To be enlightened means "the full awakening of the total personality to reality."
Like conversion...
There is usually a good deal of anxiety aroused before the experience takes place, while afterwards a new feeling of strength and certainty is present. The process of discovering the unconscious can be described as a series of ever-widening experiences, which are felt deeply and which transcend theoretical, intellectual knowledge.
In other words, the world becomes God to us from everlasting to Everlasting...
The average person is like the man in Plato's cave, seeing only the shadows and mistaking them for the substance. Once he has recognized this error, he knows only that the shadows are not the substance. But when he becomes enlightened, he has left the cave and its darkness for the light: there he sees the substance and not the shadows. He is awake. As long as he is in the dark, he cannot understand the light (as the Bible says: "A light shines in the darkness and the darkness understandeth not"). Once he be out of the darkness, he understands the difference between how he saw the world as shadows and how he sees it now, as reality.
No matter how often he thinks of God or goes to church, or how much he believes in religious ideas, if he, the whole man, is deaf to the question of existence, if he does not have an answer to it, he is marking time, and he lives and dies like one of the million things he produces. He thinks of God, instead of experiencing being God.
(Erich Fromm et al., Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis)