Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special, it’s not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred.
I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe. The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it.
Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special. Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence.
Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened the whole notion of enlightenment and someone who is enlightened is a big joke. I use the word enlightenment all the time; not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment.
– Adyashanti
I prefer to not use the word enlightenment since it comes with so much baggage and misleading ideas.
Instead, I can see how my mind creates the idea of enlightenment, if there are any threats in finding or not finding it, and if there are any commands to find or not find it. I can do this by examining whatever sensations, images and words are there. (Living Inquiries.)
That’s how I find the ordinariness in it. What’s discovered was already here, just unnoticed for a while.