Is enlightenment about a way of being or a way of seeing?

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This is a question of identification.

If you have to boil it all down to a single thing, enlightenment is the nondual perspective. This implies that it’s a way of seeing. But it’s so fundamental that the person ends up identifying with the way of seeing. Identification turns seeing into being. Forget all that nonsense you hear from other people about how all identification stops and there’s no person / ego anymore. You still identify, just not in the same way as you did before.

Identification moves from the lesser to the greater. As your consciousness grows and matures, you go from body-identification to mind-identification to awareness-identification to enlightenment, where you can’t point to the thing you’re identifying at. Hawkins called it the Self, as opposed to the self, which entails body / mind / awareness.

But if you look at the progression carefully, you can deduce what’s going on. Your awareness, the last thing you identified with before you became enlightened, is single-pointed, whereas mind and body are massive, heavy ‘things’, the body being even heavier than the mind.

As identification passes from the mind to awareness, ego’s hold is lessened. You acquire the “observer” capacity whereby you can watch your ego while it’s ego-ing. This lets you interrupt the ego response and as you do this more and more, ego gets even less involved. This further reduces mind-identification and will eventually allow you to reach the “tipping point” I described in a previous answer.

To go further you must do extreme surgery on your sense of identification. These are the higher states described in Hawkins’ books, the states he characterizes as being 700–1000. They describe ‘weird’ states where identification is unclear, so the being isn’t quite sure how to exist.

I call this “new” enlightenment. You’re perceiving in the nondual fashion, but you haven’t quite figured out “how to exist” yet. Your identification hasn’t settled yet. Eventually it does, but what it settles ‘on’ isn’t exactly clear. You appear to be a person, you appear to want things, you appear to do things, but you don’t identify with any of it and it feels like just things that happen to you. You might also feel like you could lose it if you’re not careful or whatever. Essentially you’re like a completely new being, a new ‘kind’ of being. You need to learn how to walk and how to talk and how to live all over again.