The phenomenon is known by names and there is a wide range of views about what it is, what it is not, and how to "achieve it" and so on. I'm guilty of holding some of them at one point or another. But regardless of whether you call it "awakening", "enlightenment", or simply "spirituality", there is an underlying scientific basis behind it.
In all organisms with a nervous system that regulates its behaviour, including interactions with its environment, this system ends up with an encoding or representation of the organism. In other words, there is a "model" created of what the organism ought to be. Now this arises as a consequence of evolution of course, so this is likely an approximation and a messy one at that. Because something noisy and moisy is "in charge", it asserts itself always in a well-meaning manner. Generally however, it all "works".
What has occurred in humans is that due to the complexity of this model (the nervous system representation of an individual human and their environment, a model of the human's universe if you will), it is possible that confusion arises. The model starts to think it is the real thing and the real human goes along with it. But this is an illusion: the map is not the territory.
Awakening is at least the collapse of this illusion. It is quite simple, you the human being are not your nervous system model. You are not the mind, not the ego, you are something more, something whole.
I cannot prove all the above at this time, but what I am saying is not far fetched. And it is testable by many means, which is why I labelled this as "scientific". The notion of a model isn't unique. From Freud to .., [see The Mind's I]. The detail type of mental model I'm thinking of