What is enlightenment?

For me, enlightenment is experiencing God 24 hours a day waking and sleeping and feeling the peace and happiness of that all the time.

Was life always like this for me?

No. My childhood often was terrifying just trying to stay alive first with whooping cough at age 2 and then blunt trauma childhood epilepsy starting when I was 10 in 1958 until 1963 when it finally ended and my life became more normal.

But, somehow God won me over and I realized I needed God to survive this lifetime here on earth. However, I have also met Tibetan Buddhists in Bodhgaya and Dharamshala who seemed to me to be much more devout in their beliefs than any Christians I have ever met here in the U.S.

Why?

Because Christians here in the U.S. are not killed for their beliefs like Tibetan Buddhists are often killed by the Chinese for theirs. So, in order to be a Tibetan Buddhists in many situations you have to be prepared to die for your beliefs in Asia.

What is enlightenment?

It is different for every person simply because each person has had different life experiences in this lifetime and all the others (if they reincarnate).

So, the different experiences each person has even from conception on make each person's experience unique and different than every other person's experience.

I was very lucky. My mother wanted to be a mother and wanted to have me. This wasn't true of many mothers I knew of in the 1950s and so I witnessed many children being harmed and abused in various ways as I grew up. Hurting children, and each other as adults was much more common then than now partly because people weren't entirely sane after going through World War II and the Great Depression.

Many people likely won't be sane very much after the Coronavirus either. Even now I find I really have to watch out for people driving a car that aren't in their bodies correctly to even be driving a car at all now.

So, I find you have to pretend you are completely surrounded by drunk drivers every time you get in the road now here in California. But, I imagine people are kind of nuts all over the world with so many things that they are used to to stay sane cut off from their lives because they don't want to die from coronavirus.

So, what is enlightenment?

It is different for each person because each person has different needs than every other person.

But, strangely enough, my happiest times were after I almost died in 1998 and 1999 from a heart virus and realized I just was going to be grateful for the time I have left alive. Thinking this way has been the happiest 22 years of my life so far because of this point of view.

By God's Grace