Paths and practices, like boats, are helpful crossing torrents of mind's rivers. We choose from an array whichever attracts us and sail or row as we like.
Whatever one's spiritual path may be has significance to them but matters less to others. What matters is the radiance of one's life, heart's living fire.
Is heart/mind's brush fire smoldering or blazing as it moves through the fields of ego-mind?
What grand designs does it lay waste to?
What gateways to one's inner garden does it reveal?
What's the key for awakening?
The key is preparing the ground.
For what?
For lightning to strike, for seeds to grow.
Preparing the ground how?
Through forgetfulness of ego-mind/drop-self and remembrance of Ocean Self.
How to forget self?
Remembrance of Self effaces self, chipping it away or wiping it out.
Then how to remember Self?
It's what's left, where awareness naturally goes when we're less entangled with conditioned mind (see impressions). It's the fruit of wholehearted spiritual practice.
How do you know when that's happening?
The wondering me never knows, it's just bypassed; left in the lurch before having a chance to know what's going on.
Any glimmer of awakening is beyond ego-mind's words. It resides in the spacious abode of mind beyond thoughts, of heart beyond feelings.
Not being able to put it into words may be frustrating but also very useful. For then ego-mind's word-nets have nothing to capture or manipulate.
But this can also be ego-mind's excuse to disown or devalue. 'If it can't be expressed it must not be worth much.' Another fine trap, a self-protective device in small-mind's arsenal . Guerrilla warfare at its best.
Countering all this is heart/mind's steadfast alertness. It's like the readiness in preparing to leap from ledge to ledge over an abyss. Then no time to think, not a moment to lose, no safety net for small mind.
Then only a wordless absorption leaving the need of any words behind.
Spirituality starts making sense as two basic points sink in:
1) We're asleep.
2) We can wake up.
Without heart/mind as a starting point our wanderings create more sleep, more imagination. Then ego-mind even uses 'spiritual tools' to get what it thinks it wants.
Turning spirituality into an acquisition leads to
bankrupt outcomes. It's parking another dream-car in the garage of ego-mind's dream-house. This increases the odds of not recognizing we're asleep at the wheel.
Seeing our sleep state is one thing, feeling it in a compelling way is another. Then a yearning can arise: awakening's longing to awaken in and through us.
The result is a stream eroding our resistances on its way to the ocean of Self. It contains a current of intelligence awakening heart's knowing.
Sparks from this knowing ignite into flames consuming our limits and bindings. We're led along a pathway to our inner garden as naturally as the force of gravity.
