You can never understand a truth that you’ve yet to experience. Your mind will twist any expression of truth it doesn’t understand into a concept, something digestible, based in what is known. Without a true reference point, lacking insight, experience and integration, that ‘new’ understanding will fall short and be much more complex than the truth it mimics. Unable to stop itself, your mind will substitute the new — nothing more than a dressed-up version of what came before — for the old and declare victory. Nothing substantially changes. One belief is exchanged for another, the inherent bias retained, the fallacy of the old intact and you won’t even know it happened. Mind is tricky.

With the build up of understanding, all based on the same pretty lie, spiritual arrogance gets baked right into your path of incremental betterment. The mind pats itself on the back, cheering for its wondrous courageous daring do as it heaps on fresh layers of conceit in its valiant quest to annihilate itself.

There’s a reason so many give their lives to the spiritual path and still feel like they aren’t getting anywhere.

Everything one does strengthens the doer, the sense of separation. Effort is the territory of a separate self as is any apparent success or failure. That same separate self is the bull’s eye in your target of annihilation. You craft story upon story upon story, none better or worse than any other — stories of destruction, courage and redemption, of grief, sacrifice and sorrow, of walking a spiritual, atheistic or devoutly religious path, of the good, the bad and the ugly in life. They are all ways you distract yourself from life exactly as it is right now. Funny, since now, which is not a moment in time but awareness itself, is the actual demise of the separation you seek to end.

You’ve been sold a bill of goods, informed that you must annihilate the ego … as if the ego will off itself or that it needs to be destroyed! You’ve been told you are shifting consciousness, expanding awareness and that it takes time for such a grand endeavor. Consciousness, does not move or shift. It does not expand or fill out. Consciousness simply Is. It is infinite and eternal, timeless and placeless, edgeless and dimensionless, unmoving and indivisible and even these words fall short and take liberties that go too far.

Consciousness is not something reserved for the special few. It is not something you earn or progressively acquire. It is the very natural, impossible to miss reality that is you right now. It looks through your eyes, experiences through your sensations and perceptions. Never absent, it is the script writer, the characters, and the play all rolled into one, taking center stage as your life, as all life.

You’ve been told that waking up is rare, that you have to work hard and dig deep, that you must become, transform, be something that you aren’t, that struggle is necessary, and pain is good. That is a lie and each new technique, mantra, and practice adds another layer of spiritual arrogance to the pile.

You are already eternally This. There is nothing else. Nothing but This Is. Stop if you can. Discover that which is aware of your experience. Too simple? Yes, it’s simple. Of course it is. THIS is everything and nothing. What could be simpler than that. You have to try hard to make it complex. It seems we are pretty darn good at that and if complexity beckons, enjoy whatever story is yours to live out. Live it for all you’re worth and you my friend are worth more than you can begin to imagine. And .. if simple feels right. Welcome home.