Hey guys, I’ve wanted to write this post for a long time but was having difficulty compiling my thoughts. Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers was the trick. I want to talk about meditation practice and the goal of enlightenment. He says, a common trait of successful people is that they practice WAY more than the rest. 10,000 hours is the approximate benchmark used to signify mastery. But he also says that one’s circumstances are the determining factor of whether he’ll be able to practice enough to attain mastery.
Applying this premise to meditation practice, we can reason that children born in eastern countries who get ordained as novice monks have a clear advantage over us western people (just to use an example). They are given the opportunity to practice from a very early age and put in the hours. If they take to monastic life, they can dedicate their whole life to meditation. We are lacking of these opportunities. It’s no wonder most enlightened people come from eastern countries. But all these things are fairly obvious I think.
For the next few paragraphs, I will follow the same line of logic. But I concede that spiritual matters often don’t work out so objectively. Now to the main question, is enlightenment possible for us in one lifetime? I say no. I think you can see where I’m going with this. Because we don’t have the appropriate circumstances, we have simply no way of attaining mastery over meditation.
A small calculation:
10 000 hours x 60 mins = 600 000 mins <—time needed to attain mastery
An AYP practitioner following the prescribed practice will meditate for 20 mins x 2. (I have excluded pranayama and other practices)
40 mins x 365 days = 14600 mins a year
600 000 / 14600 = 41 years approx.
Now, AYP meditation is not like others, in the sense that it uses the help of pranayama etc. But, even practitioners doing 40-60 mins of ANY meditation a day don’t stand a chance. Most of us start in middle age. The lucky one’s start young. You will be dead before you can attain mastery over meditation (following this line of logic, of course).
Work, family, responsibilities simply won’t allow you to have a chance. The cards are stacked against you. Some westerners have changed the game by simply becoming monks/swamis/sanyasis, thereby creating the conditions for practice. But to have that kind of mentality is a whole other thing. You have to be the proper age. If you’re married, its over for you unless you have some mighty revelation. Chances are, you’re going to find leaving your family unreasonable. Many other individual based factors are also at play, I won’t go into them here. Point is, you often can’t create the conditions you want. A matter of circumstance.
Now you may think my logic is unsound, as I am trying to quantify meditation, a whole subjective experience. But I don’t care how strong your kundalini is, self-pacing yourself into the ground till you’re meditating 5-10 mins a day will stretch your timeline by a few decades. How can one someone become enlightened meditation so little? How can you get far in something with so little practice? You may think you’re making progress, but by the time you think you’re spiritually “growing”, 20-30 years might have passed. Also, the enlightenment I’m talking about here is not the “live in the moment, everything is beautiful” enlightenment. I’m talking about the nirvikalpa samadhi, rainbow body, ultimate realization kinda enlightenment. So NO, I don’t think enlightenment is possible for us in this lifetime.
DISCLAIMED: I’ve removed the effect of kundalini inducing practices just because I find them hard to measure. When it comes to inner silence, there is a strong correlation between time put in and stableness of mind. You cannot do this with kundalini, which is why using AYP as the example in this thread may be a poor choice. But I think you see my basic point.
Please feel free to criticize my logic/comment on anything. I’d like to bounce thoughts around to see what you guys think.
First of all, thanks for doing all that math so I didn’t have to. 
yes, the numbers look grim. Abandon ship!!
So you don’t get enlightened. I personally can live with that. I’m doing all this for the thrill that I can combine all the things I love doing into a lifestyle; sex, love, devotion, mindfulness, arousal, curiosity, willpower, dreamscapes, asanas, the list goes on. If I shoot out the top of my head and then melt back down into my heart, well, that will be the cherry on the cake. I’m still having the cake, cherry or not. It’s best to make enlightenment a sutra, and release it, and be happy enough with that. You don’t have to worry about it anymore!
We are all on wildly different levels, and there are a ton of variables your numbers can’t cover. I applaud the exercise, though, putting pencil to paper is a good way to organize projects and arguments.
What exactly do you mean by “enlightenment”? because that word gets thrown around a lot and everyone has different concepts of its meaning.
@Dogboy
Fair point, I did this more as an intellectual exercise, since I like to muse over these things a lot.
