Can one be spiritually awakened, yet still have terminal cancer?

Can one be spiritually awakened, yet still desire & enjoy the cigarettes they’ve smoked all their lives, even as it does harm to their lungs?

Can one be spiritually awakened, yet still feel anger and have occasional outbursts.

If you said ‘no’ to any of the above, you’ve just disavowed the very complete enlightenments of widely-acknowledged sages like Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadhatta (who had or did all those things.)

First, to clarify: Everyone has an ego. Enllightened “persons” don’t lose their ego…because they’re still a “person.” Almost every “spiritually awakened” sage has retained most or all of their original personalities. If they had a very edgy personality with arrogance and anger prior to awakening, they probably seem like an old grouch even after awakening :-)

What they’ve lost is not their ego, but their identification with it. They know that they are not that, but rather, “I Am That,” as Sri Nisargadhatta said. They abide in, and as, Pure Consciousness, and they know they are free to “play around” with their ego personalities, while never re-identifying with them or taking them seriously.

Even as they are ‘yelling’ at a student, they have massive humor about the whole thing. And if they are truly awake, “they” do not predetermine how they are going to act around those they are guiding. Consciousness acts through them, spontaneously, they are not the Doer. And because of that, whatever seems to be their expression, it’s always exactly what the student needed next.