Is Enlightenment a place or a state of mind/being?

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It's a state of mind which is powerful enough to change your sense of being.

Nothing about spirituality actually changes your basic physiology. What makes you human is the fact that your body was built according the human plan. Every other human, enlightened or unenlightened, has this same plan. What makes you a mammal is a smaller set of things. Every mammal, be they enlightened human, unenlightened human, dog, bear, or whale, has the same basic body plan.

These body plans include brain composition and structure. All mammals have what's called the paleo-mammalian cortex, known colloquially as the limbic system. This system performs the exact same functions in every mammal.

Our human identities are closer to us than our mammal ones. But we are both human and mammal.

Enlightenment plays with our sense of identity. A person can have many identities, wife and mother, corporate heavy-hitter. The spiritual journey slowly shows us that these identities are of mind, and mind is a poor tool.

Progressive surrender slowly liberates you from the suffering that this process of identification invariably entails. It shortens the length of time that identifications grip to the sense of being.

One can even meditate and in the process of trance exploration, form identities of things that aren't even mammal or human. Eventually you can even meditate on the process of identification itself and learn to stop the automatic process.

Every time you learn something new about identification, a new identification "over" is formed, a hidden one that needs to be discovered. You can identify as someone who doesn't identify! Discovering this identification yields another state.

Enough exploration of this state yields the insight that all experience happens in mind and the mind is infinitely plastic.

It's when you discover that there's no end to this process that you stop trying do hard to reach the end. This is enlightenment. Shifts still happen, though not driven by a being identified with the incessant desire to detach further and further.