It requires a mature mind. It doesn’t negate meditation and yoga. In fact, meditation and yoga are seen as necessary practices (sadhanas) to prepare the mind to receive the teaching. These practices are viewed not as ends in themselves, but as necessary means for cultivating a pure and qualified mind.

There’s a reason that of the many hundreds of thousands of seekers in the world, only a few every ‘get’ enlightened. This is not down to the capricious hand of fate. It’s because only those few have done the necessary groundwork to cultivate an appropriately calm, discriminating, dispassionate, and clear mind. That’s the primary qualification for Vedanta.

If you aren’t yet ‘qualified’, however, you needn’t worry. Vedanta offers karma yoga, upasana yoga and meditation as means of managing the mind and neutralising our entrenched desires and aversions, which over a lifetime have conspired to create worlds of suffering for us.

It takes time to fully grasp and integrate this radically different understanding of reality. Yet the teachings of Vedanta prove, in numerous ways and with impeccable logic, that all you ever experience — and all you ultimately ever are — is actually consciousness.

This, in time, dissolves your identification with the limited mind-body-ego entity you assumed yourself to be; which is but a superimposition in consciousness and literally the source of all your troubles.

You discover a far more expansive identity as awareness, and the result is freedom from the suffering of samsara. The Vedas proclaim this freedom, moksha, to be the highest goal of human life.

In actuality, there’s nothing particularly mystical or magical about enlightenment. It’s simply a sense of freedom from limitation, freedom from suffering, brought about by knowledge of your self and reality as it actually is.