zen Buddhist literature strongly features masters beating seekers with sticks. It’s because they wouldn’t actually listen to their masters any other way. Corporal punishment wasn’t the first choice here, it was the last. If you can’t tell the difference between proper and wrong ways to go, can’t listen to your own inner guide, then the only possible remaining guide for you to follow is external.

If you can’t even follow an external guide, much less an internal one, then you simply don’t have a prayer of ever actually achieving enlightenment in this lifetime.