steven cundiff:
I would have told myself that liberation is not something you find or aquire...its something you uncover....liberation comes in surrender, not searching...searching and great effort is needed to get you to the gate, but it will never get you through...."you" cannot pass through this gate...only by letting go of you can you enter without entering.
through right practice once you have found the essential stillness that is you and let this stillness go in complete surrender you are enlightened....there is nothing more than this....I spent close to 13 years searching for something more than this after I found it, 19 years in total...I would spend a part of everyday nonbeing, surrendered away into nonbeingness...and then I would come back and continue searching for something more than this...finally I gave up the search Becuase I could not continue...I had no more left in me, I had utterly lost hope and gave up...I thought to myself that I will surrender into nonbeing this last time and "be" and search no more...and so i did....in that moment the whole universe opened up before me as if my awareness was rolling out across all existance...I could see everything...including the fact that there was nothing more to find or uncover than what I had already uncovered or surrendered into...I saw that for many years now the only thing that kept me enslaved was my own searching, I was the searching, the observing and there was nothing else, so i let it go, and with that came liberation.
Great effort and great searching is needed, but these things will never set you free....effort is needed but effort is not enough....effort will get the fruit ripe, but will not make it drop from the tree.
The only way you can know for certain that it is time to give up effort is that you cannot go on...at the time where effort becomes hopelessness and you absolutely cannot continue, then it is time to let effort go.
This is what i would have told myself....
Do you think that you literally could have attained your current state at any point beginning 13 years ago by allowing your mind to incline in a certain direction? Was all your progress between then and now merely "psychological", eventually allowing you simply to surrender when you ran out of things to aim at? I (being skeptical of this claim) assume there must have been some fundamental developmental progress going on...in fact, I assume an enormous amount of such progress.
If you assert that this is true, how would you have explained to yourself what it was that you would have needed to do or not-do? (In other words: how to do or not-do it?)
Have you ever experienced something similar or identical to your current state in the past, even if momentarily?