Enlightenment is the cessation of the dreaming activity of the mind. Dreaming is the capacity of the human mind to imagine something that doesn’t exist in reality, and believe its existence. Dreaming is the source of all human suffering, it is the source of all fear, misery, anxiety, sadness and all psychological pain and sorrow. It’s also the source of all aggression and violence (except self-defense), irrationality, cruelty and abuse.

Dreaming is what human psychology is based upon, and it’s also the source of confirmation bias and a variety of other psychological phenomena. Psychology as a discipline is basically a study of the human being’s dreaming mind. Which is why it is so moot as a field of study (compared to, say, physics) - because even though the deeper layers of our dreaming are universal (the ideas of God, death, universal human emotions of guilt and shame, i.e. “sin”), outer layers of dreaming are quite unique, and there’s no limit to their uniqueness, example being multiple personality disorder and all other psychiatric disorders. The capacity of human imagination, supported by the inner pain that we carry, is extreme and its effect on us is profound.

Contrary to a common misconception, enlightenment has nothing to do with complete cessation of thought, and has everything to do with cessation of emotional suffering.