One is not completely enlightened until they have realized both the Unmanifest and Manifest Self. Realizing the Manifest Self, the Life Force or God and one’s personal relationship to the divine, is called realization of the Manifest or Experiential Self. This path unfolds automatically after any great Shaktipat experience, but especially one where you realize the divine in you as “other.”
As I teach, this is a path either of residing in one’s experience of the I Am sensation (Nisargadatta’s notion of self-inquiry), or more passively, by falling deeply in love with another, a guru, Jesus, or something else to the extent of achieving total devotional love and absolute surrender of the last particle of self to another. There is no decision to surrender here, as the deepening devotional love unfolds automatically as a great surrender. This process is marked by visions, great love, unfolding energies within, bliss and ecstasies, culminating in various states of oneness, disappearances of self awareness, or becoming catatonic-like in complete absorption in God.
After this, there begins a downwards unfolding, which in the case above, is towards the increasing subtlety and decreasing intensity of the energies, gradually folding into emptiness, and that folding into nothingness.
The major problem with having the Absolute, the Unborn as the initial goal of a seeker, is that it takes so long and one can get lost or distracted. The energy path is shorter, and after Shaktipat awakening, it is mostly an automatic unfolding affected only by external events or stresses. It is also a more dramatic path with a lot more pleasure acting as a carrot.
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