Life After Enlightenment 

As I understand it, an enlightened man or woman experiences the absence from his mind of the idea of his personal self, and also, simultaneously, experiences all life as being interconnected and unified.   

With this firm realization of non-self and non-separateness, what kind of subsequent life does an enlightened person have?  According to Chogyam Trungpa, an awakened person naturally flows into the third major school of Buddhism, after Hinayana and Mahayana, which is Vajrayana or Tantra.  Trungpa has a chapter on Tantra in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (2002), as well as books on Tantra in Journey Without Goal (1981) and Crazy Wisdom (2001).  I have used these sources to develop an idea of the course of life after a person has experienced enlightenment. 

With the burden of ego virtually removed, an enlightened person gradually flows into many changes of character.  For instance, he or she experiences an influx of expansive energy and a sense of great spaciousness.  His heart begins to open, and he grows in compassion and generosity.   

He also discovers a “fabulous and fantastic” world (Trungpa’s words), coming into contact with, so to speak, the essences of objects, where colors and brighter and vistas more precise.  He experiences the “luminosity” of the world. 

His own emotions become more recognizable and definite to him.  He fully accepts them, whether positive or negative, and as a result they transmute into life-feeding energy. 

With ego virtually gone, the enlightened person gradually gets used to living a kind of groundless life, without fear and the need to grasp for security.  His behavior becomes spontaneous, worried hesitancy being gone.

These changes occur of themselves and are effortless and automatic.  The enlightened person is borne along, by a power greater than himself, into a vastly expanded life.