While I completely agree with your bacteria analogy, and the importance of awareness and seeing through the BS, when people start claiming they’ve reached spiritual enlightenment of some form, it’s usually just another veil they pull over their own eyes.
Don’t get me wrong, awareness is good. But spiritual enlightenment is just more than that. Most people who believe to br enlightened are as far from it as their next neighbor.
The most unmistakeable sign of self-deceptive “enlightenment” is the accompanying sense of superiority, if ever so subtle. Many feel they are somehow more or better) than others, not only their former selves) because of it.
Humans are psychologically programmed to belong somewhere. The contemporary spiritual/enlightened crowd is one of those places many aspire to belong to. Traditional schools and teachers worked very hard to keep their pupils in check, not to allow them to believe they’ve found some ultimate truth, just because they have stumbled upon a fragment of it.
Today, and especially on the Internet, such “safety checks” no longer exists, and it’s very easy for one to convince themselves they have found the pinnacle of awareness, especially as any amd all dissenting voices can be scratched off as “trolls”, “naysayers”, “nonbelievers”, “not awoke”, whatever you call it. It’s just another form of a confirmstional bubble, where a person is bombarded with so much self-filtered evidence to back their position that they are inclined to disbelieve, and dismiss anything even remotely suggesting the contrary. I write this from experience. Three years after publishing it, I still get a ton of hateful comments under a post that touches this very subject.
(I delete them. Yes, it’s censorship, but it’s my page, and I don’t feel the need of poisonous self-assurance in the comments there.)
Again, I agree with you on mostbof what you’ve written, including the importance of being aware, my onl.argument here is that such aeareness is not the final, capital “A” variety, but definitely a first (and very important) step toeards it.