Enlightenment
Enlightenment comes by itself, not when you want.
What you can do, is to meditate: stop talking, sit or lay down comfortably, relax your body, close your eyes but stay awake, observe your breathing, body sensations, feelings, thinking, impulses, memories, visions, external distractions, continue into a near-thoughtless investigation, inquire the inquirer – and enjoy the whole process, for it is a pleasure and rest in itself.
If you practice awareness of what you do when you do something during your daily life, meditation will be easier to do.
Enlightenment will come, have no doubt. For it is natural, just as a flow of a river.
If river is obstructed, you cannot force it to flow, but you can do the work of removing obstructions, starting from dismantling dams, then removing big rocks, then smaller stones, and then finally cleaning the finest obstructions and litter. Meditation is this removal of obstructions, while resting in the process. What ultimately removes the obstruction is an inquiry into it with concentration.
Intellectual knowledge only, will not lead you to Enlightenment, for it does not have the eliminating power of true insight, it cannot remove the obstruction, but it can morph it indefinitely. You may spend your whole life intellectualizing, and find yourself confused on square one in the end.
Usually, unless you experienced a sudden flash of Enlightenment, which tends to happen in critical life situations like near death or major loss of that which was the dearest, you start this cleaning without knowing there is a river, out of faith that there is. If there are many obstructions, it may take a while until the first sign of water flow appears, therefore you need perseverance to continue the work and faith to overcome doubt.
As soon as the first sign of water flow appears, you motivation based on faith transitions into motivation based on knowing, with ever increasing momentum. From that point on, the process becomes ever easier and even more joyful.
Eventually, the flow reaches a critical point and blows out all remaining obstructions. Pressure equalizes, waves calm down. You will never see the world as before.
One even simpler visualization of the path to Enlightenment would be this:
Imagine you have a wound on your skin that is healing and itching. Your thoughts, words, and physical action is scratching it. Whenever you scratch, you delay the healing and increase the itching. If you scratch really hard, itching becomes pain. The more painful itching is, the more you are focused on it, blind to, irritated by, and out of tune with the world. If the wound is not healed long enough, for generations, you don’t even know what it is to live without it. Stop scratching, persevere the itching, let the wound heal by itself, and Enlightenment will come by itself. Also, as you stop scratching the wound and it heals, you will start desynchronizing from previous external conditions, like people, hobbies, places, occupations, attractions, etc. It is because external conditions were adapted to your habitual scratching behaviour.