Practice all you want. Follow your spiritual path whatever it is. You really can’t stop, but you might be curious to know that all paths are rigged. Not one leads the way, holds within it the path home. Not one.

All paths die in the end. They must. For awakening is not about finding a better you, an improved life, be it more spiritual or abundant, or even getting somewhere, being someone or healing your ills. If that’s what you want, avoid the path of awakening. Turn now and run the other way. Do not look back.

If you can, that is.

All paths eventually metamorphose into capitulation, not by the path’s brilliance or inherent plan, but by Grand Design. Towards the end, the end of the search, all paths converge and transform. Life is funny that way. Whether through illness, loss or grief, financial struggles or family ruin, or bricked over dead ends like pandemics or climate shift, we simply stop dead. We run out of runway.

We see the utter futility of our actions and awaken to the realization that we were never the chooser, the controller, the one. We find that we weren’t the one we were waiting for after all.

Few gurus teach capitulation unless you consider the Guru called Life. It’s not good for the bank balance. People don’t tend to hang around long, or maybe it’s because fewer still are interested in the course work. People tend to like the paths that offer something to take home, a trick for the pain, a salve for the suffering, a technique to assuage the anxiety, a way out of boredom and ordinariness rather than a way in. It’s a sparsely populated list that signs up to release the illusion of control, better a comforting illusion than the stark reality.

The path of surrender, of capitulation, leaves nothing to take away. Most are not willing to surrender until they are left with no choice. I was like that. It took nearly dying, learning to live one breath at a time, not because I chose to but because I had no choice, before I rolled over and let God tickle my belly. I couldn’t see that relinquishing control was the portal of omnipotence, even though something within knew that ideas of control were nothing more than a hope and a wish.

I also couldn’t see that there was another way in until I had walked every step of the path laid out before me. Maybe that’s the way it works. I don’t know. All that I can really say is that how it worked for me.

Now I can clearly see the straight path. Few paths are straight. Some go round and round, others, even capitulation, zig-zag wildly. The straight path isn’t a path in so much as it is a way back, a way within, shifting the focus from out there to awareness itself. It’s so obvious and simple that most discount it, not willing to consider its power to undo ages of conditioning.

Maybe that’s because it’s not fancy, not a ticket to any of the fun New Age shows. It most certainly doesn’t give you anything to take home. It doesn’t give you anything at all. Perhaps that’s why it’s generally is the last path taken. Down to no options, it looks pretty good. Or maybe, it’s the last path because it decimates all paths, along with the one who would walk them.

If you would spend a little time (yeah I know time doesn’t exist as we think) but spend it anyway. Spend it getting to know the awareness that is you, that which you call I. Sit consciously as awareness. Explore its (your) nature. Notice how it never goes anywhere, that it’s always here, always now. It feels so good that it’s easy to return and reside as awareness often. Before long you won’t need to return. You’ll just be here.

It’s magical in a mysterious ordinary way and feels completely natural, like your favorite chair at home. You do nothing but take up residence. Regardless of what stuff shows up, you stay put. It feels like home because it is home, what you’ve always been, what you are, hiding in plain sight. It’s God’s little joke.