Enlightenment -- not one, not two?

Singular vs. Multiple Types of Awakening, by Daniel Ingram, highlights some of the differences between the various traditions and strands of Buddhism in regard to enlightenment. I found it particularly interesting in light of Wilber's assertion of one underlying spiritual substance of the Kosmos, which seems to sit rather uncomfortably next to his insistence on empirical inquiry into meditative states.

This section of Ingram's article really caught my eye (emphasis added):

I should state from the beginning that I am biased towards answering the question this way: “There are multiple paths to the same fundamental understanding, and that fundamental understanding may be expressed various ways, but that doesn’t change the basic fact of what that fundamental understanding is. That said, the different techniques, approaches and emphases may produce different peripheral skill sets and appreciations of things along the way as well as different shadow sides and problems.”

This sort of interpretation of meditative techniques opens the door to a sort of meditative enactivist relativism, which might be a precursor to a more systems based conception of meditative states. As for the question of fundamental similarity, we may be able to investigate that in a new way: Given that we can now do brain scan studies on meditators, and that meditative states seem to correlate with distinct brain activity signatures, it may be possible to determine whether or not different techniques lead to the same kind of fundamental sort of brain activity.