The Path to Enlightenment: Models & Chronicles

Let’s talk about the path to enlightenment, including the common models for it, how it is largely consistent from one spiritual system to the next, and a little about my own path thus far, which entails nearly a decade of meditation and teaching.

Notice that you can use any term that you want for enlightenment, from any spiritual system: awakening, union, God, grace, Nirvana, Heaven, moksha, cosmic consciousness, and so on.

Common models often present enlightenment as a process that involves certain stages. We’ll also take into account the opposite perspective, held by several heavyweight schools like Soto Zen and Dzogchen, the latter considered the pinnacle of all Buddhist teaching.

And undoubtedly, one’s own spiritual path reflects both of these models. Your innate enlightened mind is always already present, and always has been: “when I was enlightened, not one single thing was obtained that wasn’t already in me”, said the Buddha in the Diamond Sutra.

But in reality, people must walk a path, getting closer and closer, then deeper and deeper, to conscious recognition of this fact. I encourage you avoid trying to intellectually understand how enlightenment is both a process and an inherent state. It sounds paradoxical, but the two facts support one another. Only by walking the path to enlightenment can you realise that there was no path to walk.

Common Models of the Path to Enlightenment

Let’s begin with two highly reliable models for the path to enlightenment, seen as a journey with milestones along the way. Note that there are many, many such models from different systems East and West, modern and ancient.

The Ox-Herding Pictures (Representative of Mahayana View)

The ox-herding pictures are like the Zen version of the Hero’s Journey. They describe our journey from ignorance and suffering to permanent enlightenment and its fruits. Thanks to Shinzen Young for this illuminating presentation on these pictures.

In these pictures, the boy goes from searching for something, to finding the ox’s footprints, to glimpsing, to catching, then to riding, and then to riding the ox back to where he lives. This story represents both the process of understanding consciousness, and of enlightenment, since they’re the same. Of course, this is all metaphorical. Let’s not fall into mythic interpretation.

We cover the first seven, because they describe the path itself. There are three further ones that describe the form, appearance and purpose of enlightenment.

1. Searching for the Ox: The ox doesn’t appear in the picture: the boy is seen searching around him, looking for something. This represent our state of being lost in appearances, in Samsara, in the unenlightened mind. “Everybody’s looking for something,” and failing to find anything permanently satisfying.
   
2. Seeing The Ox’s Footprints: The boy sees the ox’s footprints on the ground. This represents one’s first encounters with spiritual practice, when we hear about the possibility of enlightenment.
   
3. Seeing the Ox’s Tail: In the pictures, the boy sees the ox’s backside and tail. This is when we have an intuition or transient glimpse of nature of consciousness, of what lies beyond our habitual self-identity.
   
4. Catching the Ox: The boy catches the ox, though it still runs wild on a rope, and the boy struggles to control it. This represents our first deep insight into no-self and “no-thingness”. Enlightenment is now within reach.
   
5. Taming the Ox: The ox now walks behind the boy. This is when the insight follows you and doesn’t slip away.
   
6. Riding the Ox: The boy mounts the ox and calmly rides it backwards while playing his flute. As Shinzen Young says, “Enlightenment is like continually falling off a cliff, and being completely comfortable with that. A great and powerful beast carries you… It’s a falling, but it’s a falling up.”
   
7. Carrying the Ox Home: In this picture, the boy is lying down at home. The ox is gone. This is complete enlightenment, or final repose. All that remains is who you really are.

The State-Stages (Also Representative of Mahayana View)

I learned these state-stages from Ken Wilber, who in turn adopted them from Daniel P Brown’s work. Brown extensively studied major meditative traditions across the world (including but not limited to Buddhism) and deduced a series of five stages common to them all.

1. Gross Waking: In the Waking state, we’re exclusively identified with the physical body, the rambling mind and our emotions: “I’m hungry,” “I’m sad,” “I’m tired”. Buddhists use the term “Monkey Mind” to describe the chaotic mental chatter from this level – we’re lost in the past and future, worries, dreams, regrets, thought patterns, catchy tunes and crazed monologues. Observe your own mind carefully. You’ll find all it’s concerned with is the physical world and all the drama that being a self entails.
   
   
2. Subtle: After some experience with meditation, our sense of self expands from the Waking self into the Subtle self. The monkey mind calms down, making way for deeper insights, intuitions, wisdom and loving-kindness. You may experience spells of profound mental quiet, experience less suffering and torment, and sense that past and future are but a dream.
   
