Q: What is your advice to a spiritual aspirant who is serious about realizing the state of enlightenment?
A: Spiritual commitment simply means to recontextualize the goal and meaning of one’s life. This needs to be done totally, all inclusively, so that life does not become segmented into spiritual work versus ordinary life. All life now becomes spiritual practice because context becomes the priority
that encompasses every act, thought, or moment. This poised point of view already results in a degree of nonattachment. From this viewpoint, the emphasis in practice is to observe all the content of evolving life without
making any comment, criticism, or judgment. The prevailing attitude can be stated as,“That is how it seems to be.” The observer/witness becomes
detached from commentary about life and is then capable of transcending opinionation, likes, dislikes, aversions, attractions, arguments, or objections. Life unfolds of its own and does not need commentary. The habit of editorializing about what is witnessed needs to be voluntarily surrendered to God.
Although nonattachment may seem like a point of view, it is really not a positionality but a nonpositionality. We see from the chart of the stratified
levels of awareness that the observer/witness is already a step beyond the confines of the ordinary ego. This practice quiets the mind and also results
in the progressive withdrawal of the ego’s habit of projecting the ‘me’ into everything that happens. When this is accomplished, life then reveals that it
is impersonal rather than personal.
This practice results in a progressive withdrawal of ego involvement in the details of life into which ordinary mind gets trapped and entangled.
Peacefulness results from being aware yet uninvolved, and the sense of ‘I’ moves from identification with content to the experiencer, and then to
the observer/witness.
I: Reality and Subjectivity, Ch. 17, The Inner Path, pg. 299-300
