Enlightenment vs Awakening: Are they the same thing?

[UpperMaster]

I'm a complete spiritual newbie. Thanks to Leo, I started meditating more seriously and am currently learning about enlightenment work. The more I study about enlightenment, the more foggy my idea of it becomes. Is it a one time thing or a continuous process? Although enlightenment and awakening are often used interchangeably, according to some people, Awakening implies to a single experience of who we really are. Whereas enlightenment is this final destination, where we eternally merge with our "true nature".

Yogis like Sadhguru among others discuss this, presenting the spiritual process as this "ladder" that we climb. Experience after experience, we reach the top. The final step according to him is "true enlightenment". He explains that most people wont be able to handle this, and immediately leave the body as it happens.

I'm mad confused right now. Someone, enlighten me.

[VeganAwake]

It depends on who you ask.

Awakening can seem to have many different experiences like becoming more aware of the minds constant chatter or how often thoughts are focused on the past and future..... essentially how conditioned the thought patterns are. There can seem to be heightened senses of awareness and or mystical experiences of the connectedness of everything. In other words there can seem to be all kinds of Awakening experiences in "someone's" life. The key point is that an Awakening will always seem to occur for a "someone". It's a very personal experience!

Enlightenment on the other hand is the end of the personal experiencer all together or rather the clear recognition that the personal experiencer simply never was. It's the end of reality being experienced as an "individual" moving through time and space from birth to death. But it's not a gaining or attainment at all, it's a falling away of that which was never real. And it seems to actually be fairly rare. 

♥ 

 

[Leo Gura]

I don't use the term enlightenment any more. I just speak of Awakening and God-Realization, which are identical. But there are many kinds and degrees of Awakening.

See my video: The Many Facets Of Awakening.

My highest Awakenings are so conscious that you cease to exist as a human. You become an infinite singularity of pure consciousness. At that level no world exists yet you are fully omniscient. There are many degrees of Awakening before that, and many different flavors of it. So it cannot be boiled to a few stages.

Edited August 29, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Joel3102]

I think enlightenment means an actual stabilised state of no self/oneness that you’ve permanently realised (yes I know technically it’s not permanent)

[axiom]

Awakening - in the way that Leo describes it - involves you becoming directly conscious of the infinitude of yourself. 

Enlightenment has many definitions so it’s hard to pin down exactly what is meant by this term. But if we go with the Zen Buddhist ox-herding fable / pointer, enlightenment is about the complete loss of self.

The basic idea of this kind of enlightenment is that the self places a veil over reality. The self gets in the way of reality. When reality is seen with no self (no “you”) standing in the way, everything suddenly has an aliveness, a freshness, an immediacy. In this new context what was formerly seen as a hand is now a HAND. It is not even seen. It just is.

In my opinion, both of these apparently dissimilar ideas are absolutely identical. The differences are semantic only.

Non dualists and Zen Buddhists will talk about “no self”, yet what they point to is actually God. Infinity. Consciousness. What is.

And from the other side, God is indeed no self, since it encompasses everything. It is a singularity wherein no differentiation of “self” can exist.

God is everything. God is nothing. Everything is God, and nothing is God.

Edited August 29, 2022 by axiom

[Kamo]

On 8/29/2022 at 2:28 AM, Leo Gura said:

I don't use the term enlightenment any more. I just speak of Awakening and God-Realization, which are identical. But there are many kinds and degrees of Awakening.

See my video: The Many Facets Of Awakening.

My highest Awakenings are so conscious that you cease to exist as a human. You become an infinite singularity of pure consciousness. At that level no world exists yet you are fully omniscient. There are many degrees of Awakening before that, and many different flavors of it. So it cannot be boiled to a few stages.

Would you say existing as that infinite singularity is emotionally challenging? Like does the mind literally not care anymore about the human life it was existing as prior to entering that state? Does it wonder if you will return, does it just forget about it all together?

[Breakingthewall]

this whole awakening thing is something new that is possible thanks to psychedelics. before the 5 meo the issue was about people who had had some spontaneous occasional awakening, or who had read about enlightenment and were looking for it through a long and hard path. enlightenment implies letting go of your ego forever, killing the self. something karmic that only happens if you are destined for it, 99,9% of the wannabe never get ir. The enlightened one, after years of searching, lets go of the self in eternity and becomes a being without desire, without attachment, who lives as an absolute without even understanding how a separate being once felt. without caring about his body or his material survival, completely unlimited, but alien to the human. Probably he spends his life meditating in solitude. For him, anything is equal to anything else. Awakening as leo says, is that one day, you, that egoic guy who could never opt for enlightenment  in a thousand lives, takes a psychedelic and became the absolute for 5 minutes. this is a huge difference to not doing it, but after those 5 minutes you go back to being the unenlightened egoic individual, like leo, and you explain your story by conceptualizing everything, as leo does. 

