It seems, from my experience, that the culmination of my many years searching for the state of enlightenment eventually returned me to a previously known state, but with a simple change of perspective...
Through the years I held onto an expectation, a representation, a portrait painted by my own hand, of an enlightened being. The portrait was vivid, the subject highly detailed, fashioned with the characteristics I had gleaned from many teachers who I deemed realized beings, but this portrait that I created and hung in the annals of my mind, in the end, became my greatest source of resistance to a greater understanding...
Enlightenment, becoming realized, being awake or aware, doesn’t mean you cease being who you are, you become more completely you, more authentically you, more than you can ever remember experiencing. It’s a place that is familiar, you recognize that you’ve not only been here before, but it has always been there, hidden under the layers and layers of debris from false identifications, and you’ve never breathed a breath without it...
All of the worldly entanglements are subjugated to the background and then you begin the real journey, facing your deepest and darkest fears, as well as the true examination of your beliefs and understandings that were once the foundation of your known existence...
To me, this process equates to what should be the natural maturation process of a human being, the evolving into a mature human state. The culture and the society that we were born into has prevented our growth from the adolescent state of being into the full ripening of mature human adulthood...
Our true being loses its influence in your life as you are brought into the common subservient behavior paradigm from almost every perceivable source, thus we lose our true selves and become a weak and battered reflection of our environment instead of the beaming agglomeration of the source that is our true nature...
Enlightenment may very well be the stateless-ness of our true selves being able to emanate throughout all aspects of this manifestation and thus nurturing it into maturity...