Once you get it, there is no going back.

Someone suggested to me recently that some people ‘have the enlightenment experience’ but then they go back to living the old way.

To me this seems unlikely. The ‘enlightenment experience’, if you want to call it that, is a one way street. Once you realize that you are not, never have been and never will be an individual entity as you had always assumed, it fundamentally changes your life experience. It is like waking up from the Matrix – once you know, you know. It’s a fundamental shift in your thinking. It’s like finding out one of your parents has died. You don’t forget and try to call them the next day or a few months later. You might retain certain mental habits. My dad died 11 years ago and I still sometimes have the thought that I’d like to talk to him, but, when I do, my brain immediately reminds me that he is dead.

The same is true of knowing that you are not an individual. Certain habits of thinking about yourself as an individual might remain, after all, they are hard wired into your brain, but if you’ve had ‘the experience’, then whenever those thought arise, they will immediately be countered by the new information.