How different is non-dual awareness from enlightenment?

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Enlightenment is a big word and there’s lots of ways to define it, and they all have varying amounts of realism and achievability.

One of those ways is the vaunted nondualism. It hits a nice sweet spot between being both realistic, difficult, and reasonably achievable. I’m not going to go off on a tangent defining nondualism, plenty of descriptions are there for the taking online, and honestly, it’s a big topic and doing it justice won’t actually answer your question.

The question is about enlightenment because it’s the less well-defined concept. You’d think the Buddhists would have this one figured out because they invented the term. But really, Buddhism is a big religion with tons of offshoots and its theology can be all over the place. So you can’t find a consistent definition of enlightenment there.

You can either pick a specific Buddhist tradition, synthesize something that works for you, or just reach for what’s readily available. But nondualism works really, really well as an synonym for enlightenment. You just have to be aware that other people have other ideas and that you don’t own the word. The last thing you want to do is get dogmatic about a religion you haven’t even converted to yet!