What is the essence of spiritual enlightenment

I once read, I don't recall where, that Buddha stated that spiritual enlightenment is not suffering. That he put it in a negation on purpose. Ok, I get that, not suffering. With NLP I learned there are 2 types of motivation. 1). Moving away from. 2). Moving towards to. The second is more valuable in my experience, because it brings me want I want, instead of something that differs from what I do not want, but isn't necessarily something I would want instead. So to be able to move towards experiencing spiritual enlightenment I need to know what is. I would like to known, in simple words, what spiritual enlightenment is. So the question is, what is the essence of spiritual enlightenment?