Enlightement experience: how to get it?

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Everybody says: oh yeah,
that sounds like that's great for me.

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Let me become enlightened

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and it's not an easy process obviously.

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Buddhist monks spend 30,
40 years trying to achieve

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enlightenment and some do
and some don't.

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So there's no one size fits
all it's not, there's no guarantee

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but part of what we
have learned again by looking

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at this survey and thinking
about this process, is:

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one you have to want to have
some change occur in your life.

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And whether that is just to
become a more open individual

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whether it is, you know, we all are
living through our brain.

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Our brain is interpreting the
world around us and it's doing

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the best job it can.

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But it's a scary
world out there.

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And we have no real way of
knowing if what we think

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on the inside is accurate.

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So the idea of can we learn
about the world in a different way

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and make that kind of a
change is an important one.

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Part of the Enlightenment
process is to find the ritual

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that ultimately,
the process that ultimately

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works best for you and whether
it is a spiritual or religious approach

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through a tradition
that a person grew up in,

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whether it is a new approach
that they hadn't tried before

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maybe they were Catholic and
they decide to try Buddhism or

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something like that or maybe
they're Buddhist and they just

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try to follow the
path of Catholicism.

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But the idea that you
look for that path that is

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individualised to you and for
any given individual

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the experience of enlightenment can
be many and varied,

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and for some people it is
within a religious tradition

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for others it is through their
own private practice of

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loving kindness meditation,
mindfulness, some other prayer

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practice or something
like that.

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And some people that just had
some walking down the street!

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Now I mean obviously those are
the people who kind of

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win the lottery so to speak.

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But there are ways of trying to
purposely work towards those

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experiences and ultimately try
to release oneself from that,

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that whole process so that one
gets to an experience of

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enlightenment and sees the
world in a different kind of way,

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and I think that even proceeding
down the path itself is part of how

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our brain starts to incorporate those
kinds of ideas and feelings

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and we begin to learn about other

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ways of thinking about the
world and being open to them.

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So it's a complex path but it
is a path that certainly I think

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is worth following.

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Whether one ultimately
gets to enlightenment or not

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may not even
be the final word.

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It's really the path itself
that becomes so powerful and

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changes the person's brain and
changes the way they think

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about the world.

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We also spoke about the idea
that part of what happens in

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the context of these very
intense enlightenment

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experiences is that you feel as
if you are not making them

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happen, you're sort of
surrendering yourself

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to these experiences.

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Well the frontal lobe is what
helps us to feel like we are

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purposely engaged in something
that we're purposely trying

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to do something.

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And so when we look at the
frontal lobes what we see is

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that when a person starts to
feel that sense of surrender,

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that they're not making it happen,
these areas that are mostly

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in kind of a red and sort of
intense yellow area

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these areas start to quiet down,

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now it's almost in these green
kind of colors,

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as the frontal lobe shuts down
we lose our sense of

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purposefulness our willfulness
and we feel a sense of

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surrendering to that experience.

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Our study for example of
Islamic prayer showed these

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very specific kinds of changes
and of course in Islam,

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the whole concept is the
notion of surrendering to God.

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And so we see this kind of
decrease of activity in the

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frontal lobes that seems to be
associate with very intense

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Islamic prayer as well as other
types of practices where

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the person feels that
they are surrendering

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their own wilfulness,
their own consciousness

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to the belief, to the tradition
that they feel connected to.