Why you should always be skeptical even regarding your own enlightenment?

You should always be skeptical of your own enlightenment because believing you have achieved it can easily become a new “identity story” that you feel compelled to defend. If you deeply desire to be enlightened, you might convince yourself that you have reached the destination while you are still on the path, which merely inflates your “spiritual ego” instead of dismantling it.

Once you become attached to the identity of being “enlightened,” you develop a constant fear of “losing” it or “breaking the spell”. To protect this fragile self-image in front of yourself and others, you will start pretending, forcing yourself to think and behave in ways you assume an “enlightened” person should. For example, you might artificially suppress your judgments or force yourself to tolerate unacceptable situations just to preserve the illusion, rather than experiencing these states naturally.

Because you are terrified of ruining this new identity, you become completely unwilling to reconsider or question whether your enlightenment is actually real. We emphasize that this exact unwillingness to question your own enlightenment turns the belief into a dogma, which is clear evidence that you have not actually reached enlightenment. Dogma and rigid beliefs are fundamentally incompatible with true realization.

In contrast, a truly enlightened person understands that real enlightenment comes from irreversible realizations, so there is no fear that it can be accidentally “lost”. Therefore, someone who has genuinely reached enlightenment maintains a constant attitude of skepticism and is always entirely willing to question their own state. If a sincere seeker questions their enlightenment and realizes they were simply fooling themselves with a spiritual ego, they do not feel sadness or defeat—they are pleased, because they can finally drop the illusion and begin seeking the truth for real.