I’m starting an awakening group for people seriously interested in enlightenment. It will meet twice per month for an hour and provide instructions and guidance on how to “get there.” In that spirit, I may write on this topic for a while. If you’re interested to join the group, email me directly.
Enlightenment looks impossibly rare partly because most people have never been taught the practices designed to produce it.
That may sound provocative, especially to people who have spent years meditating. But the fact that someone has practiced for ten, twenty, or thirty years without awakening does not necessarily tell us how difficult awakening is. It may tell us something about what they have been practicing.
Meditation has become enormously popular in the West over the last half century. Millions of people have discovered that sitting quietly, paying attention, and becoming less reactive can improve their lives. That’s valuable. But as Eastern spiritual traditions entered Western culture, their practices were inevitably interpreted through Western concerns. Meditation became associated with relaxation, stress reduction, acceptance, letting go, emotional regulation, and the cultivation of peaceful states.
None of those things are inherently problematic. They simply have nothing to do with enlightenment.
The distinction is critical because a practice should be evaluated according to what it is designed to accomplish. If you practice meditation primarily to become calmer, you may become calmer. If you use it to regulate emotion, you may become better regulated. If you practice concentration, your capacity to concentrate may improve. But none of these outcomes necessarily challenge the identification with mind that awakening fundamentally concerns.
This confusion has helped create several persistent myths about enlightenment.
Myth #1: Meditation Is About Clearing the Mind
One of the most common misconceptions about meditation is that the objective is to stop thinking. The meditator sits down, discovers that the mind continues producing thoughts, and concludes that meditation is going badly. Practice then becomes an attempt to suppress, control, or escape the very activity one is supposed to be learning to observe.
Thought is not the problem. Identification with thought is the problem. It’s a content/context confusion.
Ordinarily, the distinction between the two is almost invisible. A thought appears and immediately becomes my thought. An interpretation appears and becomes what happened. A judgment arises and becomes what I believe. A story about myself appears and becomes who I am. The contents of mind are continually converted into identity without the conversion itself being noticed.
Meditation for awakening is not primarily concerned with eliminating those contents. It develops the capacity to experience them without automatically becoming them. Over time, this can create an experiential distinction between awareness and what appears within awareness.
It is easy to understand this intellectually. Someone can agree that “I am not my thoughts” and remain completely identified with thought. Awakening is not produced by adopting the correct proposition about consciousness. The distinction has to become automatically experiential.
This is why meditation is considerably more demanding than the popular image of sitting quietly and letting everything go. Attention must become sufficiently stable and precise to observe identification as it occurs. The mind is not being cleared, but rather its operation is becoming visible.
Myth #2: Meditation Is Primarily a Relaxation Practice
Meditation can be relaxing, but relaxation is not a reliable measure of whether meditation is working. Serious practice can produce peace, but it can also expose anxiety, agitation, boredom, grief, fear, confusion, and deeply defended structures of identity.
If the objective of meditation is relaxation, discomfort naturally appears to be failure. If the objective is awakening, discomfort may sometimes indicate that practice has reached something important.
This is one of the consequences of turning meditation into a form of state management. The practitioner learns to prefer spaciousness to contraction, quiet to thought, equanimity to agitation, and transcendence to ordinary consciousness. Practice becomes increasingly sophisticated, but its underlying structure may remain unchanged: there is still a self attempting to manipulate experience into a condition it prefers.
The deeper question is not how to produce a better state of consciousness, but what exactly requires consciousness to be in a particular state? Who or what is that?
That question changes the purpose of meditation. Instead of continually adjusting experience, practice begins exposing the organization that is trying to control experience. This is much closer to the original problem enlightenment addresses.
Myth #3: Meditation Alone Is the Whole Practice
A major distortion in popular Western spirituality has been the disproportionate emphasis on meditation while radical inquiry has remained comparatively obscure. Different Zen traditions have preserved inquiry to different degrees, particularly through kōan practice, so it would be inaccurate to say that Western Zen simply abandoned it. But the meditation that entered mainstream Western culture was largely separated from rigorous investigation into the nature of self.
That separation is vital because meditation and inquiry perform different functions.
Meditation develops the capacity to observe mind without automatically following it. Inquiry directs that capacity toward the assumptions through which identity is constructed. Rather than asking how to improve the self, inquiry investigates what this apparent self actually is.
Who is thinking? What makes a thought mine? Where is the one having the experience? What exactly is being referred to when the word I is used? Can the entity that appears to stand behind experience actually be found?
These are not philosophical questions intended to produce clever answers. They are instruments for directing attention. The purpose is not to develop a more sophisticated theory of self, but to investigate directly whether experience contains what the mind continually claims that it contains.
This is why inquiry becomes uncomfortable. The mind is extraordinarily capable of discussing itself while protecting the assumptions on which its identity depends. Genuine inquiry does not merely add spiritual concepts to that structure. It turns attention toward the structure itself.
Meditation without this investigative dimension can become highly refined state cultivation. A person may become calmer, more concentrated, more emotionally regulated, more spacious, and more compassionate while remaining fundamentally identified with the same apparent self who began meditating decades earlier.
Those changes are worthwhile. They simply should not be confused with awakening. They are an identity improvement instead of a deconstruction.
