Is enlightenment real? (Part 1) - by Joseph Everett (WIL)

Over a year ago I was talking with a friend of mine about learning and improving Japanese. Just as we were wrapping up, he asked me “have you heard about the subreddit /r/streamentry?” I said No. He followed up with “Essentially there’s these non-monk guys who think the Buddhist concept of enlightenment is in fact real… and they’re dead set on achieving it.” This really piqued my interest because as a kid who was exposed to a reasonable amount of Zen Buddhism, I always thought enlightenment and “the end of suffering” sounded like a pretty sweet deal. (I also thought it meant you’d get some magic superpowers.) However, as far as I remember, Zen was not very helpful in understanding exactly what it was or how to do it. The stories of people becoming enlightened weren’t very helpful either - so and so gets enlightened while sweeping the steps of the temple, so and so child gets enlightened after the master cuts his finger off… I asked my friend to elaborate and he said something along th

Over a year ago I was talking with a friend of mine about learning and improving Japanese. Just as we were wrapping up, he asked me “have you heard about the subreddit /r/streamentry?” I said No. He followed up with “Essentially there’s these non-monk guys who think the Buddhist concept of enlightenment is in fact real… and they’re dead set on achieving it.” This really piqued my interest because as a kid who was exposed to a reasonable amount of Zen Buddhism, I always thought enlightenment and “the end of suffering” sounded like a pretty sweet deal. (I also thought it meant you’d get some mag