Updated: Mar 14
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 way: 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 you are a soul using a body to experience life, a thing 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:
observe carefully every experience in order to learn and raise his awareness,
do NOT react from your body's impulses (eg fear, hate, greed, lust) but only from your soul's suggestions, and do what needs to be done in the flow of 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.
On this path, you do not need any meditation, spiritual procedures, or the like.

This path was followed for instance by the Indian hero Rama (his life described in 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 way: The spiritual way
The second way means you realize you are not able to take the normal path described above that Creation normally offers us, so you look for props like spiritual procedures: meditations, initiations, sacred music, mantras, mudras, asanas, and so on.
The main general steps 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 steps you should reach as Outcomes the following 1) spiritual awakening, 2) kundalini awakening, 3) kundalini rising, 4) limiting beliefs releasing, 5) chakras opening, 6) kundalini reaches 7th chakra, 7) 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 way: The devotional path
On this path, you kind of give up on your initial destiny as a soul on this planet and devote all your life to becoming One with a higher enlightened soul. In time, and if you truly devote yourself like in the tenths of years and give up everything else, you become that soul. In other words, the enlightened soul replaces the original soul in your body, and so you become now 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 got enlightened like this by devoting himself to the deities Kali, Rama, and Krishna. He went also through all sorts of yoga schools and also 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.
………..
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.