This is a great question and it moved me to put some ideas out there. When I say you I speak to myself as well. Should a person push on and push on for the future or should they just stop and realize that it's all right here right now. A person could cling to the truth that it's all right here, right now so hard that they could litterally just sit down stop eating and fight to the death with thier physical body until they are released from it. Why should one seek out anything? Food, water, friendship, love, a beautiful sunny day. Aren't all of those things able to be right here, right now if one would just stop and receive them? The mere act of getting up to walk across the room to get a glass of water could be the very act of doubt that keeps you from receiving without having to get up and go anywhere. When you eat from the material world are you feeding the lie that keeps you bound like a slave in your physical body and strengthening the hold that the lie has on you? You are in fact making a statement by eating and drinking matter. The statement is that you need matter to live and that you must go and get something to eat and drink to live because matter is what sustains you and it is not right here right now; instead it is some place else and you must go and get it and put it inside you. You are saying that you do not have everything you need inside of you already. This is the reafirmation of a lie over and over and over, and people wonder why there seems to be imperfection and suffering in the world. I'ts because you are feeding and strengthening that lie every day. The reason one has to hope instead of have is because of the doubt that they perpetuate by what they call living. But on a lighter note, just remember that everything is fine, you are heading in the right direction, things are happening the way that they are supposed to happen, and nothing can keep you from the truth forever because error is finite and truth is infinite and to have the pleasure of receiving truth you must be without it as some point, so actually you doing just what you need to do. Breath in, breath out, breath in, breath out.

Back to reading The Kabalion and started to ponder the Principle of Polarities. In a nutshell, Hermetists find wisdom in the view that dualities - black, white hot, cold good, evil etc. - are really singularities separated by degrees.

I picture it like a snake biting it's own tail. If the snake's head is "hot" and it's tail is "cold", it's temperature changes scale by scale in small degrees. Where then, does the "hot" actually turn "cold"? Since one can't say for sure, Hermetists will say that hot & cold are the same thing.

I thought in terms of the subject here and considered: I believe Enlightenment a journey - a journey of degrees, if you will. Since there is no way to tell when "UnEnlightened" becomes "Enlightened" (though one may know it when one gets there just as one can feel a difference between hot and cold), it could be argued that "UnEnlightened" & "Enlightened" are the same thing. Ergo; where one is at this very moment on their journey... is Enlightenment.

Ironically, Niels Bohr propsed the same idea in Copenhagen. If one cannot measure a quality i.e. dead or alive as in the infamous case of Schroedinger's Cat - then no assumptions can be made and, in this case, the cat is both dead and alive.

Can anyone here measure the degree to which they are Enlightened?