Robert McLune:
C C C:
Juan, the problem here is that no one is enlightened although Florian indicated that he felt like he was "finished"
Sigh -- just when I think I'm getting the hand of terminology. I thought arhats were enlightened, no? Aren't Daniel, Kenneth Folk, etc therefore enlightened? Or do you mean to say that no one is "fully" enlightened?
In general, what *are* the differences among "enlightened", "fully enlightened", "an ar*h*t", and whatever Floran means by "finished"?
And which of those, or something else, was Siddhartha Gautama?
What C C C alludes to is my claim that the seeking is gone, the seeker is gone, in a sense, and what is sought for is, in a sense, gone. The search is over. I no longer feel incomplete with reference to anything, rather, I feel whole. The seeker - that which would look at things from a seemingly special vantage point, looking for something to make it whole, and always saying, "no, not this...", is gone or rather, it resumed its proper station, no longer claiming to be something it can't be (a self, a safe haven, etc). The sought-for, that sense of lack, is gone in the sense that everything it was standing for was already there.
If you look around the DhO, especially older posts, you might find references to "insight disease". An internet search will probably yield better results than the built-in search here on DhO: "site:dharmaoverground.org insight disease" Anyway, this insight disease was "cured", and that's the claim C C C refers to.
As to degrees of enlightenment: heh. I just posted a longish text in the "Maps" section,
Report: Dark Kamma Results (a.k.a. Trials) / Heart Release, where I'm describing shifts in experience which seem to be only very loosely related to the curing of insight disease or the end of seeking. Nikolai has already mentioned similar experiences.
If I may give you a bit of advice (and you are by no means required to do anything with it or accept it): explore your own experience, don't limit yourself to exploring old texts or religious or spiritual ideals only. Granted, those texts and ideals are part of your experience, and can be worthwhile objects for research: but they don't exhaust what you can and do experience, not by a long shot. Wanting to "do it right" is a good motivation. It has this "near enemy" of becoming confused over just what exactly that means before even starting to "do it". Keep the "many paths up the mountain" and "blind men and the Elephant" similes in mind, and if anyone tries to scare you by saying that not all paths (or only one) actually leads up the mountain, remember that he's likely talking about his own experience, where indeed he took exactly the right path, and is just committing the fallacy of turning a description (of his own experience) into a prescription (for everybody else's experience).
Cheers,
Florian