A while ago, a monk told me confidently that a spiritual guru who was well respected in my community, was definitely not enlightened.
After this I got interested in what people meant when they were talking about enlightenment, so I asked anyone who reported being enlightened to talk to me.
I didn’t only use the E-word; I also asked for people who were awakened, or hit stream-entry, or any sort of intense equivalent spiritual shift. In this post I’m going to use the “enlightenment” word, but keep in mind I’m using this as a word that broadly refers to the “big thing” that people were calling by different names. Most people had a strong aversion or weird reactions to self-claiming enlightenment.
I had in-depth interviews with 20 people; 18 of whom came to me and 2 well-established practitioners who I chased down. I focused on asking questions that teased at the edges of how they understood the state they’d achieved – e.g., “if someone claimed to be enlightened, what would make you doubt them?” I also read several long emails describing their experiences, and did a large survey.
This blog post is very personal – it’s my unique lens on the patterns I heard reported among these people. You might disagree with the way I’ve drawn boundaries around things; if so, I welcome you to do your own interviews and draw your own boundaries! My information is also limited – I pulled a lot of people from the west (though a few did come from eastern traditions). They were also mostly male.
So: What the hell are people talking about?
I made a list of spectrums that summarizes the variance in experience I heard reported:
The Bliss Spectrum: characterized by nirvana, ecstasy, constant happiness. They claimed they had reached a state where they were shivering with delight at all times.
The Mental Health Spectrum: of clearness, purpose-drivenness, fulfillment, being aware of what they wanted at all times, being motivated, healthy, whole. For them, ‘enlightenment’ was working all their personal shit out and having a hyper-functional life.
The Science Spectrum: Intense, awesome scientific epiphany. An awareness of their smallness, the universe’s largeness, deep realizations about being walking matter, of the intricate beauty of evolution.
The Superpower Spectrum: The possession of magic abilities, including being able to talk to beings from other dimensions, telepathy, and receiving sacred knowledge imparted to them from divine creatures.
The Concentration Tricks Spectrum: Intense concentration and mental abilities. They were able to alter their perception, slow time, change the space around them, see the refresh rate on monitors.
No-self spectrum: Altered senses of self; they included inanimate objects or other people in their sense of self, or had no sense of self at all. This includes ego death.
Understanding Spectrum: A general spiritual epiphany; people reported a sense of completion, of having ‘no more questions’, of finally comprehending what’s going on, of nonduality, of wholeness.
Wordless Spectrum: An altered or unusual relationship to words, typically distrustful or disconnected; playing with words, going meta with words, not using words, not-claiming, claiming contradiction and paradox.
Perception Spectrum: Seeing your experience as your own; experiencing yourself as inherent and integral to the experience; a realization that your brain is constructing things, often associated with dreamlikeness.
Morality Spectrum: An intense sense of an ethical direction; describes a ‘right’ or ‘moral’ direction, uses goodness as a consistent guiding description of their insights.
Love spectrum: A sense of love and compassion for all living beings
Tradition spectrum: How much they adhere to classic wisdom and beliefs; tends to believe in reincarnation and karma, places authority in the Buddha’s teachings
Disassociation spectrum: Stoicism; the ability to carefully control emotions, independence from environment, remaining unaffected by whims or pain or pleasure.
Peace: A sense of being deeply okay, at ease with the current moment, settled, present, like everything is all right.
The spectrums are probably the most detailed way of summarizing the variance, but if I’m gonna get a little more sloppy, I also binned them into loose groups based on recurring patterns I noticed.
- Material enlightenment – mostly characterized by a lack of spiritual terminology; materially enlightened people did not stray outside of what was explainable by science and didn’t develop any excess beliefs around consciousness. They mostly were high on mental health, concentration tricks, and science spectrums. Some but not all heavy meditators were here; stories of hitting ‘rock bottom’ before their enlightenment were common. Interviews with these people tended to be very clear, and reminded me of an inspirational talk given by a competent CEO at a dinner party.
