What's your explanation of enlightenment?

Nonduality. No separation. Awareness of awareness and nothing else.

"A hushed silence pervades the surroundings and motion itself slows and becomes still. All things radiate forth an intense aliveness. Each is aware of every other. The luminous quality of the radiance is overwhelmingly Divine in nature. It completely includes everything in its total Oneness so that all things are interconnected and in communication and harmony by means of awareness and by sharing the basic quality of the essence of existence itself."

The term enlightenment should be reserved to the moment when you finally experience God, the Force that is outside of this world. Taylor 's description of oneness is the state that we can aspire to reach on our spiritual path. The final step is outside of our grasp.

Yeah that quoted description is of the Presence of God which you can get a taste of early along the pathway. In enlightenment the Presence completely overtakes everything else and there is only God.

I have a little number play just in case anyone is interested in numerology:
1: Son of God
3: Holy Trinity (something that the I perceives as external)
5: the Tao (something the I experience when he/she is in the Now)
4: God
You now see that you can get to God in two ways:
4=3+1 (the enlightened 1 joins the Holy Trinity)
5=4+1 (the not yet enlightened 1 merges with God in the Tao)

Fuzzy math?

Oh I thought you meant you subtract yourself from the Tao and all that's left is God.

Why a math metaphor.... WHY "4" WHY?!?!?!

I borrowed the idea of God's secret number being 4 from a book on the physicist Pauli and Jung who came up with the idea. The Holy Trinity is well-known, 1 being the Son of God seems obvious, and I have no idea how I came up with the Tao = 5 idea. I have to admit though, the 5-1=4 concept is a bit confusing. Perhaps it was fuzzy math after all ..

I see enlightenment as understanding both of our light and dark sides, while being in harmony with both. I see it as understanding the divine within ourselves, that we are in fact gods. I think the quickest path to enlightenment is to lose ourselves in service. It's the whole idea of 'he who loses himself shall find himself.'
Your thoughts?

To lose yourself in services is a great path, if you understand that you truly service yourself by servicing others. I believe if you truly walk the Tao you realize that all the time. Embracing the dark and the light simultaneously is a road to success, but not an end in itself. I would think enlightenment lies beyond good and evil.

Enlightenment is a word often defined in such a way to explain various states of being where one feels a tremendous sense of unity with everything in their reality. Enlightenment is often over exaggerated and placed on a pedestal so that one may find themselves striving for something always out of their reach. Just as the business man strives for a the large house and many cars, so does the spiritual man strive for the vague destination of enlightenment.