What are some details about enlightenment, as your faith and belief systems explain?

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I’ll start with the history and then move into the technical.

The concept of enlightenment germinated in Iron Age India, and slowly emerged over the course of a thousand years. The concept didn’t acheive much definition until the 4th-6th centuries, when the sramana traditions were established. Each tradition codified a particular approach to achieving enlightenment.

The established tradition, named for the spiritual texts that organized them, the Vedas, was the ‘hedonistic’ way, practice of which was very like other mainstream religious traditions in the world. Sramanas, in general, wanted more austere, compressed ways of escaping samsara, the cycle of death and life that characterizes Indian cosmology. Lot’s of people just weren’t satisfied with the status quo.

The Buddha, after his awakening, journeyed around and tried out different sramana methods, finding them to be largely useless for the purpose of achieving enlightenment. He then advocated for a ‘middle path’ between the austere sramana methods and the more traditional, millions-of-lifetimes conception, settling on meditation as the method. A lot of people agreed and now Buddhism is one of the largest spiritual traditions in the world.

Let’s deal a little with the West-East connection before moving on. As early as 200 AD, prominent Romans were aware of the basics of Indian religious philosophy. Once discounted by historians, the idea that Christianity and Buddhism informed each other and that there was a lot more cross-regional dialogue than previously thought. We think of them all as backwoods farmers, but in fact travel was somewhat common, common enough, and the philosophical ideas simple enough, that all of these ideas sort of emerged together in the collective mind. The big difference in theology between the two, is that while the sramanas generally avoided theism, (most of the Vedic faiths accepted it, theism often ends up being coopted into the political realm) Christians doubled down on Jewish monotheism.

This is a lot of setup to talk about Buddhist soteriology, what we call enlightenment. The reason I spent four paragraphs on it is because if you want to orient yourself properly, you need to look out onto the horizon and find things that don’t move no matter how far you walk and in what direction. And to look deeply at the human condition, to try to get anywhere regarding the thing we call enlightenment, how humans have grappled with it is super-important. I could continue the history to present day but instead I’ll just skip to the technical. The following are general facts gleaned from personal study and practice, aimed at guiding a Western-minded seeker into a practice that’s more conducive to spiritual achievement.

Enlightenment is a mental state. It is not constant no-mind or any of that nonsense. It is not a binary state. Meaning that you’re not either enlightened or unenlightened, you’re somewhere in between. However in order to discuss the topic productively, we need a guidepoint, an artificial ‘finish line’. So while everyone is enlightened to a degree, not everyone has reached any given guidepoint, so people that talk about enlightenment tend to refer to something called nonduality as a convenient finish line. It’s a difficult to discuss, but ultimately simple concept, which I talk about in many of my answers.

Meditation is useful for two purposes. Getting to know your mind, so that you can push it along to enlightenment, and also because it’s initially how you process an awakening event. Being able to push everything out of mind and focus on something is a crucial skill. Any time you can cultivate quiet, contemplative space to do inner work, you’re plugging away at the mental walls that keep you from nondual perception. It doesn’t matter what you do, contemplate astrological signs if that’s what interests you. Until you have an awakening, where the spiritual and mundane invert, there’s no way to meditate too much. If you’re feeling stuck, find something to read to give you some fresh ideas.

Meditation all by itself can create enlightenment. But it’s a lot harder than you think. Mastery is just the first step. If that path is for you then it will call you, you won’t be able to keep yourself from reading about new ways to meditate, then trying them out. What usually happens is people just fall away from spirituality back into the mundane. Simply forgetting to keep pursuing your spiritual path is why most people never get truly oriented and make progress.

There’s a motivation issue to solve. It’s not easy to keep meditating when you’re not ‘feeling it’. If you can’t bring yourself to do direct practice, at least keep reading and studying. In truth, most people that want spiritual attainment, are really just looking for the ability to concentrate and make continuous, visible forward progress on a goal of their choosing. We all want that flow where everything just works, and effort put in equals reward received.

This is where maps come in. Imagine a topographical plane. Your spiritual self exists on it, and you can make delineations on it like, ‘Christian believer’, or ‘received these kinds of Zen satori’. If you haven’t done any practice, then it’s small, undeveloped, and doesn’t see anything but the deep dark hole it’s in. Everything you do at the beginning is to crawl out of the hole. The reading and studying isn’t going to help you out of that hole. It’s for people who have already crawled out of it to make sense of the huge world they suddenly find themselves in once they do.

It literally doesn’t matter at all what you do to crawl out of it. It’s just effort, effort to pull you out of the gravity well of your own laziness. If you pull yourself out using a methodology you later hate, it’s way easier to change it after you’ve pulled yourself out rather than to think one methodology is better than another. If you built a rowboat to get you across the river to your bigger boat, you don’t start taking apart the rowboat while you’re on the water because it’s not as nice as your speedboat!