As with much philosophizing, I agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but the solution seems dubious.
ultimate reality can be experienced
You see this claim all the time (e.g. Ken Wilber) but I have yet to see a shred of evidence for it. Given how the brain works, there seems to be no pathway to experience ultimate reality directly.
Bear in mind also the claim
the ultimate reality is the source of all existence
So we are supposed to be able to directly apprehend the source of all existence. The fact that many people experience similar feelings/insights/beliefs is weak evidence for the claim. Not much stronger than the common feeling among each and every new generation that they are the most virtuous and ethical of all generations. (As an aside, which usually comes with the feeling that they are the first to discover the wonders of sex and drugs/alcohol).
On the question of enlightenment this is a very overloaded term.
One use of the term that I found useful and other rationalists might is “The Finders” by Jeffery A Martin. This is a practical and useful version of enlightenment with very little mystification and few grandiose claims.
Given how the brain works, there seems to be no pathway to experience ultimate reality directly.
If “ultimate reality” means “the process by which your brain constructs a simulation of reality” or “all of reality as constructed by your brain” then I believe there is a mechanism to experience something like this directly. Specifically, I suspect that connectome-specific harmonic waves exchange information by adjusting their resonances relative to each other. If CSHW resonance works this way and the global workspace is a low frequency harmonic wave then concentrating on a single thing for a long time ought to get different regions to sync up with each other like a room full of pendulums. This ought to increase the information exchange between them, linking together different parts of the brain that are normally separate from each other.
As with much philosophizing, I agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but the solution seems dubious.
You see this claim all the time (e.g. Ken Wilber) but I have yet to see a shred of evidence for it. Given how the brain works, there seems to be no pathway to experience ultimate reality directly.
Bear in mind also the claim
So we are supposed to be able to directly apprehend the source of all existence. The fact that many people experience similar feelings/insights/beliefs is weak evidence for the claim. Not much stronger than the common feeling among each and every new generation that they are the most virtuous and ethical of all generations. (As an aside, which usually comes with the feeling that they are the first to discover the wonders of sex and drugs/alcohol).
On the question of enlightenment this is a very overloaded term.
One use of the term that I found useful and other rationalists might is “The Finders” by Jeffery A Martin. This is a practical and useful version of enlightenment with very little mystification and few grandiose claims.
If “ultimate reality” means “the process by which your brain constructs a simulation of reality” or “all of reality as constructed by your brain” then I believe there is a mechanism to experience something like this directly. Specifically, I suspect that connectome-specific harmonic waves exchange information by adjusting their resonances relative to each other. If CSHW resonance works this way and the global workspace is a low frequency harmonic wave then concentrating on a single thing for a long time ought to get different regions to sync up with each other like a room full of pendulums. This ought to increase the information exchange between them, linking together different parts of the brain that are normally separate from each other.
This is a complex claim not backed by a lot of evidence. My heuristics scream pseudoscience.