The purpose of a spiritual teaching is not to give you more bullshit for your head.

If you just take on a teaching as another belief, it has failed and you have failed to benefit from it — regardless of how inspired you are by the lofty ideals and by the person who spoke them.

What happens to many people is attachment to a belief, which then becomes a pivot for more beliefs until they are living inside an elaborate, internally-consistent simulation of spiritual knowledge but which leaves their ego structure and felt-identity basically untouched — regardless of their access to and facility with “altered states.”

The purpose of a teaching and an authentic spiritual practice is to change how your perception itself functions at a fundamental level … for a totally new mode-of-knowing to open in you… and you can’t get it from a book or a lecture, or a music or dance event.

Psychedelics will give you look through the window, but won’t take you through the door.

It’s like the first time you find balance on a bicycle: you are forever changed and you can’t-not know what that is, even though you may still wobble and occasionally even fall.

If your spiritual practice isn’t regularly forcing you to change your life through what you can’t now un-see… go deeper.

“The mouse is a nibbler.
God gave him brain in accordance with his needs.
God gives nothing without need.
So if you would Attain,
increase your need, O Human.”

—Rumi