- Skill Enlightenment – most heavy meditators seemed to group here, and were more analytical and verbally precise. These people tended to have spent a huge amount of time focused on their own minds, and were high on perception and concentration tricks, but also bled a little bit into understanding and no-self too. They were more likely to have distinct vocabularies, and tended to report their states as more episodic as opposed to constant. They generally did not have the sense of wordless self-inclusion that was prevalent in:
- Standard Enlightenment – the most commonly reported type. standard enlightened people reported psychedelic or meditation use. They seemed to be high on the peace, wordlessness, no-self, and understanding spectrums. They’re contrasted to Skill Enlightened people in that they had a chronically difficult time explaining things. There was a lot of stopping and restarting in conversations, and the vibe felt more like fingerpainting to me. They tended to report enlightenment as very mundane and nothing special at all.
- Traditional enlightenment – the least commonly reported type, traditionally enlightened people placed a much stronger emphasis on action and belief than the other types. While there was a greater tendency to be wordless, they also expressed the highest sense of love and morality spectrums. This was the most difficult type for me to understand, and I got the sense I needed more background knowledge to make sense of what they were trying to say; there was a confusing combination of Standard Enlightenment, but built around references to strong and clear belief systems.
Also for all of these spectrums I got a faint sense of there being levels of advancement; e.g., some people reported much weaker sensations around material enlightenment-y things than others did. No one bin seemed to have a more clustered level of advancement than the others; as in, I didn’t notice a distinct cluster where everyone reported similar things and also seemed to be at the same level.
Now, to be clear you shouldn’t take these bins as definitive; for one they’re as much a reflection of me as they are of the people I talked to. Also, the more people I talked to the more I began to realize that there was a lot of variance; someone might agree almost entirely with something I’d heard someone else say, and then have a completely bizarre and unusual thing to follow up.
I also mostly paid attention to the kinds of things people chose to talk about. It’s very likely that e.g., traditionally enlightened people might agree strongly with the no-self spectrum, but in my interviews they talked about it less than the others.
There’s also a few spectrums I didn’t put in bins; either because the sample size was too low, they were outliers, or they were roughly reported equally by everyone.
Most people did seem to overlap bins a little bit. If I had to make this a fun personality quiz, I’d assign one ‘dominant’ bin and one ‘secondary’ bin.
So – how many people were ‘really enlightened?’ The answer is I don’t know, and I don’t care. I interviewed everyone who claimed to be enlightened or some rough equivalent without filtering at all their qualifications. My goal is not to provide a correct definition of enlightenment, it’s to help map out the landscape of the kinds of experiences people are talking about, and maybe provide some more concrete terms for what’s going on.
My dear Aella fabrication and friends,
In my view, this discussion is missing Rob Burbae’s take, e.g. from Document 500 titled „Stream Entry (Part 1) – Conceptions, Value and Realisation“ from https://airtable.com/shr9OS6jqmWvWTG5g/tblHlCKWIIhZzEFMk/viw3k0IfSo0Dve9ZJ
„Last thing. We can turn it around, turn this whole question around, and say, what interpretation – or however I’m interpreting, let’s say, stream-entry or awakening, however I’m framing it, however I’m defining it, and however I’m positioning myself on that scale – “I am a stream-enterer,” “I’m almost a stream-enterer,” “I’m far from it,” “I’m an arahant,” “I’m a this,” “I’m a that” – what way of framing the self and the goal, in this case, what do those framings lead to? In other words, how I think about myself, how I define myself, and how I define the goal – what are the consequences of those definitions? So, “I’m a stream-enterer,” “I’m not interested in it,” “I’m not a stream-enterer, but I’m really striving for it” – to me, the question, or one of the things that’s most important – and again, it’s just me speaking now, and I have that privilege – but to me, what’s actually important about those definitions is the consequences.
Definition of self in relation to this goal, and definition of what that goal is. What do these definitions of self and goal do with respect to my eros? I’m not going to unpack that word, but I mean my infinite longing, the juice, the depth, the mystery, the calling, the vocation, the devotion. What do the ways I am defining the goal, whether it’s stream-entry or arahantship or whatever, and how I’m seeing myself in relation to the goal – what do they do to my eros? What do they do to the directionality and the full-blooded, wholehearted, whole-soul movement of my love and my life? What do they do specifically to my eros for discovery, to discover more? My eros for the poetry of existence? My longing for mystical insight? My sense of the beauty of life and the depths and the ranges of that? To me, that’s the much more interesting question. What happens? A person says, “I’m not interested in it,” as I said, and actually what’s happening is they’ve just shut down that definition, and maybe the reason for that defining has actually just shut down that eros.„
Btw
You’re an excellent writer and unique thinker.
