Waiting for enlightenment to arrive is already the process of enlightenment playing itself out. This is it, this very moment looking through the empty eyes of awareness, the presence of the sense of being. Recognize that pure awareness of self is not of the world, nor are you genuinely in it. You are quite simply beyond it. “Realization is not acquiring anything new, nor is it a new faculty. It is only the removal of all camouflage.”— Ramana Maharishi. The make-believe thought-character you call your person would never see this pure awareness. How can it? It is the camouflage made up of a history of conditioning from birth. The expressed conditioned reality cannot see the unconditioned awareness. But pure awareness can realize its unconditioned nature within all defined reality.
There is no real future in investing in worldly objects as a haven or resisting a thought-based buried past. Let it go; it is illusorily stored memory. Memory does not exist unless you give it life in your mind; free your mind by not playing out any illusory resistance or holding fast to an object-based transitory present reality. Though life unfolds as it will in a myriad of thoughts, memories, and tangible objectified reality, this is not your essential nature.
Consciousness has been looking for ‘Consciousness,’ when all the while, it has been looking from consciousness. Recognize this speculation-free and thought-free abiding pure awareness. It is already here. This unwavering non-changing self-referral awareness is the container of all memory, all sophisticated presentation that has always been consciousness alone, the unconditioned formless presence of being.