If enlightenment is really a glitch in the system since everything is as it should be, why should one pursue it or teach others about it?

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Because enlightenment isn’t an all-or-nothing thing. You can be more or less enlightened. To visualize imagine getting born into a state of ignorance. By the time human infants are born they already have discernible personalities, differences in how the brain functions and so differences in how the person behaves, acts, and chooses goals.

Eventually you grow up and mature into an adult, and part of this involves coming to grips with this thing that we call spirituality. You get to choose how to approach it and what your relationship is to it. Nowadays you can choose a path that I call “hyper-rationalism” and this is how atheists are created.

But if you don’t choose to make up all the reasons for yourself you’ll find a sometimes dizzying array of traditions and schools of thought to choose from. These traditions are often ancient, the reasons why things are they way they are often boil down to some argument one guy had with another guy two hundred years ago.

Anyway these traditions in general introduce you to a spiritual way of looking at things. And the thing about spirituality is that it’s dense. The reason there are so many traditions and schools of thought is precisely because of this density. You can trace the development of any Christian denomination through a thousand years of history and come to understand a truly vast amount of knowledge just to understand simple questions about tiny phrases you might here over and over again when you go to church.

Enlightenment is kind of an end-run around that whole way of doing things. Instead of decades spent practicing things that may or may not get you what you want, enlightenment tries to come to a laser focus on exactly what it is that distinguishes ordinary people from the kinds of people that people create religions around.

When you get into the world of enlightenment, you start immediately grappling with incredibly deep questions about the ego and self. I’m more of a Christian these days, but that’s only because I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life grappling with spirituality in all kinds of ways, so I can understand the uniqueness that Christianity has to offer.

Enlightenment has perhaps the steepest learning curve out of any spiritual practice I’ve ever encountered. And any progress you make on that journey is progress worth making. Time spent grappling with the mind in concentration meditation is always worth it. Sure, you can plateau, but even plateaued concentration practice is way better than not doing anything at all.

And if someone can actually learn and grow from a skilled teacher’s teachings, then a wonderful thing has happened, even if that person never manages to actually become enlightened.

Because nothing makes life better to live than the things we call spiritual. Go ahead, try to name things that you don’t think are spiritual that are meaningful. I bet you every last one of those things on your list, can be seen as spiritual.

Spirituality and meaning are entwined so deeply with each other that it’s all but impossible to define one without aspects of the other. Concentrated spiritual struggle, which is what enlightenment practice offers, is perhaps the most accessible form of greatness that we can devise. Not everybody is cut out to be a doctor. Not everyone can know the horrors of war.

But anybody can meditate on the nature of ego. And it really helps to get help, instruction, and advice from others.