Is It a Long Road to Enlightenment?

I'm not saying that enlightenment is easy. In this article, I am proposing that its underlying mechanism may be far less complicated than the enormous philosophical and metaphysical structure that has been built around it.

Hear me out.

When I began writing How We Are Here, I did not begin with a clearly organised philosophy.

In fact, I didn't begin by writing a book at all.

I had started exploring ideas, making notes, asking questions and trying to put into words things I had been thinking about for a long time. There were observations, experiences, things I had read, things I had rejected, and things I sensed but could not yet properly express. Some of it fitted together. Some of it did not.

Only after some time did the thought occur to me that there might be a book in all of this.

Once that happened, I began organising these different thoughts around what eventually became How We Are Here. And in doing so, something else happened: the philosophy of the book itself began to take shape.

Writing the book became part of the process of sorting through all of this.

That seems appropriate for a book that places so much value on not knowing.

I did not begin with a conclusion and then write a book to support it. Much of the understanding developed through the writing itself.

Only after the book was finished did a question occur to me that seems, in retrospect, almost embarrassingly obvious:

What actually makes an awake person awake?

Or, if we want to use the larger and more troublesome word:

What does it mean to be enlightened?

The word carries an enormous amount of baggage. Different spiritual and religious traditions use it differently. It can suggest the end of suffering, the dissolution of the ego, liberation from rebirth, union with God, recognition of one's true nature, nondual awareness, or the discovery of some ultimate reality.

Those claims take us very quickly into territory that cannot easily be established through direct experience alone.

I went looking for a clearer definition. What exactly do Buddhist traditions mean by enlightenment? What do Hindu traditions mean? What do contemporary spiritual teachers mean when they use the word? The more I looked, the clearer one thing became: there is no single, universally accepted definition of enlightenment. Different traditions describe different attainments, different transformations and, in some cases, very different ideas about what is ultimately being realised.

So rather than choosing one tradition's definition and treating it as authoritative, I would rather say plainly what I mean when I use the word.

For me, enlightenment means being at peace with what is.

Whatever experiences may be possible beyond our ordinary state of awareness, most of us spend our lives here. We return to the body, to other people, to work and relationships, to uncertainty, disappointment, illness, ageing, loss, and also to pleasure, love and everything else that makes up an ordinary human life. This shared reality of form is where our lives unfold. It is also where most of our suffering takes place.

If enlightenment has any meaning for me, it must therefore mean something here. Not escaping this life, transcending it, or learning to spend more time somewhere else, but being able to live fully within it.

This does not mean that nothing difficult happens anymore, or that we passively accept everything that happens. There will still be pain, loss, conflict and circumstances that need to be changed. Being at peace with what is means no longer fighting the fact that, at this moment, this is what is. We can still act. In fact, we may be able to act more clearly when we are no longer fighting reality before responding to it.

And if that is what we mean by enlightenment, a much more practical question appears:

What skill does an awake person actually have that another person does not?

I think the answer may be surprisingly ordinary.

An awake person may simply have become very good at recognising what is happening within them while it is happening. A thought can arise without immediately becoming a fact. An emotion can be fully felt without necessarily determining the next action. An old pattern can begin to unfold and be recognised as an old pattern. A belief can be held without being confused with knowledge.

None of this sounds particularly enlightened.

In fact, most of us already do it.

We have all caught ourselves worrying about something that has not happened. We have realised that we were angry about something other than the thing we were arguing about. We have discovered that something we were absolutely certain of was wrong. We have sometimes noticed a reaction beginning and decided not to follow it.

So perhaps the difference between an ordinary person and an enlightened person is not the possession of some mysterious capacity at all.

Perhaps it is largely a difference of how reliably and how early this recognition happens.

So perhaps it isn't really a skill that an awake person possesses and another person does not. Perhaps awakening is the development of a capacity we already have.

Almost everyone can recognise a thought as a thought, notice an emotion while it is happening, catch themselves reacting from an old pattern, or realise that something they believed with complete certainty was wrong. The capacity is already there. What changes is how developed it becomes: how readily, how clearly and how early we recognise what is happening within us, and whether that recognition remains available when we need it most.

Someone may recognise an angry reaction the following morning. Someone else sees it an hour later. Another notices it after the first angry sentence has left their mouth. And occasionally we notice it as it is forming.

The difference is not that one person possesses something the others lack. The same human capacity has developed to different degrees.

But what if the essential movement is not towards somewhere else?

What if it is simply the movement from being completely caught in what the mind is doing to recognising what the mind is doing?

That can happen in an instant.

A thought says, She doesn't respect me.

One moment I am inside it. It is simply true.

Then something changes.

I am having the thought that she doesn't respect me.

The situation itself has not changed. The thought has not even disappeared. But my relationship with it has changed completely.

Psychology has rather unromantic names for this. Researchers speak about meta-awareness, decentering, cognitive defusion and dereification. The terminology differs, but these concepts circle around something remarkably similar: the ability to experience thoughts and feelings as events occurring within us rather than automatically treating them as accurate descriptions of reality or of ourselves.

This is where the question becomes interesting.

Because if that capacity is central to what contemplative traditions have called awakening, then we may already possess the thing we imagine lies at the end of the road.

What so often prevents us from being at peace with what is?

It is not only what happens. It is what the mind does with what happens. Thought tells us what it means. Emotion responds to that meaning. Old conditioning enters. Beliefs tell us how things should be. Fear projects what might happen next. Desire insists on what needs to happen instead. The body carries and reinforces the whole reaction.

If all of this happens without being seen, we live from it.

But we have a capacity to see it.

We can notice thought while thought is happening. We can feel emotion without immediately becoming its story. We can recognise a belief as a belief, notice what fear is projecting, feel what is happening in the body, and gradually distinguish what is actually here from everything we have added to it.

Perhaps awakening is not the acquisition of a new skill at all, but the development of this capacity we already have.

And now the original question begins to look different.

If enlightenment means being at peace with what is, and the capacity that allows us to move towards that peace is already present in us, then perhaps enlightenment is not a distant place at the end of a spiritual road.

Perhaps the road is the development of that capacity.

Perhaps meditation, contemplation, self-inquiry and other disciplines do not take us towards some distant thing called enlightenment. Perhaps, at their best, they help develop and stabilise a capacity that is already present.

And perhaps this is also why there can be no simple dividing line between an awake person and everybody else.

Awakening may not be binary.

The capacity can become more developed. Recognition can come earlier. Identification can weaken. Reactions can lose some of their automatic authority. We can become increasingly able to see what is happening within us without immediately becoming what is happening within us.

That does not make us immune to anger, fear, grief, jealousy, desire or confusion.

It may simply make us a little less blindly governed by them.

Which brings us back to the road.

Perhaps the road is long, but not because enlightenment is far away. The road is long because recognising what is happening once is easy; living that recognition when we are frightened, hurt, angry, threatened, in love, grieving or absolutely certain that we are right is something else entirely.