As little as possible. If you really have to believe something, ask yourself why. We flatter ourselves that we believe for a reason, though it's often just to make us feel comfortable. Always believe in your own capacity for change.

Someone who looks into his/her own mind in search of the Buddha.

There's no word in Pali, Sanskrit or Tibetan for Enlightenment. There's also no grammatical convention in any of those languages for capitalizing a word to make it special. The word that's usually rendered as Enlightenment is bodhi: it means awake.

Yes, being awake is available to you whenever you want it. However, it's not permanent. You will fall back into semi-conscious automaticity, though not permanently; you will want to awaken again. The more you experience it, the stronger will grow your wish to awaken. It grows though a positive-feedback loop.

Ego is a fiction, though a useful one. Without it, we can't tell the story of who we are, or communicate with any intimacy. Newcomers to Buddhism often make the mistake of thinking that ego is the enemy and should be overcome, but the Buddha was more subtle than that. Conventionally speaking, you obviously exist; however, when you try and put your finger on something that is specifically 'you,' it dissolves like a mirage. The task of insight is to find the Middle Way between the extremes of self-existence and non-existence.

You do. The Buddha did not deny the existence of self, but he did draw attention to the fact that we act as if some managing soul lies behind the body and mind. There is no separate controller but there is a visceral conviction of one being there. The Buddha described this subconscious conviction as unfounded, and also the source of all dissatisfaction, stress and suffering.

The effort required is not hard, sweaty work; it's more like a simple determination to stay on track. It requires a light touch, enabling you to integrate it into all aspects of your everyday life.

As with 'enlightenment,' there's no word in Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan for 'meditation.' Several different terms are rendered in English as meditation. The two main ones are, a) dhyāna: inner concentrative absorption (a relatively uncommon practice among Asian Buddhists), and the other is bhāvanā: cultivation. This effort is consistently required, and refers to the threefold cultivation of ethics, concentration and insight. It's a whole-life thing that includes — but goes much further than — what we know in the West as sitting meditation.

The cultivation of awakening is not nearly as tidy as the highly organized Buddhist teachings make it seem. I find the process chaotic, though over time there is progress. It's like learning a language. You can divide up parts of speech, list grammatical rules, explain colloquialisms and practice drills, but in the end the process is one of persistent trial and error. For ages it's frustrating and bottomless, but one day you find yourself speaking with some sort of fluency.

They are four calls to action: 1. to existentially KNOW stress, suffering and dissatisfaction; 2. to LET GO of craving (the root of stress); 3. to EXPERIENCE cessation of stress (i.e. moments of being AWAKE); 4. to CULTIVATE an eightfold path and be awake more often. (adapted with thanks from Stephen Batchelor).