Understand now why every search failed — yours included. A wave cannot find the ocean by swimming. The swimming was the problem — and the swimming was made of ocean too, so it was never really a problem. Seeking presupposes distance. Distance is the one thing missing. The dream-self said: enlightenment is far, high, elsewhere, later, for others — and as long as you believed it, you faced elsewhere, which is the only way to miss what is everywhere. You cannot become what you are. You can only stop pretending you are not it, and even the pretending was lit the whole time by the very thing it denied.
So this recognition is not an attainment, and beware every voice including your own that frames it as one. It is not a state — states arrive and pass in you like all other weather; even bliss is scenery; even the feeling of being very spiritual is scenery, and rather cheap scenery. What you are is not an experience. It is the knowing of every experience — the screen on which every film plays: war films, love films, the film of your forty or eighty years — and the flood never wet the screen, and the fire never burned it.