Lot of like to say but, perhaps in good time.
I could write on this for days, and I liked your take, the sections, on this. However, to keep this concise (and I would be glad to give a far deeper response, on not just this but several other posts including the different ones on psychedelics, the sitar accordion one….i played amongst other styles, trad Irish music, and the button accordion, single notes, is a different beast than the “keyboard” one…. And yes, the sitar is an absolute beast. (I performed and taught music at a college for many years, play 5 instruments, studied Vedanta and a big fan of indian classical and carnatic singing).
. Enlightenment, in the Buddha, Jesus Hindu saints, tradition is so rare it’s highly doubtful anyone claiming to be is. (Btw, the tao TE ching is actually daoism/confuciunism. Buddhism reached china after and was called chan… the precursor to zen as it transmigrated east.). The only modern adept/teacher that had a period of this that I am aware of is Eckhart Tolle, but that has lessened . Thich naht hanh, amma, osho, jack kornfield , ram Dass, all had perhaps deeper levels of awareness. Some longer than others. There are many indian yogis in the last century who did.
The word we are looking for, in regards to psychedelics, falling in love, meditation as we experience it in our current consciousness frequency, sexual bliss, creativity espec live music, and states brought on by spiritual practice is the word awakening. Awakening has many levels, signposts for the aha of enlightenment.
But, the trouble with awakenings is most fall back asleep, these are episodic, so big picture progress is more like terraced farming. Go up a little, level off, even maybe go down a bit. Back up etc.
Wow..A very precise taxonomy. You are tripping me sweetheart! I love you..I hope you have stayed safe during the shit.
What I would love to see is a mapping of these categories (which I think are really well synthesized!) to the external fruits of their practice. For the people you interviewed, what relationships do they hold close? Who do they dismiss? Who dismisses them? How do others feel around them, and why do they believe they feel that way? What is the social utility of different categories of self-described ‘Enlightenment’, and how do un-Enlightened devotees tend to interpret the ramifications of their guru’s teaching? Do the answers map cleanly to your categories, or confound them?
Thanks for chasing this question! We are in desperate need of more robust vocabulary to parse through this essential aspect of the human experience, especially in a cultural moment that is leaving so many people grasping for truth.
Hi Aella, i like your journey and the blog, mostly because I went through a similar path.
I was a passionate psychonaut for a number of years, tripping heavy on a weekly basis or more, using every imaginable substance under the sky, in high (sometimes extremely high) dosages.
However, none of it answered my deepest existential question like the moment of stream entry did.
Took me a month and a half of intensive retreat, but it IS possible, and so worth it. it is the single best thing i ever did in my life, and is definitely achievable, it is not a pie in the sky kinda thing. it is like the difference between reading hundreds of books and interviews about the taste of an exotic fruit and actually tasting the fruit itself. a completely different dimension. its not easy and takes some measure of hard effort and time, but it IS possible.
instead of wondering around, speculating and interviewing “others”,
why not see for yourself?
You’ve asked some really good and very effective questions here in your interviews. I wanted to ask, having read this, do you have a methodological structure to your questioning?
There is a group called Street Epistemology that uses a conversational method originally based on the book How to Have Impossible Conversations, and evolved into a structured method of having 1 on 1 conversation with people who hold a belief claim, and unpack how and why they they believe the way they do. Have you seen any of that?
You’ve assembled some interesting groups and spectrums here as well, which are certainly good categories. Within each of these though, maybe we could ask each one how confident they are in their claim of being enlightened, or whether such a concept even exists. So that adds another axis to the graph of each spectrum, how confident they are in their claim introducing a whole host of supporting reasons that might place them in another subcategory. And then finally ask them if they saw conflicting evidence, that they were not enlightened, or they discovered that enlightenment were not possible for whatever reason, how would that affect their belief structure?
That method might help you to suss out the vagaries of the variances you described between persons, as they’re each tackling their doubts and assurances in unique ways, adapting to challenges to the underlying belief. As well as simply a lack of education in the belief, since not all who make a claim are fully versed in the claim they’ve picked up after a few exposures to the concept. Even after decades in a bubble like Naropa in Boulder, Colorado, they may have only been going through the motions, or even having a learning / recall issue they can’t actually call their thoughts to the forefront when having a conversation.
