How does it feel when you are enlightened?

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Sound out the word ‘enlightenment’ a few times. Think about it in terms of lightening your load. You were carrying such a heavy weight before, but you just cast it off and now you’re walking free.

That’s what it feels like. As you see in my credential, I have been enlightened since birth. This means I’ve never had to carry the weight of suffering. Ever. It’s just not something I ever feel. I feel all kinds of other things, including pain, anger, lust, and annoyance, but the sort of identification with struggle and hardship that defines the term “suffering,” that’s just not a mental process that I have. Feelings arise, then they pass away, replaced by different feelings.

This presents problems with relating with people on occasion, but I’ve been dealing with it my whole life, so I’ve come up with approaches for dealing with it.

I live in harmony with my surroundings. Issues are extremely localized to small areas of context and are fixed before they can escape and mess up other parts of my existence. The process of issue discovery, location, and resolution is constantly being refined.

Every enlightened person finds different meaning in their lives. But none of them are plagued by anything like doubt or worry.