You don’t go back and forth, no. If you go back and forth, it’s not enlightenment, not yet.

People call “enlightenment” a vast variety of spiritual experiences and states of consciousness which can last hours, days, weeks, months, or even years, because of the profound misunderstanding of the nature of the bliss it brings, and the misconception that enlightenment is an altered state of consciousness. Enlightenment, strictly speaking, is neither an experience nor a state of consciousness, it’s the cessation of dreaming, i.e. the mind’s capacity to imagine things and believe them. All experiences and states of consciousness are temporary, enlightenment is not.

An awakening experience is just shedding some of the unconscious beliefs. When it happens, there’s a relief and an accompanying feeling of bliss, love and contentment which does not last very long. So people think they “lost it”. They didn’t lose it. You can’t “lose it”, you can only lose your beliefs, it’s just that the bliss and contentment didn’t last because not all beliefs were lost. People who had awakening experiences usually still harbor a lot of beliefs, for example, “we are all one consciousness”, “everything happens for a reason”, reincarnation, past/future lives, beliefs in soul, or divine masculine/feminine. All of those are beliefs to be shed in the future.

The point of abiding awareness, or self-realization is the point when you are seeing your true nature for the first time, it’s the point when you accept that everything you thought about yourself is not true, it was a belief. That there is no “you”, and never has been. Divine, God, higher self, soul, ego - all disappear in self-realization, only experience is seen to be true. It feels like death. One enters authentic non-duality. The release of bliss and love is truly massive compared to an awakening experience. It can take a few years just to sit through it. Some rare individuals (Osho, Maharishi, Tolle, myself) never had any awakening experiences prior to self-realization. So their “enlightenment” was sudden and complete. When it happens this way, it’s also very dramatic. It cannot be lost. There’s no possibility of coming back to ignorance.

But the journey continues. The mind cannot stop dreaming instantly. What follows is usually a very intense period of bliss and emotional release. One can become very sensitive, bare. Or enters a trance-like state which can persist for years. As the mind slowly grinds to a halt, emptiness replaces bliss, and one becomes less and less emotional. Then comes a point when the mind’s capacity to dream is destroyed. One becomes very regular again, very ordinary. It’s a place beyond duality and non-duality. Never again he will imagine things that aren’t there and believe them. All falsehoods have been abandoned, only the real is perceived. There’s not even a slightest possibility of “losing it”, even for a split moment, because “losing it” means believing the dream, and there’s no more dreaming. That’s enlightenment.