There are so many varied stages to the spiritual experience, and it is for each of us to live through them on our own terms being sincere with ourselves every second. Hopefully we can share those transitions with others, but for the most part, we need to be silent, shifted away from such trivialities as thought, removed from the mind-field of making comparisons, and avoiding the white knuckles of attachment to the sacred teachings because they are merely a means whereby.

We can be inspired to elevate ourselves by words, ideas and by texts, but we must always remember that they are entirely abstract. They are indirect and so necessitate our correct interpretation, no matter how beautiful they may seem. We can allow them to touch us deeply, but they do not constitute our faith, our core, our true nature. They are risky accessories which if we lose our self-honesty for a split second could put us out of balance. So we have to learn to roll away the parchments, close the books, and live entirely according to ourselves, because only we humans are the way. It is for each of us to listen deeply to our mission directly. Such accessories can amplify or distort such messages.

Sacred chants and melodies built on ancient mantras in forgotten languages are more concrete, as their vibrations can amalgamate with our own and so set in motion desirable rhythms. They are invisible, not interpretable, and so they prevent us from manufacturing concepts and then becoming attached to them. Our base human emotions are capable of rendering these sacred means into commodities, false realities or rafts, which convey us to a fixed location in the eternal, irrepressible surge of energy that is existence. We must leave the raft behind for others to use. We must close the book. We must listen to our own vibrational patterns.

Experience, it is said, is needed to bring us closer to true happiness and to have wisdom, but this can become fixed also, creating pride and narrowness. Unless we are mindful in our thoughts and words, carefully monitoring them to find a middle way, it is quite possible to create very damaging experience, which we then turn into stone out of the craving of the lower mind for permanence. For experience to be of value I have learned not to always leave it behind me like a snail trail in a linear model, but to meet it head on as the ellipse of our living moments is completed again and again. Experience has the potential to be as lifeless as thought if it always relegated to the past. Similarly, predictions of elevation into the future according to prescribed systems and stages, can splinter the moment. Ever-lasting nowness is not subject to the shallow concepts of time and space. We must step beyond them into reality.

In true stillness and the great silence we can feel that the thin membrane of the skin is the only flimsy barrier between the inside and the outside. The skin pores are two-way valves so that the inside and outside become one. Similarly, the veil of death is the only other flimsy separation between the visible and the invisible. This unique feeling ‘nowness’ is reality, beyond all interpretation and comparison. It is our true nature.

Giving to others without conditions is our true nature. If we deem our human form truly impermanent then there is no impediment to giving our lives for others for we are bestowing pure spirit or energy to one another. This is our mission. After all, the Universe and Nature gives us a chance at human life without a second thought. Due to our special qualities of divine and unconditional love, our human form then gives us the perfect opportunity to express them.

We can give of the material world because it is simply a means for us to express our divinity. But as the visible is the opposite of the invisible, and everything in the vast invisible world is reflected in the environment of matter in which we find ourselves manifest, we can succeed in our human endeavours if we notice those reflections in reality without interpreting them. We must find balance, the middle way, between our base human mind, which reflects the delusional nature of matter, and our higher mind or true nature, which reflects the invisible reality or truth of the Universe. We embody both the human and the invisible, constantly going between them to find a middle path. We must accept both equally, connecting them together to create a never-ending web of goodness and light.

We humans are indeed angels and can very easily get trapped in the world of matter because we struggle to make meaning and in so doing we may become oblivious to the subtle energies of our origins. The two-way valves in our skin pores can get blocked with such crude materials, so we must strive to keep the divine tides ebbing and flowing despite the limitations of the mind of matter. If we do not stay awake during our visit to this dangerous material world, we may become blocked and it will become almost impossible to escape and go back to the source.