It's much better to me the Leo's option than being enlightened, since you are still playing the ego game, but you have seen what it really is. the absolute will arrive, since it is reality, but why not play the ego while it exists? It is beautiful and challenging. should not be despised. seeing the absolute sometimes widens, enriches, the game of the relative. kill the relative and become absolute and return to bliss meditating sitting... so why did you create the game? let's play the best we can. the absolute will arrive

Edited August 31, 2022 by Breakingthewall

[Leo Gura]

14 hours ago, Kamo said:

Would you say existing as that infinite singularity is emotionally challenging? Like does the mind literally not care anymore about the human life it was existing as prior to entering that state? Does it wonder if you will return, does it just forget about it all together?

There are no emotions there, and nothing human. You become a metaphysical singularity of Love.

[JuliusCaesar]

In my own experience, the concept of awakening points to God-realization and not much else. Enlightenment, however, seems to be a very general relativistic notion. Derived from the Latin word Illuminatus(meaning the one who has the light, light being a metaphor for knowledge), it basically means that you know what the ignorant masses don't know. And are therefore considered to be wiser than they, because they live in the dark.

 

So we could say for example that atheists are in a sense more enlightened than traditional religionists because they don't believe in all the fairy tale nonsense of such organizations. We could also say, that Leo is more enlightened than an atheist because he doesn't believe in the myths that they do(eg human consciousness originating in a physical brain, dreams being unreal etc). So you see, you're only "enlightened" in comparison to others who are not. Whereas with awakening, well you wake up and "others" don't really exist anymore. So they're two very different concepts as far as I can tell. Though you might say that one who is awake is also enlightened because others are not awake.

[Kamo]

10 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

There are no emotions there, and nothing human. You become a metaphysical singularity of Love.

Thats profound as fuck anything can induce a state like that. 

[eputkonen]

@UpperMaster

Enlightenment, awakening, liberation, and self-realization are all synonyms for the same thing.

[JuliusCaesar]

On 9/1/2022 at 4:06 PM, Kamo said:

Thats profound as fuck anything can induce a state like that. 

It's profound as fuck anything can become anything when you realize that nothing actually exists.

[Zigzag Idiot]

There are many good excerpts. I just picked the first one under each term.

Quotes about Enlightenment

https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/enlightenment

 

Different Conceptualizations of Enlightenment

Actually, there is no universal or agreed upon definition, or even understanding, of the concept of enlightenment. Different traditions use the word differently. Different teachers refer to different realities when they use it. And most people have not the vaguest idea what they are talking about when referring to enlightenment. Sometimes enlightenment means the attainment of a certain stage of Being. Sometimes it refers to a certain insight, perception or understanding. Sometimes it refers to a certain stage of inner development, usually the final stage, which becomes problematic since different traditions take different conditions to be the final stage. Sometimes it signifies the transcendence of ego, other times the death of ego, still other times the transformation of ego... The concept can be useful only in a teaching that defines it very specifically. But we cannot use the concept assuming it means the same thing in all teachings or traditions.

Pearl Beyond Price, pg. 182

 

Quotes about Awakening 

https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/awakening

 

Appropriating the Capacities of True Nature

Thinking that realization happens because “I am stepping aside” is the same thing as thinking that realization happens because “I am meditating.” Both positions take awakening and illumination to be a result of something we are doing. This becomes problematic because it prevents reality from revealing the fact that true nature is always the illuminator. It is the light that illuminates. It is the awareness that discerns. It is the knowledge that knows. The self or the individual or the practitioner doesn’t have these powers, doesn’t have these capacities. And when we use the ordinary style of language—where the subject doing the action is always an “I” or a self—we are appropriating the capacities of true nature. As I said, from the nonhierarchical view, we see that reality does appear this way sometimes, but if we assume that this is the only way that reality is, we limit our experience of reality and miss all kinds of freedom and fun.

The Alchemy of Freedom, pg. 92

[Kamo]

3 hours ago, JuliusCaesar said:

It's profound as fuck anything can become anything when you realize that nothing actually exists.

Yeah that goes without saying huh? lol. It really is interesting to think about that.