I believe that the word enlightenment has been watered down from its ancient meaning. I believe people confuse awaking with enlightenment. I personally reserve the word enlightenment to mean the following: To use a metaphor, every cell in your body explodes and you announce your presence to God/The Universe/The Force. When people say I had a moment of enlightenment, I believe what they really experienced was a moment of being awake.
I believe we are all energy beings who inhabit physical bodies so we can experience this solid physical dimension. This energy enters our body at the moment of birth and departs a few minutes after we die. What happens to this energy while we are alive and after we die is up to us.
Now I also believe that there is a force that keeps us all in a form of sleep during our lives. A movie might call this force keeping us asleep the matrix. When we awake in the morning, we are moving from one form of sleep to another.
But occasionally people break the hold the matrix has on their perceptions. Toltec shamans talk of entering a trance and seeing people as luminous orbs of light. The shaman trained himself to be aware our energy bodies.
Being aware contributes to entering enlightenment but being aware is not, in my opinion, enlightenment. From studying people who claim to be enlightened I think that not everyone who claims to be is. Also there are cycles to enlightenment, a spectrum.
