Awakening Explained: Why Enlightenment is Both Sudden and Gradual

Is awakening sudden or gradual?

When I was studying Buddhism several decades ago, I came across this debate in Mahayana Buddhism: that between the school of sudden enlightenment and the school of gradual enlightenment. I'd like to bring the two together to settle an old, two thousand year old or at least thousand year old debate:

I think both are correct.

My argument for sudden awakening is that, because awareness is ever-present and just behind the content of our experience, it's always accessible. So, a novice or a veteran can get there at the same pace. You just drop everything that is not awareness, and there you are. You have to know how to do it or else you luck into it. But it's always right there, that kind of awakening that resting in awareness, direct path kind of awakening is always available and can happen to anybody at any time in seconds or less.

On the other hand, integrating that resting in awareness into your daily life, I believe for most people, is a gradual process. I would also say for most people, it is a process that is ongoing.

Why is it gradual and or ongoing? Well, it's gradual because it actually takes some practice to break the old habits, at least again for most of us. So, changing a deeply ingrained habit to get caught up in the content of my life experience, as opposed to resting and awareness being the primary habit, can take time, takes most of us time to kind of practice, right, this is how I tap into resting and awareness throughout the day and every day.

Why ongoing? Awakening is ongoing because the cultural and social messages that we keep getting, the cultural and social messages that generate an absorption in the content of our experience keep coming at us through all sources, in person and online. They're constantly coming at us. And so there's a practice that most of us need to engage in to not only protect ourselves from being shaped profoundly by these external messages that are designed scientifically to shape us.

Awakening can be sudden because it's here all the time. And it's ongoing, both because we need to break old habits and because we need to consistently push gently against those influences that would have us lose track of the resting and awareness and get caught up, entangled with the content of our experience.

So yes, awakening is sudden and gradual.

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