I agree. The Everyman, as an abstraction, is assumed to be un-enlightened precisely because they haven’t noticed their Buddha nature. The Oxtail pictures in Zen Buddhism describe the return “home”, or back to mundane nature, as the natural progression of the mystic’s path.

I think we’re all on some point on that path, but it’s not a straight one for everybody. We turn around and go back a few steps, for any number of reasons. Eventually, you realize forwards or backwards don’t matter anymore and never really did, so you just go home.

Maybe the majority of people never move past their outward self projections? I don’t claim to know.