Can enlightenment be lost?

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There are two things at play here.

First, there is the neuroscience of enlightenment. When you become or have a realization of enlightenment, then your brain changes, you lose your addiction to the ego, and to wanting things.

Note that this is not the same thing as ego death. Ego death is an undesirable phenomenon whereby you literally lose all wants and desires. Ego death isn’t enlightenment, it’s a neurological disorder. Your brain works better when it’s enlightened, not worse. Ego death belongs to a class of psychiatric disorders that are really tough to treat because the patient doesn’t understand that there is anything wrong.

Real enlightenment is that in which you want things, maybe you even want them badly, but if you don’t get them you don’t get attached to that fact and can just move on. This is just one aspect of enlightenment, other things come from the other aspect of enlightenment that I’m about to discuss.

Our bodies have minds and our minds are conscious. Our conscious minds are connected to a soul. The soul retains our ongoing spiritual growth. Before we are born we are in constant communion with the Source, or as some people call it, God. Our consciousnesses evolve over the course of our lives and that gets stored in the soul.

Before we are born, we commune with God to determine the path our next lives will take. God then devises a life plan for you and then shoots you off into a new body.

People who get enlightened during their time on Earth were destined to do so. People who lose enlightenment were similarly destined to do so. It’s not so much a matter of God deciding, but rather God knows to a much greater extent than we do what the future holds for us. He places you in this world knowing you’re going to evolve a certain way. He assists in that evolution by driving certain events to happen to you.

People go through many many lifetimes where they become enlightened. They get enlightened in many different ways, there’s not just one way of being enlightened. Enlightenment as we see it is half cultural anyway.