Enlightenment Is in the I of the Beholder
The difference between being enlightened and being unenlightened isn’t the presence or absence of ego, but the place the ego occupies in your life. After all, if you lacked all sense of self, who would wipe your butt and keep you from wiping someone else’s?
The ego, the self that imagines itself apart from rather than a part of the Happening that is happening as all happening, is a tool for navigating the world as it appears to us in our normal waking state. The goal isn’t to kill the self but to be freed from the self and to place the self in service to the Self.
The true value of human beings can be found in the degree to which they have attained liberation from the self.
Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions
If we exaggerate this self, we catastrophize its experience and seek to escape from it through the pursuit of enlightenment, heaven, or a superior rebirth. But if we allow the ego to do what it does best, and not get trapped in its hyperbolic notions of itself, we are never apart from and always a part of Reality. We recognize the uniqueness and preciousness of every I without imagining that they are other than the singular I’ing that is all. And when we do this, we treat all beings justly and compassionately, and we become a blessing to all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3). That’s enlightenment.
Or if it’s not, enlightenment is irrelevant.