Yes, I have met such a person. The first person who comes to mind is Ed Brown, Edward Espe Brown—this person. author of the Tassajara Bread Book and other things.
I once spent a day at Green Gulch that was a blend of sitting and dharma talks with Ed and gentle yoga with his partner. I was also fortunate enough to sit at his table at lunch. There was a gossamer lightness about him that I have never seen in anyone else, although I have met many who were revered as wise and some who were revered as saintly. I have also known many, many people who, as saved and sanctified believers in Jesus Christ, would testify freely and passionately to the power and reality of their faith. I grew up among them. But when I met Ed I thought, “This one is the real thing.” Everything he said and did had that quality to it.
I think there is something real there. I think it can be experienced, although “attainment” is probably not the right word. I also think, just speaking for myself here, that it’s not necessarily a state of blissful being that you cross over into and never go back. I think that, like happiness, it occurs in moments to those whose mind is in a state of readiness or receptivity or hospitality to it. I don’t think you want to have just one enlightenment in your life any more than you want to have just one orgasm. I think that I have had moments of enlightenment and so, probably, have many or most of us, but that when we look for it to be some particular kind of thing, we are looking in the wrong place (or the wrong way)—that our presumptions and expectations and intellects and hunger for definitions are standing between us and whatever our mind wants to be open to.
But what do I know? I am not one of those beings. I’m just attempting to disclose what I have seen in those glimpses of the gaps between the fence boards that allow you, if you’re passing rapidly enough, to form an image of the outline of what’s on the other side of the fence.