If you’re all enlightened beings, it follows that the Buddha was nothing special. Why call yourselves Buddhist?

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The idea that everyone is enlightened is a perversion of Buddhist ideas. The self is illusory, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not also a real thing. The television show you were watching last night is an illusion, an illusion that still cost millions of real dollars to make.

You need to gain a certain perspective in order to see through the illusion of self, mere knowledge that the self is illusory does not by itself give that to you. The Buddha worked to teach not just knowledge, but also technique, technique aimed at making the knowledge real. Realization of illusion of self is what brings about liberation.

Buddhism arose at the tail end of the Vedic period. The Vedas chronicle the progress of Hindu religious thought from a linear soul progression to a circular one. It was originally thought that you lived once, then progressed through various heavens until you obtained release from existence as a being separate from the universe.

This didn’t really work for them so they stumbled their way into the concept of samsara, which today all Hindu religions share. The term encompasses life, death, and rebirth, seen not just in the macro but also in the micro.

Gautama Buddha observed that while there was a lot of people practicing religion, not a whole lot of people were achieving liberation. So he went on a search to figure out just what it meant to be liberated and how to go about it. We call his findings Buddhism.

He first looked to asceticism, the renunciation of bodily pleasure, but found it wanting. He then turned to yoga practice, the effort to purify the body and mind through physical discipline. He was asked to succeed his teachers, but he found yoga wanting too and turned to meditation.

In meditation the Buddha found what he was looking for, a “middle path” between physical denial and physical embrace. Through concentration and insight, the mind can be brought to a state where true freedom from the tyranny of self can be obtained.

If the Buddha himself wasn’t born enlightened, and had to work to find it, certainly everyone else isn’t either.

I do believe it is possible to be born enlightened, but I think this is quite rare. I consider myself to have been born enlightened. But even so, I’ve done a ton of spiritual practice and learning, it was required in order to come to awareness of the perceptive state I’d been enjoying for my whole life.

I have gotten into trouble assuming that other people were like me. They aren’t, and the more authentically I can express the truth of my experience, the easier it seems to help others on their journey. The notion that everyone is enlightened is toxic and only gets in the way of true realization.