Have you achieved self realization or enlightenment? Can you explain the feeling of being enlightened?

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I was born enlightened, and I’ve spent my entire life building an understanding of what that means.

What does it feel like? In a nutshell, it feels like not needing anything at all. Like I’m already perfect. Any defects I find in the perfection are perfect defects. Whatever it is I do or build in any given moment simply brings about a more precise perfection.

Let’s say you’re throwing darts. You pick up a dart and throw it at a board. It doesn’t even hit the board. What do you do then? Do you lament that you’re not any good at darts and you’re suck at everything and adulting and life? I don’t. I laugh. That was a perfect dart throw, it perfectly missed the board. I laughed with God over just how much fun I’m having, to poke holes in the walls instead of hitting the dartboard.

I’ll pick up another dart and throw again. This time maybe it hits the board. I throw three hundred more times. I throw three thousand more times. I throw a million times. Each time, I make a perfect throw of a perfect dart at a perfect dartboard. The dartboard has hundreds of perfect little holes in it.

Getting tired of this analogy, I don’t throw darts, my passion is ping pong. When I started playing ping pong, I sucked. Everybody sucks at the beginning. I loved to suck at ping pong. When I stopped sucking at it, and started beating almost everybody I played, nothing changed my essential joy that filled me in every single rally. Every strike of the paddle on the ball, the high-speed calculation of spin and tactics.

It was perfect at the beginning, rather my game got more precise over the course of time. I don’t just love ping pong this way, I love everything this way. Programming computers, entertaining beautiful women. Writing Quora answers. Missing the high marks I set for myself don’t get me down, they just give me more interesting experiences to analyze and learn from.

This is what enlightenment feels like to me. Endless, boundless joy. Joy that’s present everywhere. When I’m sad, I’m joyously sad. When I’m angry, I rejoice in my anger. Negative emotions are fun for me, so much fun that I have trouble being relatable sometimes.

Sometimes the joy is intense, but most of the time it’s very subtle. It’s the subtle joy of knowing that if everything ended this very second, I wouldn’t regret a moment of it. The subtle but sublime, and ever-changing realization of perfection.