Why is spiritual enlightenment so trendy at the moment?

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To be frank about it, it’s because it’s easy for Westerners to fool themselves into believing that Buddhism isn’t a religion. They think the achievement of enlightenment is a personal development project, not a project of focused and intense mystical religious study and meditation.

Enlightenment, the setting aside and deprioritization of the self as a primary determinant of meaning in life, is nowhere near simple or easy. It’s achieved through a process called surrender. What are you surrendering and who or what are you surrendering it to?

Simple, you’re surrendering the self to something bigger than you. It doesn’t matter what you call it. The self wants things that are smaller than it. Sin places things above people. Instead of a wonderful, happy, engaging relationship, people want controllable pawns they can move around on their board of life.

How do you stop yourself from doing this? Not by doing anything normal. Not even by doing some not-so-normal things.

No, what you need is to master a specific process. A process by which you fail, learn why you failed, then surrender the part of the self that caused that human failure to crop up. It’s not going to stop you from failing in the future, but if you master the process, you can slowly reduce the “cycle time” between doing something wrongful and surrendering the aspect of self.

The major bottleneck in this process is, well, the whole process. How do you learn what part of the self you need to surrender? Where do you get that information from? Reading books is way too slow and the information is limited to what humans can articulate and convey.

You need a source of guidance that you can access at will. Otherwise you’ll never get from “smart human” to “enlightened human”. This is where the meditation and mysticism comes in. When you meditate on yourself, you contact some aspect of yourself that provides answers to the things that ail you.

At some point you realize that this thing you’re contacting can’t completely be within you. Meditation smoothly segues into mysticism, the cultivation of belief in something external, yet bigger than the self. You have to surrender materialism and rationalism along with everything else. If you don’t then you can never seriously call yourself enlightened. You’ll keep hitting the ‘rational’ block over and over and over again.

Christians have already figured out this surrender process, and just call the thing they’re surrendering to Jesus. It’s the exact same thing. In fact, every single spiritual process and framework and religion eventually reveals itself to be a process of surrender, just with different themes and myths.

Enlightenment fashionistas believe they can achieve what Christians and Buddhists work hard, every single day, 100% of the day, to achieve. They refuse to believe in anything, and so won’t ever even find the first step, much less even get started.