@alecpeace
The end of all suffering.
Hi ak33,
Who is it that wants to get enlightened?
Haven’t you experienced a gradual decrease in suffering with AYP practices?
Is there an end to infinity?
Dogboy! 
@sunyata
Yes I have, but not an end to all suffering. I’m not a huge fan of advaita riddles tbh.
Hi ak33,
This subject actually came up for discussion on the retreat in Sweden 2 weeks ago: How long does the path take?
If people were only practising meditation, then your calculations may well be correct. In fact, that is what is often seen in cultures that do only meditation practice, that it is the ones who start young, in a monastic setting, that are the ones who attain enlightenment. Those who start in middle or old age, are often still in the middle stages of the path when they die. Of course, there is nothing to say that they do not take the progress that they have made forwards into another lifetime, but that it another matter. 
With yoga though, everything is different, because yoga is not limited to meditation. As you know, yoga also includes asana practice, and pranayama and the additions of mudras and bandhas and samyama practice. So it is a whole other game. It is especially the pranayama and the mudras and bandhas that speed things up in terms of the process of purification. What would otherwise take lifetimes with meditatation alone, only takes decades with yoga.
In other words, enlightenment becomes possible within this lifetime.
Nobody likes to put numbers of years onto the process of spiritual awakening, simply because everyone is different and has their own unique matrix of obstructions to work out. But looking at the process of awakening, from the point of the beginnings of the first stirrings of kundalini, we can give a rough guideline as to how long various stages play out. From what I have observed in others who are practising yoga in a serious manner, I would say that it takes around 10 years to purify the first 6 chakras to a high enough degree to be able to begin working safely at the crown chakra. It then takes around 5 years to purify the crown and to begin coming back into the heart. Then a further 5 years to settle fully into the heart. So 20 years.
That 20 years is from the beginning of the awakening of kundalini. How long it takes for each person before they begin to experience the awakening of kundalini is another matter and it varies greatly from person to person.
That is a very rough benchmark and what actually happens will depend a great deal on the actual practices used and the seriousness of the practitioner to engage in the sadhana on a daily basis.
In terms of actual hours, the example you gave above was for a person meditating for 20 minutes, twice a day. For someone who is serious about awakening and who is engaging with a full scope yogic practice on a daily basis, that would increase. Once someone has built up their practice to include asanas, Spinal Breathing, Deep Meditation, samyama followed by rest at the end, a single session can easily be an hour or more.
As for how can this be done in the Western world for people who have jobs and kids? As one of my teachers once said: “Get up an hour earlier in the morning and do your sadhana. After a while, you will find that you need an hours less sleep, because of the practices.”
There’s a clue.
Christi
Point well taken Christi. I appreciate the practicality of your post. I stated in my first post that I don’t know a way to enough approximately measure the effects of prana on personal transformation. But yeah, pranayama, asanas etc. will definitely influence the timeline beyond my basic model. Interestingly enough, if I take your one hour twice a day and repeat the calculation:
1 hour x 2 = 2 hours a day
2 hours x 7 days x 4 weeks x 12 months = 672 hours/year
10 000 / 672 = 15 years approx.
Give 5 years or so because of the non-linearity of the path, and we’re looking at a figure similar to what you said. I don’t think this is unreasonable. Very advanced practitioners would be meditating upwards of 3 hours anyway. Another point I want to make is that this estimate may not vary much across serious yogic traditions. Primarily because I don’t think kundalini awakening can be avoided on the way to enlightenment. Even in the buddhist insight tradition, you hit kundalini eventually and go through the same symptoms described in AYP.
So I think 20 years of serious practice is a fairly reasonable estimate. But we all know how difficult it is to practice so consistently for such a long amount of time.
Nice topic, well stated. Christi gives the hint, I will complete it a little without making a suggestion if I may, since it seems we had the same teacher.
The nighttime is often used for meditation by householder Yogis.
The biggest problem I see is determining where one is starting from as the beginning of Kundalini awakening needs to be defined then Christi calculations sound doable.
So how do we define beginning Kundalini Awakening?
There is another factor also that is hard to determine, let me try to explain it like this.