   
3. Causal: As we further identify with the Causal, our attachment to the Gross body-mind weakens, and Subtle features, such as intuition, insight, connection and bliss, increase. Mental calm becomes more constant, as we would expect. The Causal is home to the subtlest objects we can be aware of: subtle sounds, lights and shapes that appear in our consciousness.
   
   
4. Witness: The Witness state is home to the realisation of Emptiness and Nothingness: the pure, featureless awareness that grounds everything we experience in the senses. It has no colour, no shape, no sides, no boundaries, no time, no inside and outside. Instead, it effortlessly Witnesses all of these features. We remain, unshaken, grounded in this pure Seer.
   
   
5. Non-Dual: At non-duality, there is no sense of a separate Seer witnessing thoughts, emotions and sensations. That Seer collapses into the flow of our senses. We’re no longer on the bank of the river – we’re in the river. We realise we are not separate from anything in our awareness. There is both the radical freedom from the Witness stage and a Single Taste of not being separate from anything.

Dzogchen (Represents the Vajrayana View, or the Pathless View)

Dzogchen is the pinnacle of Tibetan Buddhism, and often considered the greatest set of Buddhist teachings. It’s a direct non-dual pithy path that works top-down, swooping down from above, rather than building up from the ground like most other Buddhist traditions.

Since it’s a Vajrayana school and part of the Third or Fourth Turning of the Wheel of Buddhism, it views the path to enlightenment not as developing through stages, but as recognising our inherent pure presence and Buddhaness. It’s often called “the pinnacle of all vehicles”. It’s the sister practice of Mahamudra, which is a down-up approach.

My Dzogchen teacher, Lama Surya Das, says that enlightenment is both a process and an inherent state. It’s about going from here to truly and completely here; we are there while we get there. We awaken from the dreamlike daze of the Default Mode Network and our limited, egocentric perception. We go from attachment, aversion and blindness to true vision.

My Path to Enlightenment

I find the ox-herding pictures to be a good model for my own path to enlightenment. When I started meditation, I felt unsatisfied with my life, and had for a while. I’d been through a difficult period not long before I started, and had always been caught up in addictions of different kinds, always looking for something, always looking for the next thing, always seeking and always desiring more.

Quite quickly after taking up meditation, I knew that I’d found something powerful and that I was ready for it. I felt that I was coming home, in a way, even if I didn’t understand the depth of what I was glimpsing at the time..

And quite quickly I started having glimpses into the nature of mind and into my true self, my true being. In the first couple of years I had many such glimpses, and they have stayed with me. Once you have a glimpse or two, you can’t forget.

I actually had a few very deep experiences early on. They weren’t permanent, but they were very powerful, and looking back, those experiences have guided me and shown me the potential for this work.

They’ve reminded me not to get fixated in a certain place, not to think that I’ve completed the path to enlightenment. I must keep going and keep immersing myself in the teachings.

And in the last two or three years, it has all started to stabilize. I don’t want to say I can’t live without meditation, because that doesn’t really sound right. It’s more that life and meditation seem totally intertwined: I can’t have one without the other.

Even in the last couple of weeks, I feel like I’ve gone into a new state of consciousness. When I remind myself very briefly to see through the illusion of separation and of being trapped in my body-mind, I immediately tap into who I really am. Then I just rest in that, and it is so delicious and so fulfilling.

I’ve also realised that this is what the path to enlightenment is all about. It’s about resting in this place and forgetting about the seeking and wanting something else. This is really what we want. We want this deep sense of inner peace.

And it’s not sugary or New-agey, but very tangible, very embodied. It’s realising that no matter what’s happening in your life, you already are this pure beingness that you cannot grasp or hold on to in any way.

You cannot contain it. And yet at the same time, it completely overpowers any illusion or any sense of grasping or any desire you could have for anything else. By resting in that place, you rest in inner peace and contentment no matter what’s happening.

And literally in the last couple of weeks, I feel like my connection to that has gone to a new level. In terms of the ox herding, I’m probably about to ride the ox backwards. I sometimes do, but certainly not all the time.

And I think my Dzogchen meditation has been a big part of that. I’ve been practicing this form of meditation since January this year, and it points directly to who you are, to this knowledge as best as it can. It points you right there. And the more I practice it, the more I can rest in who I really am.

You might like my video on why enlightenment is not serious.