Many spirituals ask themselves how to reach enlightenment. After researching and watching a good number of enlightened souls evolving over the years, by looking into their soul's awareness levels and soul's evolution, and also studying the enlightened souls in the past, I reached a synthesis of the main ways for reaching enlightenment.
The ancient quest of How to reach spiritual enlightenment? finds its answers below, and lets you choose your own path toward spiritual enlightenment.
First Path: Just live your life fully aware
The first way to achieve enlightenment is the normal path as per intended by God: just live your life fully aware that you are a soul using a body to experience life! This is something you feel is true from within you. Truly live it, not just as an intellectual piece of information from a book.
Therefore, to achieve this, one needs to:
Take a moment to observe every experience in your life. This is a great way to learn and raise your awareness.
When you feel a reaction from your body, like fear, hate, greed, or lust, try to stop and think about what your soul is telling you. Then, do what needs to be done in the Now moment, with Integrity.
Accept people and events around as they are without judging, but always learn from them.
Live your life as if everything is Connected, not Separated.
You don't need to worry about meditation or spiritual procedures on this path.
This path was followed for instance by the Indian hero Rama (his life described in the Ramayana), a fully enlightened soul, who lived sometime before 1000 BCE. He just went with the flow of events, did what needed to be done even if he had to battle, didn’t judge anybody, accepted events as they came (and he surely went through hardship!) but stood his ground with compassion and determination.
Second Path: The spiritual Path
The second way is when you realize that the normal path described above isn't right for you. That's when you start looking for props like spiritual procedures: meditations, initiations, sacred music, mantras, mudras, asanas, and so on.
The main general things to do on this path are:
Create Stillness in you, and cultivate Mindfulness
Connect with your Higher Self
Cultivate Compassion for yourself and others
Go within through Meditation & Prayer
Acknowledge your Limiting Beliefs and release them
Merge with the rest of Creation and become One with it
Do good Deeds and also give further what you gained on your Path
If you go through the above things you should go through the following steps:
3. chakras opening
6. kundalini energy reaches 7th chakra,
7. reaching enlightenment
Sure there are many other smaller intermediary steps, but these are the major ones. When walking this path the role of a spiritual master (guru) is fundamental for guidance. A vast literature is available about the subject so I won’t elaborate further.
Examples of people getting enlightened this way were Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Vivekananda, Yogananda, and some others.
third Path: The devotional path
This path of Devotion is about letting go of your initial destiny as a soul on this planet and dedicating your life to becoming one with a higher, more enlightened soul. With time and dedication, you can become that soul. In other words, the enlightened soul replaces the original soul in your body, and you become enlightened.
In this case, it's not your original soul that goes through spiritual awakening and soul growth over time based on his efforts and endeavors on the spiritual path, but another already enlightened soul that comes down and from now on takes over your body.
An example in the 19th century is the great spiritual master Ramakrishna who was enlightened like this by devoting himself to the deities Kali, Rama, and Krishna. He also went through all sorts of yoga schools and tried several religions, but basically he walked the devotee path.
Conclusion
The main three ways on how to reach spiritual enlightenment depicted above assume, in different percentages, the need for a soul to release his limiting beliefs in his subconscious. His progress on the spiritual path of becoming united with the rest of Creation is possible only by releasing the attachments he has.
I noticed that many spirituals work for years and even decades practicing meditation, sacred rituals, grounding procedures, and so on without actually raising much of their spiritual awareness just because they neglected the above.
From my observations, paths 2 and 3 can be mixed generally, but the first one, the “normal one”, stands alone for me.
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You can learn more by reading other posts on this spiritual site that are coming from a very different and fresh angle than spiritual mainstream, and based on a very long and personal experience and hands-on research, and not from books.
You might also consider a service like Psychic Readings in the Services section of this site from the ones listed here and get a spiritual diagnosis, Healing limiting beliefs, or Compatibility for lovers, or attend my spiritual School of Body and Soul Ascension Mastery so to raise your body and soul awareness and reach into higher dimensions.
Learn and research a lot of knowledge around you to gain spiritual enlightenment. flappy bird