Question I've had about the Buddha's teachings on reaching enlightenment through meditation
What do Buddhists believe the Buddha taught about achieving enlightenment by meditation? I read Siddharta over a decade ago, which I remember being a great book, and what stuck with me was the author's emphasis on how Siddharta's awakening under the bodhi tree was manifested. I don't know how faithful the book was to the Buddha's actual teachings, but what stayed with me was the author's illustration of Siddharta's moment of awakening. It surrounded around the idea of understanding as awakening, which is a different idea from pure change of consciousness, unless that change is assumed to carry with it complete understanding. It is interesting to me because I always thought of enlightenment as this awakening of the spirit along with a convergence of undrestanding, but there's also two kinds of understanding. There is intuitive, intellectual understanding, but even then, it can be argued that solely intuitive understanding is different from intellectual, depending on your school of thought. Then there is emotional understanding. Depending on your school of thought, that could easily be seen as a second or third kind of understanding, but emotional is generally regarded as more subconscious and therefore more intuitive by nature. An analogy is that people don't use a text book to comprehend emotions. They either instinctively understand what an emotion or they don't. So then the question remains. Is this awakening a convergence of these different kinds of understanding, a simultaneous union? The book strongly implies that Buddhism teaches that enlightenment is an intuitive revelation of sorts combined with the spiritual element. A perfect union of both dimensions. That makes sense to me as I learned that the spirit is a big factor in the traditional story, which implies that if your soul doesn't somehow engage with this process, this awakening cannot happen. That would squarely put enlightenment in not only a mental pursuit mainly achieved through meditation, which is what understanding is, it is an inherently spiritual/mystical one too, if that is accurate to Buddha's teachings. I am inherently a skeptic when it comes to mysticism, though I do firmly believe in the existence of the soul and energy/prana/chi etc, but there doesn't seem much wiggle room about this when it comes to my understanding of the traditional concept of enlightenment, which is where my motivation for posting this originates. On the one hand, Buddhism doesn't appear, from my memory, to teach that you must believe in the existence of the soul. On the other, without the soul, you just have a mental transformation process, nevermind the Buddha engaging with spirit entities as a part of his awakening. Nevermind the idea of escaping reincarnation. That all puts enlightenment from the Buddhist perspective squarely in the territory of the soul and "life force", "energy", which would make absolute sense to me.
If anyone can recommend Buddhist literature written in or translated into English to illuminate this, I would appreciate it.