“If anyone imagines he will get more by inner thoughts and sweet yearnings and a special grace of God than he could get beside the fire or with his flocks or in the stable, he is doing no more than trying to take God and wrap His head in a cloak and shove Him under the bench. For whoever seeks God in some special Way,
will gain the Way and lose God who is hidden in the Way. But whoever seeks God without any special Way, finds Him as He really is... and He is life itself.”---Meister Eckhart
“When we want something, normally we know well enough what needs to be done to get it. But what if the object I desire is something that can never become an object, because it is prior to the subject-object dichotomy? What if it can never be an effect, because it is always unconditioned? What means will enable me to attain an end that is impossible to grasp? I find myself in a dilemma. If I make no effort to do anything, it seems that the result will also be nothing, and there will be no progress towards the desired goal. But to the extent that I exert myself to attain it, I do not, for in this case all effort is self-defeating. This is the paradox of spiritual practice, for Ātman, Brahman, Nirvāṇa, Buddhanature, and so forth are all unobjectifiable (because nondual), unoriginated (that is, beyond causal and temporal relations), and hence unobtainable. How can we escape such a dilemma? “---quoted from
http://enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/loy.htmI'm somewhere in the middle of the process of becoming a "common" sense-of-self liberator. What do you see as coming next? What practices bring it about? Is it still about surrendering?
Stirling you are asking the question that should be asked and has been a dilemma for many past reformers such as Dogan – since the True Nature/Enlightenment is already our inherent, intrinsic condition why is it not always and currently obvious and what can be done to cultivate it? His answer was ‘surrender’ or zazen as the means to be that, to live as that. So you already have the (Soto) Zen answer added to this you have the
elaborations of Kenneth’s gear system and Shinzen’s meditation fusion technology.
The modern teacher Adyashanti in the first clip below ( I didn’t watch further) suggests we should just keep on doing what we are already doing as practice because we really have no choice and with luck or Grace we may ‘awaken’ from the need to do any practice. To some extent then the conundrum remains in his view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXl-BMUotwo&t=253s On the other side you have all the neo-advaita proponents who say no practice is necessary including surrender (which is still a conscious deliberate practice) another typical clip below. What they
must do is mental programing by repetition. That is constantly repeat ideation along these lines otherwise there is nothing added to the ordinary unconscious living. My teacher called this approach “talking school” (with critical irony).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2349lmMIm-A
The only thing I have to add to these voices (from my own experience) is there is an intuition possible to anyone that reveals our present condition as already free and unbound. At some point it (this inherent cognition) becomes strong enough to
inform us directly and then we stand more and more free of any need or seeking impulse to look passed this intuition of perfect certainty. The practices are what we
sensibly do in the meantime. All the koans, paradoxes and cryptic statements and strange trickster’s teachings point and yield to this knowledge, or if not they should. Because it is not a mechanical formula it will never be popular in mainstream spirituality and will tend to be denied, supressed or disputed.