Excuse the extreme headlines, my main purpose there is to bring focus to the main points I'd like to illustrate. I'm quite suspicious of the activity, believing that most people have have simply been indoctrinated into it including this idea of enlightenment.  Enlightenment as I can tell, as purely as I can describe it, is simply the absence of a perceived self however people make it much more than this for some reason. Why should meditation and the absence of thought be the only means of achieving this state? Why can't a certain kind of way of perceiving and conceiving of the world be a means of achieving this state?

It seems that there's a huge culture in the spiritual community that create unquestionable social norms around both ideas, norms which are antithetical to the idea of not being ruled by ideas which of course, originate from thought. What I also notice is a strange relationship with the conceptualisation in relation to the idea of absolute truth, negating ideas around absolute truth even though to negate in such a black and white fashion is an absolute truth in itself. Truth seems to be placed in this weird dimension of being purely relative, which again in itself is another absolute truth that is preached even though both coexist. It seems its a duality I notice in the community that people are not aware enough about. This strange relationship that people have with truth only being relative is also ironic in the case of people having extreme views pertaining to enlightenment such as it can only occur in the absence of not believing in thought and through extensive meditation. How can one get away with creating absolute truths when one believes that truth is relative?