Enlightenment: What is it? And What Causes It?

I have been having discussions on an internet forum where enlightened people hang out, discussing what enlightenment is, the process by which it happens, the effects of awakening, and how awakening produces those effects. With that knowledge, it is possible to understand how different meditation and spiritual practices help cause enlightenment. With the knowledge of how different practices cause enlightenment, each person can choose or develop a practice that works for them - a practice they think they will be able to stick with because it is congenial and meaningful to them.

Based on those discussions I have put together the following:

Enlightenment Is Giving Up Your Concept of Self

• The source of unenlightenment is a person's mental model of self that develops in stages from infancy to adulthood. At a certain age an infant develops the ability to recognize objects, later it understands the objects continue to exist even if they are out of sight, later it learns to recognize itself in a mirror - it understands itself as an object, at a later age it understands it can influence the environment around it. Step by step the concept of self is constructed.
  

  Meditation and Spiritual Practices Help You To Give Up Your Concept of Self

• Meditation and spiritual practices help produce awakening by helping a person to realize their mental model of self is constructed.
  

  
  

  When You Give Up Your Concept of Self, You Realize You are Just Awareness Observing, You Stop Distinguishing between Self and Not-Self, and You Stop Overreacting to Emotions That have Ego at Their Root.

• When a person sees how their mental model of self is constructed, it no longer filters their view of reality. They realize they are just awareness observing events in the environment around them and thoughts, emotions, and impulses that arise spontaneously in their mind. And they no longer make a distinction between self and non-self, they feel that there is no distinction between them and the universe and everyone and every creature in it.
  

  Like the optical illusion below which can be seen as a duck or a rabbit, the new way of seeing reality was there all along, it is just a different way of seeing the same thing.
  

  
  

• The "suffering" that awakening "cures" is our overreaction to emotions. Awakening does not end emotions it changes our understanding of them in a way that stops us from overreacting to them. We see that emotions arise from the unconscious unasked for, uninvited, they exist for a time and fade away. They have no permanent existence. They are not true, or real or reality. They are subjective, they are illusions.
  

• When the mental filter of self is removed, "suffering" is also diminished because the roots of all that overreacting are perceived threats to the self (to the ego) such as being insulted, losing, being embarrassed, not having what someone else has, someone else having what you think should be yours, etc. etc. When the filter of self is absent, there is no ego to react emotionally. The result is a profound equanimity.
  

  How Meditation and Spiritual Practices Help Free a Person From Their Concept of Self:

• Practices can help a person to give up their constructed filter of self in various ways:
  

  • Allowing yourself to feel emotional pain is the way to let go of it and that weakens the ego (the feeling of self). For example, if someone says something nasty and a person relaxes and observes the emotional pain, letting themselves feel all of it without looking the other way, the pain lasts a short time and is gone and they don't feel any need to react defensively or vengefully because their feelings are not hurting them. Like if a child having a temper tantrum says "I hate you", the parent laughs it off. If there is no emotional pain, there is no ego.
    

    The same applies if you lose in a game or in some competition, if someone makes you feel inferior, if you are embarrassed, in any situation where ego is normally involved. Ego is really a reaction to hurt feelings. If your emotions are not a problem for you, there will be no ego arising.
    

    When you observe the activity of the mind you are "lucid". Like in a lucid dream where you know you are dreaming, and in a regular dream you think it is real, when you observe the activity of the mind you know you are just observing the activity of the mind, otherwise you are immersed in your thoughts, emotions, and impulses and you think they are real. You can learn to be lucid when ever possible (through sitting meditation and mindfulness in daily life) so that you do not become immersed in thoughts, emotions, and impulses, so that they do not take over your mind. When you are immersed in emotions and they take over your mind, you think the problem is what caused the emotion and you focus on that as a problem needing a solution. When you are lucid, you realize the problem is your overreaction. You can let yourself feel emotional pain (which is how you let go of it) without overreacting or becoming fixated on the external cause of the emotion.
    

  • Practices that quiet the mind slow down the mental processes and make it possible to see more clearly what is happening in the mind.
    

  • Practices that induce relaxation can help you let go of emotional pain. When we feel emotional pain, we become tense as the body reacts to stress. Relaxation turns off the body's response to stress reversing one of the effects of emotional pain helping us to let it go.
    

  • Types of meditation that produce pleasant emotions can help you let go of emotional pain. Pleasant emotions produced by meditation can alleviate emotional pain making you more willing to allow yourself to experience it.
    

  • Observing the activity of the mind:
    
    • Can help you notice when emotions are produced by thoughts and that these emotions are accompanied by sensations in the body - tensions which if relaxed helps you to let go of emotions.
      

    • Helps you see that emotional upsets have ego at their root.
      

