Why is it so rare for enlightened people to help others become enlightened? Is it because they don't regard other people as real?

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Most everyone I’ve met that I considered to be enlightened was interested in helping others. They were happy to answer my questions, and willing to entertain my theories, and concerned about not appearing pretentious.

That’s… really about all you can do. If you study the phenomenon long and hard enough, you eventually come to the conclusion that it’s just not something everyone can do. You can help people out in small ways, maybe even in big ones. You can give them things that will change their lives, from the shirt off your back to a new outlook on life.

That’s nice and all, but it’s not enlightenment. A young mother approached me in the coffee shop once and handed me a note asking for money for groceries. I thought for a minute, and instructed her to go to the grocery store nearby, get a cart and start filling it up, I’d be there momentarily. I wound up buying her ~$200 in groceries. I was going through an expensive generosity phase that wound up costing me over $1000 by the time it was done. I touched several lives in very unique ways. I expect them to think back to our random meetings, like, maybe six times total for the rest of their lives after the initial amazement wears off. Maybe the one homeless dude who prayed with me in the ATM lobby actually listened to my advice on how to ask for people’s generosity got himself off the street.

The fact of the matter is that you can’t make anyone do anything, and while my own life is filled with phenomenal, amazingly wondrous experiences, the capacity for that comes from deep within my own being, and even though I’ve spent many many many years trying to work out the intricacies, I can’t fully understand it to the point where I can stop someone’s mind from destroying them from the inside out. One amazing experience doesn’t cut it.

And to be frank, that’s not my purpose. God already put someone on the Earth to implement His will. He did it at the perfect time in history, in the perfect place, for people He chose probably largely for geographical reasons. We have four accounts of people that were there that we can study, and the collected spiritual and cultural writings of the people Jesus was born into.

It’s really, really, really hard to be human. Demands are made that one must respond to before they can understand why. Mind, ego, develops around these demands and it takes an incredible amount of intelligence, fortitude, and willpower to go one’s own way. Then when one does earn agency, ego turns it into pride. Pride hardens and as a result few people can spare much time to conduct a spiritual journey.

The best structure for learning how to be spiritual is perhaps the one I utilized. It required me to drive 40 miles both ways once a week on top of my full time job. All to spend a lot of time and energy on the specific goal of cultivating and building belief in things that most of the world doesn’t think exists, and even if they do believe in the existence of the spiritual, wouldn’t know the first thing about how it works or how to get started themselves.

Because at the end of the day, spirituality can really only be communicated face to face to someone who is already interested and is willing to accept you as a teacher. It’s not that I need someone to accept me as a teacher in order to affect their lives, but if the goal is enlightenment, well there’s a reason people move to monasteries.