What does it mean to be “fully enlightened”?

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To be fully enlightened is to have hit the ultimate point of diminishing returns on spiritual effort.

When you first begin the journey, the thing you lack most is knowledge. Once you acquire some knowledge, say through a book, article, or perhaps you’re lucky enough to have in-person tutelage, you need to practice and apply it. Over the course of many years you work out how to have a personal spiritual journey without constant input from other sources.

This is mastery. You can reliably progress on the path when you put effort in. This leads to an experience called ‘awakening’, inverting reality and spirituality. Spirituality becomes real and reality feels more and more fake and illusory, a servant for the spiritual. Like a hero character who must balance an adventurous life with school and home life, you must learn to balance the needs of the world with the real and pressing needs of your soul. Where before mastery you had to struggle to put the effort in, now you must struggle to not put too much in.

You’ll forever feel like a beginner, but it’s always fun and interesting. Until it’s not. Spirituality reveals its dark sides to you. You have to deal with existential crises that no one else can even begin to understand. Life works best when you feel like a beginner and worst when you feel like a master.

Eventually the state of affairs equalizes, and you finally earn peace with yourself. This is enlightenment. Something available only to those who walk the spiritual path so strongly that they have to struggle with unbearable crises of a purely spiritual nature. Crises that make you feel like a battle-hardened warrior when you emerge, like you didn’t really win, just lived to fight another day.

When these fights become normal, that’s enlightenment. But not yet full enlightenment. Full enlightenment is when you can relish the prospect of losing everything for some weird answer to a weird question, where you’ll walk through hell just to see what this particular hell feels like.

When the ups and downs aren’t just normal anymore. When spirituality and reality mix so thoroughly you don’t care anymore to fully distinguish them. When you finally give in and just play along. When trying to go somewhere only ever leads nowhere, and sitting on your butt reliably leads to adventure.

When there can be no further question of limits or risk or even meaning and purpose. When the world and God merge and you can’t tell them apart anymore. When you are the biggest thing in the world where it matters and the smallest thing where it’s fun.