How does an enlightened or awakened person experience reality?

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What is reality? What is experience? What is enlightenment? What is awakening? This is how a truly enlightened person experiences questions of this sort. Even having answers to the questions won’t stop the questioning. They’re evergreen. I can define enlightenment all day long.

I’m going to give a personal perspective here as I think that’ll be the most useful. As a kid, I was precocious, gifted, and only really interested in learning and understanding for myself. If you told me I needed to do something, I’d take the input, but if I decided it wouldn’t teach me anything, I wouldn’t bother. I couldn’t be influenced by fear.

I am, and have always been, me. I don’t want to be anyone else, I never have. I spent the entire decade of my twenties doing self-exploration. I had no interest in struggling to find a place in the world. I made the world find a place with me.

Spirituality was something I had to come to over time. I found the Internet in my teens and used it to exchange ideas with people, always the most deepest ideas I could find. I was an atheist at the time but over a few years decided atheist materialism just wasn’t that interesting.

Life events conspired to get me to join a Wicca coven. Spiritual people were always more interesting to me than ‘rational’ people. Wicca introduced me to the idea of ‘building’ belief. I didn’t believe in anything but believing in things is fun. So I learned how to pretend. Many years later I would learn that pretending is the first and most important step. If you can’t pretend you can’t do anything.

The life events that conspired to get me into a Wicca coven also made me leave the coven eventually. For years my only connection to spirituality was through Internet forums. I knew what enlightenment and awakening was, I just didn’t think in those frames. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. So I bounced around different wild notions for years.

Eventually I was introduced to Dr. David Hawkins, who came up with a rational basis for enlightenment. I devoured his books. I finally felt like I could be enlightened. A new way of thinking was introduced to me, the idea that I could actually make sense of the world of the spiritual.

Around this time I made friends with people who were spiritual in ways I’d never considered before. They had visions, they claimed to know and understand. I asked questions and really got to know them. I eventually realized that, unlike most other realms of human activity, talent counted for more in the world of spirituality than effort.

Talent is inborn potential. I had never considered myself as a spiritually talented person. But when I met other people who actually were spiritually talented, I had to consider myself in relation. I had to face up with the fact that I am extremely spiritually talented. I threw myself into studying Hawkins, and recontextualizing everything I had learned up until then but hadn’t really had reason to value.

Weird spiritual experiences I’d had throughout my life suddenly started making sense in relation to my discovered spiritual talent. Hawkins had given me a framework, the levels of consciousness, that I could try to find myself against. Hawkins said you couldn’t calibrate yourself, but I didn’t trust anyone to do it for me, and my spiritual journey couldn’t be denied.

I had my spiritual awakening 6 years ago, the details I’ve outlined here: Vincent Guidry's post in Spiritual Musings. Despite being awakened, and having all kinds of spiritual experiences, I didn’t yet consider myself enlightened. There was a ‘block’ of sorts keeping me from trying to make the determination. Enlightenment was something far away, not anything that could be near, let alone possessed.

Eventually I was ‘forced’ my awakening state of mind to consider the possibility. I looked and remembered all the enlightened people, and descriptions of enlightened people that I’d ever read about. I could no longer deny that I shared the same elements. If I wasn’t enlightened, then I had no clue what in the sam hell enlightenment even was. And I’d spent years contemplating it.

I finally accepted that I was enlightened. Long after I’d after been awakened. All the literature I’d read spoke of an enlightenment event. So I looked for such an event, a point in time where my mind made a serious shift and destroyed the illusion of self. I couldn’t find one.

I could only conclude that I have been enlightened since birth. It took me years to come to an understanding of how that was possible. Eventually my states of mind would start to reveal themselves to me as enlightened states of mind. Before they were just everywhere. I came to realize that intent is super important.

You can be enlightened without knowing it, and that makes your mind different than other people. Enlightenment applies ‘pressure’ to being. Pressure to discard self and just exist. Knowledge gives you the tools to actually do it. And the true meaning of the levels of consciousness manifested. You either have it or you don’t.

Levels of consciousness, enlightenment, are Eastern concepts. But the true nature of reality, I’m learning, is understood only by the West. The East has a better understanding of self, the inner, while the West has a better understanding of reality, the outer. So I spent many years working to understand Western religion. Judaism, Christianity, soon Islam. Gnosticism. Swedenborg is my muse. I yearn for heaven constantly, even while embodying it.

I’d say that the enlightened person experiences bliss constantly, that is their reality. It’s true. But me personally, I discovered the secret to bliss a decade ago. Bliss isn’t even special for me anymore. In fact, in a somewhat recent meditation, I asked to get brutally maimed, not literally, but in trance. The sensations were fun. I’ve never once had a bad dream. Oh I’ve had dreams other people would consider bad, I’ve had teeth fall out and brutal car crashes and all that sort of thing. But I never woke from them scared. Just, “oh that happened, interesting.”

Fear has always been this external thing. I can feel it, but it never dictates my actions. I don’t seek out fights, but I won’t shy away from them.

What do I do with my time? Seek to understand ever deeper concepts. I have a definition of existence and reality that answers questions that I’d had for years. Self kinda intrudes on the process, but when I analyze, I realize that the intrusion helped instead of hindered.

I have great love for my self. I’m raising my self like I would a child. The self is not me, and only an enlightened person can have that perspective continuously. Some can have it occasionally, these people are forever interesting to me.