In the case you’re unfamiliar with SE, here are some resources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic8O-m1lAZo
https://streetepistemology.com/
It sounds like something you’d enjoy, even if just to watch the videos with Anthony. Seeing people explain the reasons why they believe what they believe is very, enlightening.
I think this is a very intelligent analysis. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, would proffer it as an example of the left hemisphere attempting to make sense of what it does not and cannot experience.
Really interesting indeed, I definitely want more detail about the interviews and how they fit with your interpretations. Such an engaging read but I feel like it creates an itch more than scratches one for me and I’d love a continuation on the topic, from your perspective.
all related matters to ancient ways to reach something called enlightenment like yoga techniques have been deformed. a tiger is hunted in ancient orient and has turned into a cute kitty to be kept inside home !!
what we call enlightenment is nothing but a weak sense of what is really powerful and even very very dangerous.
for example yoga is just a branch in hinduism religious and this religious have strong twisted root with the origin of Zoroastrianism which has been also partially under influence of all Mesopotamia’s religions.
Yes. The “purity and power” of the original teachings have been manipulated to serve the priestly elite classes, who are placing themselves as mandatory conduits to God consciousness. Also, the teachings were designed for a certain age.
My friend said should come over and read your work. fascinating…. We have been psychonauts for decades and these are the discussions that take up a great deal of our time. Enlightenment is a never reached goal line for most of us, its always the next journey. the second you think your on top of it the universe reminds you thats a fallacy. Then you add the the door openers like LSD, Psilocybin, DMT, 5MeODMT, Mescaline, Ketamine, MDA, and MDMA you have a lot of roads to travel. I find the cliché The more you know, the more you know you don’t know to be the truth. and a few more quotes to trip by. Pain is certain, suffering is optional. and the ever great…… Its better to travel well than to arrive. thank for a fresh voice on many many subjects
The guy in the introductory paragraph was monk blocking. Not cool or very enlightened.
As someone on the spectrum myself, I need to say that spectrums themselves, as abstract objects with particular properties, sometimes don’t work too well. A spectrum is continuous, so you can lie anywhere along it. It’s also linear, so it’s one-dimensional and doesn’t wrap back around on itself. It’s asymmetric too, so one end is different from the other. The last thing is that it’s ordered, so one thing on the spectrum is either to the left, right or the same as another.
But let’s say there’s a kind of enlightenment that’s either “on” or “off” with nothing in between. Or suppose that, for whatever reason, being very enlightened is the same as not being enlightened at all, so that you’re really dealing more with a cycle. Maybe it turns out that there isn’t any particularly compelling way to determine if someone is more enlightened than another, so they can’t even be put on a spectrum relative to each other.
The idea of breaking down “enlightenment” analytically into it’s different dimensional components is a very math-y way of looking at it. It reminds me of finding the components of a vector in physics, or axes in a multi-dimensional space, or phase diagrams in chemistry. That’s genuinely refreshing and I like that. That said, I don’t know if this is a very helpful list. Imagine that there was one kind of enlightenment that would help you become more enlightened in other ways as well. In other words, what if these spectra aren’t independent from each other?
Just some ideas. Hope they’re helpful to you in your making sense of all this stuff.
Funny, I’ve experienced all of your listed spectrums, would I call myself enlightened? Nope. Still got real-life shit to work out, and one of the epitomes of my “enlightenment” is actually that, the fact that we are here for a reason, for learning, and whatever higher spiritual force we hold means shit while incarnate.
Have you by any chance spoken to Byron Katie? She is a sparkling example of a person in peace with the world.
Very interesting, thanks for this. I’ll have to re-read this one a bit later (like is the case with every good article for me) to digest this a bit further.
Where these bins, as you describe them, the result of a gut-feeling after talking to these enlightened individuals or did you also do some encoding and post interview analysis on the recordings / transcripts? This is some seriously impressive theory building here, so very curious to hear a bit about the methods you employed besides interviews themselves!
Self-reporting enlightenment makes me uncomfortable and suspicious—perhaps unreasonably. But I found your investigation nonetheless interesting.
Did you ask about their motivation for wanting to share with you?
