Are teachings on enlightenment that reduce to "You are already enlightened" of any use to anybody?

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No, it’s not. Enlightenment is a real thing and people with the understanding can in many cases tell who is enlightened and who isn’t once they’ve spent enough time with them. Building that understanding is something anybody can do with enough time and effort. Having the understanding does not make you enlightened.

If you want instant salvation, you need to turn to Jesus, not meditation. Because only Jesus offers a real method for doing that, one you can work out just by reading the New Testament and applying both an open and a critical mind to the material.

That aside, let’s dive a bit deeper. Enlightenment is the realization of the illusion of self. Notice I didn’t say that self didn’t exist. It does exist. The problem is that it’s an illusory existence, not a real one. One meditation you can use to apprehend this is to constantly ask yourself, what precisely is it that is having this thought? What is your core essence?

It’s impossible to pin down with any kind of accuracy. Are you merely a featherless biped, as Plato said? Of course not, we are more than that. Diogenes’ answer to Plato was to pluck a chicken and throw it in front of Plato and his disciples, saying, “here is Plato’s man.”

But not being able to pin down an identity does not mean that your brain isn’t constantly generating and maintaining an illusion of one. And understanding that your brain is doing this does not protect you from the downsides that come from identifying as the illusion.

No, a different process is needed, one we call a spiritual one. If you were already enlightened, then when you do spiritual things, they nearly-instantly succeed, because the illusion of self doesn’t get in the way of spiritual manifestation.

The process of spirituality reveals the illusion for what it is. You want to do something like apply the Law of Attraction, but just can’t get it to actually make something you want to happen, happen. So you keep reading and studying and applying and you find that what’s deficient is this process of release.

Eventually you learn how to let go of your desires and it’s like a block is lifted, the universe showers you with riches. You now have a new problem in front of you, managing the abundance that you are receiving. It’s as spiritual a problem as the one before.

An enlightened person never needed the riches or the management. When I got into it, I simply wanted to know how it worked. Once I figured it out, I didn’t bother trying to take it to the next level or anything, I realized that greater vistas were possible if I didn’t identify with this one aspect of spiritual reality.