Question: Is it harder for a rational logical formally educated mind to achieve spiritual awakening?

What is actually important is how attached you are to the results, or reality of your rational thinking. Attachments in the mind are significant impediments to progress in this pursuit.

All thinking is done using the tool of language. Language is a subject/object construct we use to reductively create illusory “parts” that we can separate and contrast to make sense of them.

The basic tenet underlying the understanding of reality that becomes present at awakening is that there are no separate things, only ONE, so you can see that using the tool of thinking, which is entirely dependent on comparing and contrasting separate things, would make a nonsense of how things actually are.

It is very useful to have an intellectual idea about how things are, and to study that. However, no amount of reading or intellectualizing will create the understanding of how things are. The tool for seeing how things are is a still mind. Meditation is the primary tool for creating the still mind. The mind in between thoughts is a non-dual state, just as reality is. The mind when thinking is a dualistic state, and as such, an impediment to understanding how things are.