A student once went to Paramahansa Yogananda and said something like this, ( sorry no longer remember the actual verbatim quote) Master I have done it I am enlightnened, I finally finished I have done this many Kriya Pranayama according to your mathematical calculations.
As the man walked away Paramahansa Yogananda commented to James Lynn I believe it was if memory serves; poor soul he has missed everything I have tried to teach him.
What was that one thing? The man obviously had paid attention to what he had been told concerning the number of Kriyas to practice to derive a mathematical result after all his master had said so had he not? If I do this I get that.
Does anyone know what that thing was the man had missed?
You might want to do a little research, because scientists estimate the Earth to be about 4.5 billon years old, so I’m not sure how your 20-year plan fits into that timeline. A tiny drop in a vast ocean, it would seem.
Daily practices are for stringing together perpetual moments of peace and joy…not so much for trying to squeeze the magnitude of enlightenment into a relative and arbitrary time frame. The first outlook is realistic and progressive, whereas the latter is highly speculative and conceptual, at best.
My advice would be to reserve your scaling system to Earth projects (like: it will take 3 hours to run a marathon, or: I can devote 1 hour to AYP practices per day), and then let enlightenment have its place in eternity, which is not confined by space and time, even though It permeates space and time.
If you’re doodling around with arbitrary assessments of chakra purification, you’re very likely to miss the big picture, which is to participate in the real-time miracle before us and within us, and that miracle goes way, way beyond 20 years.
Hi ak33,
Thank You for your honesty. I had a feeling you would say that. Sometimes I read a post and post whatever comes up at the moment and land in trouble. 
The advanced yogis have given their wisdom. Let me share few of my thoughts. From the time line of enlightenment mentioned in this thread, I am 5 years in the journey so may be 25%. I’m
writing from that stage.
I am with Dogboy with what he says. The experience of no “I” for months gave me the feeling that there is really no such thing has an indiviual being enlightened.
My body was a hollow shell. There was complete silence. The body and everything around was made of the same silence. When the ego returned, it took five years to integrate everything.
As long as you do your practices and live your daily life from that silence and bliss- that may be the reason for this Earth Life. Enjoy the beauty people/place but not get attached to it.
Suffering usually comes when we resist what’s happening right now. When we accept everything as it is, there is no room for it. I love AYP practice because the level of peace and bliss has increased each year. The increase in peace and bliss is experienced and then assimilated and it just become normal until a new one comes up. So, I don’t know what final enlightenment looks like. I’m content and can’t imagine how it is going to be in years to come! Samyama is the best practice ever! The experience that there is no "I’ to get enlightened has been a relief. But I’m so looking forward to seeing how the divine wants to experience creation through this body in years to come.
If one’s goal is enlightenment then yes a long time. But if one is content with the peace that comes with daily practice then why put so much emphasis on the 20 years. I brush my teeth everyday because it feels good.
Hi Everyone,
Whether 20 years is seen as a long time or not, really depends very much on the person listening. For people who have the idea that the spiritual journey necessarily takes lifetimes, then 20 years seems surprisingly short. For people who are hoping that they may be able to get the whole process done and dusted in a couple of years tops, the 20 sounds surprisingly long.
So it is all very relative. I offer this rough time-frame as a way to encourage people who tend to feel that the process may take life-times, and sometimes feel disheartened by that. It is useful to know that that is not necessarily the case.
The 20 year figure I gave above, was not a final enlightenment stage figure, it was simply in reference to the stages in the process of purification of the chakras and the nadis beyond the awakening of kundalini. Something that it is much easier to quantify than something as nebulous as enlightenment.
There is though, often a correlation between the process of purification and awakening on the energetic level and the process of spiritual awakening, also known as enlightenment, which is why it can be a useful model for some.
Like all models, though, it is only a model, and how everyone relates to it and maps to it, will be different. Certainly if someone started to say that they have been practising for 10 years, so they are half way there, then that might not necessarily be the case and they could be misled by the model. Equally, it could be the case or they may be further along.
