There are many viewpoints expressed by 'experts'
about what enlightenment is and how it happens...
One of the great problems among seekers
is identifying with the manifestations of enlightenment
and assuming that this is what it means or looks like...
There is enormous confusion amongst seekers and even teachers
about the many possible manifestations of enlightenment.
-Richard Rudd
There are different levels of enlightenment.
-Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
Every time a little piece of the cosmic puzzle falls into place,
we experience a kind of enlightenment.
Enlightenment is a bringing to light
of that which was previously hidden -
the triumph of understanding over ignorance.
There are few people who have never experienced
some form of it in the course of their own lives.
Little enlightenments like these
are added to the personal matrix,
and every so often they fold in on themselves,
creating a quantum leap of understanding.
This is a slightly greater "aha," the grasping of a cosmic truth,
a moment of extreme clarity or a penetrating insight.
And these "medium sized " enlightenments
also add together until they form still higher understanding,
and on and on it goes to infinity.
-Anodea Judith
Mystical experience can also be mistaken for awakening.
There are many types of mystical encounters and visionary states
that occur to human beings all the time,
but awakening is to something entirely different from these.
Many of the greatest mystical visionaries
and even the great revelations or systems that come through them
still do not touch the field of awakening.
-Richard Rudd
Heightened spiritual states often include periods of blissfulness
that can last days or even months.
None of these experiences can be compared
with the actual enlightened state itself.
-Richard Rudd
Encountering the Absolute
is still not enlightenment.
-Sandokai
The experience of the mind dissolving into the Self
is not the same as Enlightenment.
Enlightenment is the state when this unbounded awareness
is maintained at all times,
during the states of waking, dreaming and sleeping,
no matter what the mind and body are doing.
Just as it takes time to integrate this expansion into everyday life,
so that is never lost.
Enlightenment comes from the alternation
of the completely settled mind and ordinary activity.
In this way the Eternal gradually infuses the world of time.
-Alistair Shearer
Full enlightenment -
in which one's entire being becomes permanently diaphanous
to the "light" of ultimate Reality -
is, as I understand it, an exceedingly rare event in human history.
-Georg Feuerstein