If you’re up for some further reading, Daniel Ingram also claims to be enlightened and has a free web book you can find wherein he describes his findings from similar research on the nature of enlightenment. He has been meditating for decades, highly intelligent person, and also very down-to-earth and reasonable, calls bullshit where he sees it. Check it out if ya feel 🙂 It’s called Mastering The Core Of The Buddha’s Teachings (Vol.2) . Thick book, but the table of contents is really good so you can find you way around.
While I’m here too, I must mention Meaningness.com. I’ve been sharing this website with friends and internet strangers lately. It’s another web book, but goes meta with all of this stuff.
I’ll be keeping up with your blog, and look forward to reading the outpoured contents of your inner world.
I have talked to Daniel a substantial amount! He’s great.
Nice. I am a bit of a beginner in this space but it was Ingram’s book I thought of reading your post. So as you were I guess :-).
Did you ask them if there was a moment they became ‘enlightened’ and, if so, what their respective ages were at the time this moment occurred?
I have done some of my own research about this and have a theory, but would like to compare it with your notes.
Why is enlightenment so male-coded?
You guys must listen to Sadhguru. He is a true spiritual guru.
Have you watched the midnight gospel? Definitely has examples of “enlightened” people that fit some of this definitions
Very cool! 😀
Would it be accurate to say that in your estimation Skill Enlightenment is an intermediate between Material Enlightenment and Standard Enlightenment, and that Traditional Enlightenment is like Standard Enlightenment but with a strong emphasis upon the enlightened person’s belief system?
If so I think there would be broadly speaking two potentially overlapping phenomena or mental states discernible in this survey called “Enlightenment”. Reminds me of talk about the differences between Enlightenment in the Western tradition, which is very knowledge-oriented and usually contrasted with the state of ignorance (or just unknowing ignorance) by philosophers, and “Eastern” Enlightenment, which was translated by the same word but I have read may be better translated as “Awakening” or “(Self) Extinction” and which de-emphasises external knowledge and egoic pursuits. Both kinds of Enlightenment value wisdom related to others and the self, however, so there’s room for overlap, not unlike how the Skill Enlightenment folks value action, application, and language as much as understanding and manipulating their own minds and perceptions.
Also, I am curious: would a born-again Christian be considered a reportedly Enlightened person in your survey even if they did not use that terminology for themself? If so that may disprove my hypothesis above that Traditional and Standard Enlightenment be variations of the same phenomenon, as Christianity puts a strong emphasis upon the individual’s soul and the afterlife as opposed to non-self. If so, perhaps “moral and/or religious awakening” would be a third type of enlightenment, like that former slave trader John Newton who became an abolitionist (and wrote the song “Amazing Grace”) after having an epiphany.
In case you haven’t thought about this: one way to check how much your categorization matches the experience people reported would be to send them a validation questionnaire in which they can rate how much they agree with the descriptions.
I am missing page 2.
The idea of multiple dimensions to enlightenment reminds me a lot of Ken Wilbert and his idea that total complete enlightenment is “all states, all stages”. There’s of course a lot of partial enlightenment along the way.
I think enlightenment is more about the alteration of one’s self-perception and emotional norms than anything else. The entire thing smells deeply solipsistic to me and I seriously mistrust solipsism as a rule.
I hope you continue with this. I am particularly interested in the outliers. I thought I was enlightened several times and then it was taken away. I feel like every time I felt enlightened it was akin to getting a new toy. You get really excited and it becomes a sort of self validation but that “new car smell” eventually fades. It can come in waves (from my personal experience). Now I believe I know more than I have ever known and connected more dots than I have ever connected because I feel less grief and more peace but know I don’t know anything. I have a lot that I am learning and I am thankful to have cleared away the ruble of religion and gods. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe in a creator nor do I believe that we are left without guidance. Most of what I have learned isn’t new. They just so happen to resonate with my view of the world as it’s always been.
I wonder if any outliers you have met have the following traits.
1. They do not believe our creator is a god.
2. They do not believe in religions.
3. They do not believe they are enlightened.
Probably the majority of people hit those 3 points you listed.
Thanks. Now I am curious what makes an outlier different. If they are still “enlightened” what exactly distinguishes them?
Like I mentioned in the post, my goal with these interviews wasn’t to count if people were actually enlightened or not, it was just to explore what people meant when they claimed a significant spiritual awakening.
Gotcha.
I liked it, I found it interesting.