Bodhi, I would completely agree with you about the miracle of life. That one of the interesting things about travelling along the path is that the longer we travel for, the more we realize that there is no top of the mountain. It becomes more of a continuous journey of falling into grace, or participating in the miracle, as you put it. So these arbitary time-frames, or any arbitary time-frames for that matter, that we could put on the journey, become more and more meaningless as we progress. Like a mountain that disappears under our feet. Or a mountain climber that disappears along with the mountain.
The Buddha was once asked this same question about how long it takes to become enlightened. He replied: “It takes 7 lifetimes, or 70 years, or 7 years, or 7 months, or 7 weeks, or 7 days, or 7 hours.”
A bit more vague, and potentially less controversial. But maybe not as useful to a seeker on the path.
Christi
Christi 
.
I think it’s just the topic in discussion. I like how you answer questions directly. It has helped me over the years.
Going back to ak33’s original post…he is framing enlightenment as if it is something to be attained in prolonged solitude (like in a community of monks), whereas AYP is focused on finding enlightenment in the heart of domestic and cosmopolitan activity.
In the monastic scenario, enlightenment is like a rarefied state that primarily benefits the individual. In the householder yogi scenario, enlightenment sculpts the character of the individual to be more giving to the community.
ak33 said: “Work, family, responsibilities simply won’t allow you to have a chance. The cards are stacked against you.”
What I’m saying is: Nothing could be further from the truth. Those are exactly the opportunities and chances for enlightenment. Instead of running away, we’re embracing and enriching the role of being in the world, including work, family and responsibilities.
Think about it. The world is going to be enlightened not because of cloistered monks who have shut the world out, but because of ordinary people who have let the world in. The gap between secular and spiritual is rapidly closing. It’s a great time to be alive.
I began yoga in my 40ies and do practices twice a day because it makes my daily life much, much better. For e ample, today was a bad day, but after the evening yoga session my mood suddenly improved.
I don’t care about reaching enlightenment in this life. Never saw my life in terms of achieving something anyway. The only thing I really, really want is my family to have a good life. So, I don’t need to be enlightened for that, because I already can do my favourite thing, which is trying to be a good father and husband every single day until I die.
That being said, I enjoy this topic and the way you guys are making predictions. :-).
According to Christi’s mathematics I could reach enlightenment before I get 70 - nice!
Knowledge is better than practice ,and meditation is better than knowledge ,renunciation of the fruit of action is better than meditation …peace immediately follows such renunciation …Krishna the yoga of desire less action . 
Hi Bodhi,
Very well said .
Also, some of ak33 assumptions about the East. I was born and raised in the East. I feel that it does not matter where you are born to achieve freedom.
Some of my friends siblings were sent to become monks at an early age. I often wondered if they were ready for it. They were probably following the family customs.
There is no place like the worldly life which shows you how enlightened you are. 
. Just wanted to share an example for what Bodhi has written.
I always thought there was something special about my Father-In-Law. He is a man of high credentials but a simple man, soft spoken, willing to help anyone- basically emits the lights. During my many visits to their place, there have been times where I have gone downstairs to get a glass of water and found my father in law sitting cross legged on the floor.
I asked him what he was doing early in the morning. He just said softly nothing and asked me if I wanted something to drink. After my spiritual awakening, I exchanged emails with him because my intuition said to email him… He finally said that he had been meditating since he was a young boy. After a bunch of email exchanges, I finally asked him if he was Enlightened. This was few years ago. He didn’t answer the Enlightenment question but said that a Jivanmukta comes back again and again to help everyone (paraphrasing)
I don’t want this thread to be all about me. But this man has achieved freedom- working hard, raising kids and being active. His presence is so sweet that I’ve teared up a few times. He definitely fits the definition of a Jivanmukta.I pulled up one of his email where he said" I believe achieving the consciousness may not succeed without understanding the implication of it in our way of daily life"
Our Dear Yogani is an example of a household yogi who has achieved liberation.
Sunyata
What a story, sunyata. Thank you for that fresh perspective. Ah, I can breathe deeper now. I love stories like that.
I have a grandfather who has cared for my disabled grandmother for many years now. He has been incredibly generous to the family. Though he doesn’t formally practice, there is still plenty of liberation radiating from him. [OM]
. Yes, they are our source for inspiration.[OM]