Myth #4: Enlightenment Is a Special State
The idea that enlightenment is a permanent spiritual state creates another obstacle. Enlightenment becomes imagined as continuous bliss, unconditional love, perfect equanimity, cosmic consciousness, or some luminous condition in which ordinary human experience has disappeared.
This is understandable because meditation can produce extraordinary states and they are easy to sell. People can experience profound silence, boundlessness, unity, emptiness, ecstasy, or love, and such experiences can radically alter their understanding of reality. But an extraordinary state is still a state, and states change.
If enlightenment required maintaining a particular state, it would merely replace ordinary dependency with spiritual dependency. Instead of requiring money, approval, romance, success, or comfort in order to be okay, the practitioner would require peace, spaciousness, bliss, or transcendence. The object of attachment would have changed while the underlying organization remained intact.
Enlightenment, as I teach it, is not the acquisition of the ultimate state. It is a fundamental change in self-identification that leads to a freedom from all states.
This does not mean that an awakened person never becomes angry, frightened, sad, tired, confused, or psychologically reactive, nor does awakening confer omniscience or psychological perfection. Human experience continues, but what changes is the degree to which identity is confined to the content of the experience, and you don’t realize how claustrophobic this is until you’re no longer in it.
This distinction also explains why attempts to cultivate enlightenment directly can become self-defeating. If enlightenment is imagined as a state, the practitioner continually compares present experience with an imagined spiritual ideal. The very self whose apparent solidity is supposed to be investigated becomes the manager responsible for producing enlightenment. This squarely inhibits awakening.
Myth #5: Enlightenment Takes Decades
Perhaps the most consequential myth is that awakening necessarily requires decades of practice. This assumption has become so deeply embedded in spiritual culture that longevity itself is often treated as evidence of seriousness. Someone who has meditated for thirty years is presumed to have undertaken more profound work than someone who has practiced intensively for three.
But duration tells us very little without knowing what was practiced.
Someone can practice a musical instrument incorrectly for twenty years. The persistence is real, but the duration does not establish that competent playing requires twenty years. It may demonstrate that repeating the wrong movements does not reliably produce the intended result.
The same possibility should at least be considered with spiritual practice. If someone spends twenty years cultivating concentration, relaxation, emotional regulation, acceptance, or pleasant states, and awakening fundamentally concerns disidentification from the constructed self, then the relevant question is not why enlightenment failed to appear after twenty years. The relevant question is how much of those twenty years was actually spent investigating identification.
This does not mean enlightenment is easy. Serious practice requires sustained attention, commitment, honesty, and a willingness to investigate structures of identity that the mind has spent a lifetime protecting. At certain points, the work can be extremely demanding precisely because what is being questioned is not merely a belief but the apparent location from which beliefs, choices, relationships, and experience itself are organized.
But difficult does not mean slow. As any musician knows, practice doesn’t make perfect: perfect practice does. The time horizon of awakening can be radically reduced through efficient practice.
The assumption that it must take decades may itself be partly produced by a culture in which relatively few people are practicing directly for awakening, usually and tragically without realizing it.
The Circular Myth of Rare Enlightenment
There is a peculiar circular logic surrounding enlightenment. We observe that very few people appear to awaken and conclude that enlightenment must be extraordinarily difficult. Because we assume it is extraordinarily difficult, we accept practices that may remain indirect for decades. When those practices rarely produce awakening, their failure becomes further evidence that awakening must be extraordinarily difficult.
The conclusion may be correct. But there is another possibility worth investigating: perhaps the system is producing exactly the results its practices would predict.
Teach meditation primarily as relaxation and people will become better at relaxing. Teach it as concentration and they will become better at concentrating. Teach it as emotional regulation and they may become better regulated. Teach spirituality as the cultivation of preferred states and people may become remarkably skilled at producing those states.
If the objective is awakening, however, practice must eventually confront identification itself. Meditation must develop the capacity to observe mind without automatically becoming it, and inquiry must direct that capacity toward the mechanisms through which the apparent self is continually reconstructed.
This does not require adopting any beliefs whatsoever. You do not have to believe there is no self, that consciousness is fundamental, or that Buddhist philosophy correctly describes reality. In fact, replacing ordinary beliefs with spiritual beliefs can become another way of avoiding the investigation.
You have to look.
That is the radical simplicity at the center of awakening practice. The mind would often prefer a spiritual philosophy, a transcendent experience, or a thirty-year project of self-improvement to direct investigation of the one who supposedly needs to become enlightened. The evidence demonstrates it.
Practicing for Awakening
This is the purpose of the meditation and awakening group I am putting together. The work will not be about relaxation, clearing the mind, manufacturing transcendent experiences, or maintaining spiritually desirable states. Those experiences will occur, but they are not the objective.
We will use meditation to develop the capacity to differentiate awareness from the activity of mind, and inquiry to investigate the structures through which identification is continually produced. The work is experiential. The point is not to acquire the correct philosophy of enlightenment but to become increasingly capable of examining what is actually happening in consciousness.
Eventually, conceptual understanding reaches its limit. You can understand everything I have written here and remain exactly where you started. Awakening requires something more direct: sustained contact with experience at the point where the mind can no longer answer the question of what you are by referring to its own contents.
When the mind is shown what it cannot do, again and again and again, eventually a kind of dam breaks, and you are never again the same.
Enlightenment may be rare. But before concluding that it must take decades to attain, we should ask a much simpler question: How many people have actually been taught to practice for it?