    • Allows you to see that you are just awareness observing thoughts, emotions, and impulses, and events around you. Ordinarily you are immersed in your thoughts, emotions, and impulses. They seem to be reality. Immersion creates an illusion that they are yours, that they are part of you. Particularly if you are thinking - trying to solve a problem, it seems like you are intentionally producing thoughts. But if you observe your mind so that you are not immersed in thoughts, emotions, and impulses, and observe the thoughts, emotions, impulses arising in your mind, you see that they arise from the unconscious, exist for a time and pass away. They are not really you or yours. You are just awareness observing.
      

    • When you observe everything that appears to your consciousness: sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions, various other kinds of feelings, impulses, and intentions, you may also notice the cause and effect relationships: sense perception - recognition - thought - emotion - impulse - intention - action. If you are immersed in this process, it seems like you are in control. But if you step back and just observe this process, it seems like it goes by itself. You see that when you are immersed, the "self" exists, but when you are just observing, there is no feeling of self. This is how the sense of self is produced and how, by observing the activity of he mind, you can learn to see reality without the filter of self. From this you realize that your inner reality is a creation of the mind and you are no longer attached to your emotions, you see they are not you or yours, and you no longer overreact to them.
      

    • Shows a person that if they look closely they cannot find a self anywhere they look for it.
      

    • Helps a person to get closer to a state of consciousness without the mental filter of self.
      

  • When mental activity is greatly reduced during some types of meditation (for example: concentration meditation, or self-enquiry) , the action of the filter is also greatly reduced and it can help you to see through the filter of self.
    

• Each person should choose the type of practice they feel is most congenial and meaningful to them.
  

  Three aspects you shoulder consider are:
  

  • Relax. You can meditate in a way that is relaxing.
    
  • Stay lucid.
    
  • Allow yourself to feel emotional pain.
    

  (These ways of being are not just for meditation sessions but for daily life as well.)

  • Relaxation:
    
    • Turns off the body's response to stress, the fight or flight response. This prevents some unpleasant emotions like fear and anger from arising.
      

    • One of the effects of emotional pain is stress. Turning off stress helps us to reverse the effects of emotional pain which helps us to let go of it.
      

    • Relaxation helps prevent overreactions to emotional pain.
      

    • Relaxation helps to prevent you from suppressing thoughts and emotions. Suppressing usually involves some type of tension. Relaxing prevents this.
      

    • The importance of learning to relax should not be overlooked. No practice can guarantee that any particular person will become enlightened, but almost everyone can learn relaxation and experience great benefits from it.
      

  • When you are lucid:
    
    • You can relax and allow yourself to feel emotional pain (which is how you let go of it) without overreacting and without becoming distracted by fixation on the external cause of the emotion as a problem needing a solution. Being lucid reduces "suffering" by eliminating emotional overreactions, and it weakens the ego by allowing you to let go of emotional pain.
      

    • When you are lucid, you are not immersed in thoughts, emotions, and impulses, they do not take over your mind, you do not feel like thoughts emotions and impulses are you or yours, you see reality without the filter of self.
      

    • By contrast you also see when you are immersed in thoughts, emotions, and impulses, the belief that they are reality, that they are you or yours, is how the mind produces the feeling of self.
      

    • When you are lucid, you can see that sense perception, recognition, thought, emotions, impulse, intention, and action and the cause and effect relationships between them are a product of the mind. You see that your inner reality is a creation of the mind. When you see this, you are not attached to emotions and you do not overreact to them.
      

  • Allowing yourself to feel emotional pain is how you let go of it. As explained above here and here, letting go of emotional pain:
    
    • Reduces suffering by reducing your overreactions to unpleasant emotions.
      

    • Is equivalent to letting go of attachments and aversions.
      

    • Helps to reduce the ego because most emotional pain has ego at its root.
      

• You can understand the reason awakening is so difficult to achieve by considering what it would take for you to respond with equanimity to assaults to your ego - to react with equanimity to losing your job, breaking up a relationship, being embarrassed, etc. etc.
  

  Fear can also be an obstacle to awakening. The thought of really experiencing oneness, of not making any distinction between self and not-self, of not making any distinction between yourself and other people, can be frightening.
  

• After a person first sees that the filter of self is constructed (the first stage of awakening in Buddhism), the effects are large and permanent even though the person still has a lot of work to do to stabilize that view to make it a persistent state of consciousness. This process has different names in different traditions, Buddhists may call it awakening or enlightenment, in yoga it is called self-realization, in Zen Buddhism it is called understanding your true nature.
  

(I would like to thank those enlightened beings who so kindly answered my questions. If I have accidentally misrepresented anything they have said the fault is entirely my own.)

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