Can one become enlightened and then be "dropped back" to one's previous state?

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Enlightenment is hard to define and so it’s prone to all sorts of misinterpretation.

It’s better to speak of the “nondual perspective.” Here you get the sense where if you ever stop perceiving things that way, you won’t be enlightened anymore.

If you go talk to Buddhists and parse through all that gobbledy-gook, you’ll find that enlightenment comes after long times spent meditating. They’ll give you milestones and sure as shit, if you do what they tell you, you’ll reach a certain mind-frame.

And since they kind-of invented enlightenment you can’t really tell them no.

But there are other conceptions of enlightenment. Nonduality is a surprisingly elastic concept. Again, the Buddhists have all their own language and the terms are descriptive and apt. You can experience “siddhis” and “jhanas.” If you do a lot of your own meditation then you’ll recognize the descriptions.

There’s three main components to Buddhist enlightenment, impermanence, mind-as-suffering, and no-self. You can analyze them, experience them, train yourself to integrate them into your being. But none of these things are “magic.” They are not by themselves totally transformative, which is what the spiritual seeker wants. You’re the same flawed person you were before you found them.

The tendency is to view enlightenment as an end, and that is indeed what Buddhists say that enlightenment is.

Once you’ve gone through it all, you have one of two choices. Keep seeking, or stop. If you want to stop, you have all the philosophies of Buddhism at your back. Enlightenment is the end of the self, you’ve achieved the end of the self, no point in going any further.

If you stop, then you will be tempted to lose touch with the meditations, with the spiritual stuff you used to do. You’ll fall back into old habits. Tired of all the work, you’ll just stop and “chop wood, carry water.”

And this is where and why I say that enlightenment is not the same thing as level of consciousness. Your level of consciousness is innate, yours and yours alone. It will make it easier for you to reach enlightenment if you so choose to if you have a whole lot of it.

Actually reaching enlightenment will not make it any easier for you to hold the state. Sure, if you keep working, keep doing the meditations, you’ll keep having “enlightened experiences.” But then you’re just building up another identity, after all that time spent throwing yours away, this time as an “enlightened person.” You can find scores of these guys filling up Internet chat rooms. Meditation is something everyone can do, so a lot of people do it. And so a lot of people earn the siddhis and jhanas and, yes, some of them even stumble into enlightenment, or some small sliver of it.

Turns out that nonduality does not remove the need for a being to find meaning in its existence. And the meaning you find in your existence is tuned exclusively for you. You find your own truth in the world. Do you really want to find meaning in enlightenment? To wax eloquently on Internet message boards about what is and isn’t enlightenment? To have that be the highest expression of meaning you’re able to come up with?

This is why the concept of enlightenment just makes me sad sometimes.

If you really want to be enlightened, don’t be afraid to lose the state. Don’t let the Buddhists tell you how to live your life. Fall down off your enlightened perch.

I said “to hell with it” after 8 concentrated years of seeking and decided I wanted to have a career and a place in the world. Engaging my mind. Sure, the Buddhists will tell you, you have no mind, if you try to meditate on it you’ll never nail it down. Of course not, your existence is wrapped up in your mind, it’s like saying a fish can’t see water. Turns out that the reason fish can’t see water is because their brains tune it out, what’s the point in seeing it?

If you seek and find your own meaning in the world, then it’s going to be way better than enlightenment ever will be. Because it’ll be yours.