Is it possible to experience a permanent state of enlightenment?

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I’ve been enlightened since birth. Permanent enough for you?

When I was in my late teens, I started getting interested in spirituality. I explored both Eastern and Western traditions. I joined a Wicca coven, learned how to meditate, and just read and tried anything I could get my hands on. It took me some 6 years in between learning what enlightenment was and actually accepting that I was already enlightened.

The difficulty for me was in determining when I became enlightened. All the books I’d read by enlightened people all described an “enlightenment event” where by the person discards mundane life in exchange for a blessed, endlessly spiritual existence.

I scoured my past looking for such an event. But I came up empty. I’ve always been smart, always been precocious, I’ve never had an event whereby I suddenly discarded my ego or whatever. I have the same kind of existence now as I did 20 years ago.

In fact, the main thing I learned about personal and spiritual growth is that the real stuff, what I call consciousness growth, happens slowly over the course of a lifetime. I can define enlightenment as the state of constant surrender. But what allows you to know what to surrender is what consciousness growth provides. You get born with a certain level of consciousness and it determines how quickly you move from difficulty to understanding what is needed to surrender to remove said difficulty.

Enlightened people move smoothly from the need to surrender to actualized surrender. The things I had studied throughout my life gave me a thorough grounding on what to look for, internally, when one has a problem or a concern. My meditation practice allowed me the ability to actually explore and discover truths for myself.

So rather than needing to discover a doorway that I would then need to walk through, I only needed to learn what enlightenment was before I could figure out how it worked, and once I knew how it worked, I could immediately start actually using it. Unenlightened people are unable to use the material even if they read and understand it because too much is in the way.

I believe I became this way over many previous lifetimes and I even have theories about how the world outside this one works that accounts for why we don’t have more people like me in the world.