Is it possible to become un-enlightened?

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Sure. Enlightenment is just surrender, done all the time. If you stop surrendering, and start acting again from the perspective of ego, then you are for all intents and purposes unenlightened.

This is an avenue that I explore a lot. But when I do it, I put a limit on it. I’ll “turn off enlightenment” and act from ego perspective until the limit is reached. The limit usually has to do with ethics. I don’t want anything I do from an unenlightened perspective to actually affect someone.

It’s attachment to outcome that causes us to affect others negatively. Occasionally non-attachment also causes problems, particularly if someone is attached to you. It can be very distressing for someone if you’re emotionally detached while they’re attaching to you.

Until I became emotionally mature, I had a mask I would put on whenever I needed to interact with someone. I’d watch and interact using the mask until I ran into a situation I didn’t know how to deal with. Then once the utility of the mask ran out I had to bring my full cognitive resources to bear in order to navigate the situation. This allowed me to make occasional adjustments to the mask so that it wouldn’t fail me the next time.

Since I hit my mid-thirties, my emotional facilities have fully come online so the mask has been chucked into the dustbin. It was a way to keep my limbic system from generating poor reactions to people. Everybody has those situations where they thought they were acting rationally, but in reality they were unhinged and didn’t even know it. I could always simply turn these reactions off. Well, turning them off means I have to figure out a way to respond. That is the mask.

Now you get my full authentic self should you ever interact with me. I’m still enlightened, I can still bring my emotions and cognition to a dead stop anytime I want to, obliterating the self and its patterns. But any reasons I still have for doing this are rapidly disappearing from my life.

What I’m doing now instead is gardening, tilling the ground of the self, nurturing it, and encouraging it to grow. I don’t ‘need’ the tools that enlightenment gave me in order to preserve agency in a world hell-bent on taking it away from me. I can pick and choose how I want my lesser-s self to grow and change. And further integrate it into my normal, non-detached state.

The ultimate goal is to assume something akin to what the Greeks called demigodhood. Characters like Hercules that were still human, but had aspects of the divine, otherworldly power and limitless stamina.

To me the classic enlightenment persona that you see in so many who teach it is limited and still attached to outcome. I want the sort of inner resources that is typified by someone who has no inner limits, who might act in ways that others would call evil, pure personal power to do, well, anything I happen to want. I also want the outcome of those actions to be totally under my aegis.

This requires a kind of surrender that you don’t normally see even in enlightened people. Many enlightened people are what I call materialistically enlightened. They deny the existence of spiritual reality and of God. I seek ever deeper forms of surrender, not just of self, but also of the need to surrender self. To surrender both is to put your fate increasingly in the hands of God.

The net effect of purposeful discarding of enlightenment is that you become more enlightened. This turns enlightenment itself into the obstacle. This dynamic is what I call the spiritual ego. People start encountering it long before they become enlightened as they start to engage spiritually. I like to be the little devil in the ears of the spiritual people I know, encouraging them to at least entertain the idea that they are powerful and wonderful, and acknowledging this doesn’t make you less powerful and wonderful. It feels wrong, but it’s not. I would never do this to someone who I felt needed more humility.