Well, "put off" amounts to the same thing I said. The task is clearly impossible until the understanding of "no sentient beings exist".
Is Enlightenment the same for each individual?
As far as I can tell each human being as an individual organism has a unique personal experience and expression of "awakening". In English, I think "awakening" serves better than "enlightenment" as it is quite natural for English speakers to speak of enlightenment as something someone has. As the nondual can only be spoken of in dualistic language it's important to realize that no one is ever enlightened or awakened. The disappearance of the sense of being an individual is enlightenment, but there is no one left to be enlightened, or awakened.
One teaching example using this metaphor is when you awaken from some bad dream of a disaster striking a group of people you don't ask what happened to the people, or try to go back to sleep to save them from the dream. Why? Because waking up you realize that those people were only dreamed by you.
The bit that I've dipped into The Gospel of Thomas does give a bit more support to the notion my brother has that Yeshuah was an awakened individual trying to teach the non dual to people who basically failed to get it. If he died young he had very little chance to transmit his understanding and it got recast in the old molds.
Your point about vocabulary is right on. One of the reasons I'm so impressed with Bernadette Roberts' book is that she awoke within the contemporary Catholic Christian contemplative tradition and was about as naive about Buddhism and eastern nondualism as one could be in these times. So she has narrated her experience in contemporary Enlish and using Christian concepts.
Yet, when I read her book I was very excited to read the depth of her understanding. Towards the end of her search she did turn to the east basically looking for someone who had experienced what she had experienced and recognized in a brief passage attributed to the Buddha her own experience in another's words.
She lost her self, completely and irrevocably, all that remains is God which she also refers to as What Is. Now, Buddhism does not use theistic language while Advaita Vedanta does. I believe they both recognize the same reality. If you take this notion of What Is Real, this can be a basis for your statement that different religions worship the same God. That is religions when they aren't social institution can address the search for ultimate reality. That reality is One. Or as a Jewish friend of mine said, "That's what Judaism says, it's all One." There is no way we can be apart from it or other than it in reality, hence it is our minds, imaginations, thoughts that have created a story of separation. This enthrallment which can be likened to a fall, a fall into sleep and dreams, only has the conditioned reality of our believing it. It is a powerful sleep but not as powerful as What Is.
lfen