What is considered enlightenment in modern times?

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Most people gussy up their own personal convictions and then peddle that as enlightenment. If you’re a materialist atheist, you are very likely going to include that in your list of criteria for “what and who is enlightened?”

There’s another pattern I see a lot where people mistake “resonates with me” with “in the direction of enlightenment.” The problem isn’t with the face of this statement, yes indeed, anything that resonates with you does indeed bring you closer to enlightenment. The problem is in assuming the converse is also true. If something seems ugly or base to you, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unenlightened. It could very well be enlightenment that doesn’t care what you think of it.

Another problematic description of enlightenment is so over-broad that literally anyone can fit it. I’m reminded of Syndrome’s line in The Incredibles, “And when everyone’s super, no one is.” Everyone already being enlightened robs the concept of its ability to transform and change people. This stuff is real, people can study and apply it, and those efforts, if done properly, bear real fruit. The end goal is similarly real, devilishly hard to achieve, but it’s something you can actually do.

Avoiding the common misguided patterns yields the only definition of the term that actually holds water, that of the nondual perspective. Lots of Westerners have done a great deal of work to bring Buddhist techniques and dharma over to the West. A lot of that stuff simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Some of it is unfalsifiable and therefore safely ignorable. A thriving community of meditators all over the world have been sharing experiences and understandings.

What’s left, what we call nonduality, is a peculiar perspective you earn whereby the perceptive difference between self and observed objects are obliterated. Note that this does not mean that a self cannot be observed in enlightened people. Enlightenment is an inner quality, anything you observe on a person is an external one. It’s really up to each person who explores in this direction to decide what relation they have to the end goal.

Some are seekers, some have already found it. In reality, those who speak from the perspective of enlightenment are really saying that they’re done moving in that direction. They’ve accomplished all that they want to accomplish. They see no further point in keeping on going. It does not mean that there aren’t further goals in that direction that they haven’t yet accomplished that they could accomplish.

For example, many enlightened people are supreme assholes. The lack of perceptive distinction between self and other makes them very very good at being ugly to people. Enlightenment puts you in charge, and then wipes the perspective from awareness that ‘you’ exist. So enlightened people can act without self-awareness, or even the self-awareness that they have no self-awareness.

For this reason, I do not hew to the definition of ‘nonduality alone’. You don’t want to totally obliterate self-awareness. But I can’t rigorously specify exactly what you have to add on top of nonduality in order for me to consider it “true enlightenment as decided by Vince.”

It’s not that I can’t state what’s needed, I mean I already did, self-awareness. But mating that with nonduality is, well, problematic. Nonduality means you don’t perceive self. Self-awareness means you do. It’s just a string of self-contradictory words unless you can draw a rationale. That’s the tricky part.