In the Direct Path, there are five key recognitions or realizations pertaining to what we might call enlightenment. They are not newly attained knowledges but simple direct immediate insights into what is already the case at the ground of our being. They are the unveiling of our innermost reality, the unfolding of truth at the heart of our experience.
1: Stripped naked of all thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions, we are awareness in itself—awareness at rest.
2: All experience occurs within the space of awareness and is known by awareness—clear, transparent, free, silent and luminous.*
3: All thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions are none other than awareness itself—awareness in motion.
4: Awareness is empty of inherent existence—for awareness cannot be objectified or grasped as an independent separate object or subject of knowledge.
5: Awareness, as described, is composed of idea and language and thus is none other than idea and language.
From mind's perspective, everything happens. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, thoughts, and feelings appear. From awareness's perspective, nothing happens. Silent and still.
All appearances, dynamic and ephemeral, are mind. Mind is empty of self-existence. Emptiness ever manifests, is ever self-knowing. Knowing is never affected, tainted, harmed, or destroyed by all that appears. Knowing is never changed, cleansed, enriched, or magnified either by appearances. Knowing simply is.
Empty and transparent, luminous* and free, knowing is neither this nor that; yet is everywhere neither not this nor not that. Melt into knowing nowhere and now here. Freedom or enlightenment can never be manufactured. It simply is. Awareness is thus too. Unborn. Unmanufactured.
Simply aware being, as a sliver of divine breath in the Aware Being of God.
*luminous here does not mean “lighted up” in a visual sense but the fact that every kind of object—visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, ideational, and affective—can potentially and unimpededly appear in consciousness. It is a technical term in Buddhist epistemology.