Is there anyone alive who is enlightened? I know it is really foolish to ask such questions. Only an enlightened being knows who is enlightened.

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I think lots of people are enlightened. Way more than you would think.

Enlightenment is an idea out of time. If you were to go back, grab an original, Buddha-following Buddhist who actually knew and had interacted with the Buddha in person, then had him compare the Buddha to many people today, I think he would be convinced that many, many people are similarly enlightened.

We have just managed to convince ourselves that claiming enlightenment is a super-egotistical idea and that it automatically disqualifies you. It’s not and it doesn’t. The reason why is that enlightenment is not an all-or-nothing thing, and it can be broken down into component parts and analyzed.

I think lots of people have really good ideas about enlightenment. Four whose material I’ve read are Osho, Eckhart Tolle, UG Krishnamurti, and Dr. David R. Hawkins. Very little about the published writings I’ve read stack up completely logically against all the other material. You can’t have really good ideas about enlightenment unless you’re already well on the path yourself or are already there. But ideas they remain.

I believe that there are two components to enlightenment. A physical, neurological component, and a spiritual component. The two intertwine in interesting ways. If you are spiritually enlightened, it means that you’ve been physically enlightened enough times in your previous lives that you’ve developed a thoroughly rock-hard psyche. You may or may not need physical enlightenment when you are spiritually enlightened.

Physical enlightenment is the ego death aspect that is described by most people who write about it. The ego doesn’t literally die, it’s part of the brain and it would be a severe neurological disorder for it to actually die, but it does recede into the background. This causes a huge ‘unflowering’ of spirit whereby the old identification as a being that wants other things desperately is replaced by identification as something in harmony with all around.

Under the hood, it’s all just consciousness. We slowly get more and more conscious over time, through our experiences. The basic structure is, we want something, we try to get it, we fail, then we learn. That basic loop drives consciousness growth.

Eventually you find an inflection point whereby some fundamental aspect about the loop gets upended, that’s what I call enlightenment. For example, we might find that the ‘failing’ aspect just ceases to make sense. It breaks down the whole cycle and we don’t want things anymore. You try, but then weird things happen and nothing makes sense anymore. I call this “new enlightenment” and this happens to everybody who is advanced enough spiritually. It’s not perfect enlightenment, that comes later.

Enlightenment is a step in the evolution of agency, which itself is an evolution on self-direction. Viruses, bacteria, fungi, and plants self-direct. Animals have agency, including humans. But only humans can master their egos.