Can one become spirtually enlightened from being physically in the presence of a spiritually enlightened being?

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Oh god no. If only it were that easy.

I have thought long and hard about the task of helping others become more conscious. It’s a seductive goal, easy to imagine that it could be possible.

But it’s not. A person’s consciousness is their’s and their’s alone. It’s not your plaything to order around.

You don’t know how many times I’ve seen somebody go through something that I thought was completely unnecessary. You’re always like, why don’t you do X? What about Y? It seems so simple to you. But it’s not so simple, not for you and not for the other person. Humans are smart, and that makes them complicated. I would find their situations easy to deal with, and for that reason the situations I deal with are more complicated. If they were easy then I would have solved them already and moved on to the next challenge.

Life gets complicated as we get better at dealing with it. If you are really spiritually advanced, like, say Gandhi, then life is incredibly complicated for you. There are no easy answers anymore, everything is a tug of war between seemingly impossible-to-reconcile perspectives.

So let’s say you go to a spiritual retreat and as a result of the meditation gain some critical insight. It makes everything easier, maybe for a week or so. Eventually everything reaches a new normal and you have new challenges to work through.

The work of self is never done. Not even after you’re enlightened. Whatever that means. Enlightenment is just a word.