What does it mean to be ‘enlightened’?

What does it mean ‘to be enlightened’? Many people seem able to describe it - using words in a vain attempt to capture a ‘state’, for how else can it be described? Usually involving a sense of wholeness, connection, peace and acceptance - a lack of a ‘separate self’ or ‘i’ adding a narrational overlay to the simple essence of Being. 

Many people speak of ‘a spiritual awakening’. A moment where who they thought they were fell away, and their ‘true self’ was revealed - beyond words and description - and yet inevitably written about and described later. 

Some claim ‘enlightenment’ is a ‘permanent spiritual awakening’. Living in the same ‘state’ that was first experienced when the ‘separate self’ was seen as an illusion. For many, this initial ‘awakening’ comes with extreme sensations - euphoria, bliss, relief… The apparent contrast between the ‘awakened state’ and the ‘normal, conditioned state’ can set up a seeming split, or even a later disappointment, when it is revealed that this initial rush is not a permanent state. ‘Nothing’ is. 

So what is ‘enlightenment’ then? What is permanent about it, if anything?

Some say nothing is permanent. All things have a beginning, middle and end. The whole idea of ‘enlightenment’ is a concept in the mind, or brain which will, with death, cease to exist. And yet the idea of ‘enlightenment’ ending, the idea that this underlying state of love and peace, the source of all life forms, can ever come to an end, is what seems to drive so much human fear. So we build cathedrals, we write books, we speak - determined to ‘pin down’ enlightenment. To prove it’s real. That it does exist. 

It’s beautiful and tragic. Like butterflies captured in glass cases. We can examine and dissect, but it’s in letting go, letting be, that true freedom is revealed as something that can’t ever be ‘possessed’.

We can never ‘know’ whether love/life continues after our own demise - when we no longer exist to bear witness to it. Yet it’s our inability to know that seems to drive the fear of non-existence. Not of form, but of essence. And so we scramble to ‘prove’ the existence of essence through form as a way to assuage our fears, not realising that the more beautiful, the more magnificent, the more ‘accurate a representation’ form bears to essence, the more painful or fear-invoking it can be when it inevitably ends.

Form is unstable. Essence is not. When we die we do not die. Our form dissolves. Perhaps this is all ‘enlightenment’ is. And, on a ‘permanent’ level, perhaps we call it ‘death’. 

And it is perhaps in ‘dying before we die’ that we can know this is safe. That there is life. ‘After death’. But I think I’ve probably said too much!