Ian, do you have a 'go to' definition/frame for enlightened-ness?
I know very little about JK, I recall Shinzen saying that he seemed to 'get' something but that his teaching led to a lot of his students talking about JK instead of putting what he said into practice.
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Shinzen was making the point that not all people with a deep awakening are good @ teaching it to others. He would use JK as the prime example. His point is that while it’s true that there’s nothing to get and nowhere to go, you still have to give people something to hang onto.
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As for the go-to definition of classic awakening, the short version is that you realize that there’s no such thing inside you as a self.
There’s much more after that, but that’s considered the basic “qualification.”
(And, yes, I’m aware of all that’s problematic @ that def.)
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Yeah, the other version (same thing, differently stated) is realizing "I'm just the witness". Which you get seems to depend on your tradition/previous learning/framing.
Or that's my understanding, I am (probably) willing to defer.
But awakening is not enlightenment.
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Ian, you are very welcome to stick your dick into the blender of that discussion for as long as you can stand it.
I’ll save you a trip to the ER - people define those terms differently and idiosyncratically. So you’ll just end up chasing your tail.
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My favourite is when people get angry because you use the "wrong" definition, as if this is how language works in any other modality.
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Funny, but no, it is not.
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Pretty much every religious or esoteric founding text/authoritative commentary is the founder/author correcting definitions.
Seriously.
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Teachings, denuded of context, are just babble. Good teachers provide context, but students still need help.
Intepreting meaning is much harder than people give it credit for.