The effect of a significant insight or awakening moment is that it frees the mind from attachment. Enlightenment experiences are not defined by a temporary sensation, pleasant feeling, perceptual distortion, or acquired knowledge; the experience is defined by a transformation of mind
I don’t think that we should seek insights or awakening experiences in meditation. Instead, we can clean up the mind. There are a lot of things that we can do to develop the mind. We can concentrate it if it’s distracted; we can purify it if there is a problem with our actions; we can strengthen wholesome intentions and abandon unwholesome ones. As concentration and wisdom builds we will understand the subtle workings of the mind. A concentrated and clear mind inclines toward peace, therefore, meditators may explore this trajectory (מסלול) until they realize the vast and unmistakable peace of nibbāna.
The effect of a significant insight or awakening moment is that it frees the mind from attachment. Many people have pleasant and sometimes wondrous experiences in the course of their meditations, but superficial experiences may later be reduced to a memory, a story of something that happened a long time ago, or an attribute of a “newly awakened personality.” If the mind wasn’t actually purified in the process, I wouldn’t consider it an awakening experience.
The Theravada tradition presents a system of sixteen stages of insight that culminate in four stages of enlightenment. The progression begins when the meditator sees the arising and passing of material and mental phenomenon very clearly. Clarity mounts as the meditator perceives the danger inherent in all forms of attachment; disenchantment and dispassion strengthen; and at some point the mind may turn away from conditioned phenomena to realizes the deathless element—nibbāna. This is the moment that I would call awakening; the tradition identifies it the Path Moment, and it is immediately followed by a Fruition Moment. This realization has the quality of a vast, profound, all pervasive, and unshakable peacefulness and has an immediate and enduring effect—the weakening or eradication of ten fetters that defile the mind. It also seems to bring a striking quality of equanimity, purity, and internal balance to all aspects of life. Enlightenment experiences are not defined by a temporary sensation, pleasant feeling, perceptual distortion, contact with a famous guru, or acquired knowledge; the experience is defined by a transformation of mind that eliminates the impurities of greed, hate, and delusion. The experience of nibbāna serves a function; if it doesn’t do its job, then I don’t consider it a significant experience.
The first stage of enlightenment eradicates the belief in an existing self or soul, attachment to rights and rituals, and doubt regarding the efficacy of the path. The second stage of enlightenment weakens the fetters of sensual desire and all forms of aversion. The third stage of enlightenment eradicates hate and greed. And the fourth stage, which is synonymous with complete awakening, occurs with the eradication of five more fetters: 1) attachment to the pleasure associated with fine material jhāna, 2) attachment to the immaterial attainments, 3) the conceit “I am”, 4) restlessness, and 5) ignorance. It’s not possible to “be enlightened” or “awakened” and still have anger, greed, selfishness, or egotism overtake the mind, whether the awakening occurred spontaneously, through defined meditative stages, or through the blessings of a guru. Experiences of worth will weaken and eventually eliminate the defilements.
In the first few years of my practice many personal insights about my patterns and ways of being in the world transformed the choices that I made, how I used my mind, and how I lived. These personal insights had the effect of bringing my worldly actions into alignment with my spiritual aspirations. Although important to my personal growth and spiritual development, they are not what the Buddhist path points to as liberating insight or awakening experiences.
For me, more impersonal insights tended to occur after interest in those personal insights settled. While sitting and watching the mind in a simple and bare way, observing the breath, body, sounds, or any perception arise and perish, it became obvious that there was no self to be found in the mind-body process. Whether I was sitting in meditation or actively engaged in the world I found only momentary process that arose and passed away. There was nothing that I could call me, I, or mine. This sort of impersonal insight greatly heightened my dedication to dhamma in the 1980’s.
When I met H. W. L. Poonjaji (Papaji) in India in 1990, he quickly settled my mind into a perception of the emptiness of all things while talking with me in his living room in Lucknow. It felt like an altered perception that lasted for many years. My mind was light and clear, and functioned well in the world, both when I was in Asia, and also back at home in California, but nothing seemed to have any solidity or density. For example, I recognized a table, a car, and a cabbage, and would use them appropriately, but I did not perceive them as having any solidity. Everything appeared as just concepts that represented things that were in a continuously state of flux. I knew what my social responsibilities, commitments, and duties included, and I performed family and work tasks effectively. I could function well, because the concepts were clear, but each moment of seeing, hearing, feeling, and tasting was known right in the moment of contact, as ephemeral and completely devoid of any reference to me. It was a surprisingly different way of being in the world. I felt light, buoyant, and unperturbed by any event, whether I was bargaining in an Indian bazaar, cleaning closets after my father’s death, driving to work, cooking dahl, or sitting at the feet of my guru. I told Papaji that it was as though he had stolen the subject away from the object in my mind and had never given it back. After some years, the “I” formation started to occur again, and perceptions began to appear dense. The blissful and buoyant quality of awareness diminished and I perceived things more concretely. Self-concepts now arise, but my mind has seen things from another perspective long enough that it just can’t believe anything is solid, fixed, or self-existing. There was a definite shift in the way I understood phenomena, and so this might be called an awakening, but there is much more work that still needs to be done.
Whether the awakening experience occurs through an immediate and intuitive experience that happens with a guru or a systematic meditative technique that develops through sequential stages, once the mind turns to the deathless element (nibbāna) it goes beyond concepts. No concept will touch it, and any attempt to describe it can at best only point toward it.