Are you enlightened? What does that mean to you?

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Yes, I consider myself enlightened. Discovering the meaning of enlightenment as it pertains to me is a life-long project.

For a long time I read about enlightenment with a sort of detached air. Enlightenment was something silly people who were looking for an escape sought out, it was interesting to read their adventures and the life lessons they took from them.

But as I kept reading about it the descriptions started to apply more and more to me, and the people who wrote about enlightenment, I felt more in common with them than with the people who sought it out.

Eventually I discovered David Hawkins, who created a framework for thinking about enlightenment through the mechanism of consciousness growth. This was some 6 years after I’d first come across the concept. Over the course of perhaps 2 years, I learned, worked with, embraced, then slowly became disillusioned with his material, eventually coming to settle on my own conceptual framework. David Hawkins was a brilliant, brilliant man, and I’m proud to be able to stand on his shoulders.

In the course of working with his ideas, the question of where I was at on his scale persisted. By the time I was able to set his scale aside, that question of whether I was enlightened or not, could no longer be answered in anything other than the affirmative, for me at least.

But by then the whole concept of enlightenment had lost its luster. I wandered back to Christianity, which has a very different perspective on how people learn and grow and what happens around the time on Earth that dominates our lives. I just stopped thinking in those terms.

It wasn’t until I started answering questions on Quora that I started thinking about enlightenment again. My spiritual journey has chapters, and the topics of those chapters have always revolved around the people in my life that I share my spirituality with.

So much of my journey has been just me exploring and growing by myself, punctuated with short, intense bursts of shared exploration when someone or a small group of people suddenly get interested in what I’m interested in.

So what does my enlightenment mean to me? Nothing. It’s a conclusion I reached years ago. Having been concluded means that I no longer need to go down that pathway anymore of looking for things to surrender so that I can get out of my own way.

I look for far more powerful vehicles to put my spirituality in these days. No guru, no book, no framework can contain my inquiry any longer.