From the "gradual path" of believing yourself to be who you think you are and your attempts to transcend yourself into that which is already true of you, you will think your sincerity is enough for you to come home to the heart.

You may spend the next thirty years trying to awaken from your "bind and blind of your mind" - the belief that you are this mindbody that you travel around through. All the while you have been turning your back on the simplicity and clarity of who you already are, getting distracted by "arisings" of manifestation and going off on tangent with those distractions. Six months later - if not longer - you come back to a point of clarity once again and then off you go again on another "ticky tour" of your mind.

You will have created another thirty years of the "stuff of bondage" that must unravel of this mindbody that prevents you from realising the beauty and simplicity of who you already are - the heart, self.

Fortunately, it matters not to self whether you realize who you are or not. Who you are is, whether you be this one or whether you believe yourself to be much less than who you are - who you think you are.

You can speak of the essence of who you are all you like. You can speak of "nothingness" until you are blue in the face. You will not understand its play from within manifestation, its "windows of opportunity" that appear from time to time to enable you to break through your own resistance to being who you already are, or of what you are currently doing that obstructs your own heart from flowing without obstruction.

Unfortunately, the "western male mind" - which is a word addicted mind - claims knowership of something which it can never know anything about. It projects what it thinks is the way it should all be like - its expectations - and then judges according to those expectations. Now, talk about the world of your own imagination. No matter what is going down you squeeze it into this world of yours, of who you think you are, unreality. You do not get to abide as the one that is already who you are.

No amount of words are going to help you out here. You have to surrender who you think you are.

There is no getting around this.

You are involved flat out with trying to get around this fact that you have to let go of, have to wrench apart those fingers that have a stranglehold on who you think you are. You really believe that somehow you can be who you think you are and somehow "attain" and "add" the beauty of the heart - who you are - to who you think you are.

Nope. That is never going to happen.

You have to surrender who you think you are and be this one that is already true of you - now this you can "do".

The "stopping and dropping" of what you are not and the "seeing and being" of who you are is entirely at your fingertips. It is not a "doing." It is a shift of focus of your attention from being on what you ordinarily think yourself to be to being focused on what is already true of you.

Left to your own devices you will not do this.

Before the next blink of the eye happens you will be back to buying into who you think you are and believing your mind - and this is before someone else comes into your room, to say nothing of when they engage you in conversation. What to say when you become actively involved in the dance of life, doing things?

Even though this great matter of being who you are is one of simplicity itself, your capacity to stand free of what you have done for so very long is much more complicated than you realize. If you are not consciously at rest as who you are - not who you think you are - in this moment right now then all of what you are up to has not worked for you. "Gradual" is not applicable in your immediate freedom.

I make no apology about telling your "western male mind" this...

Unless you find yourself in the company of one who lives constantly and consistently the obviousness and clarity of the self - at home in the heart, self realized - then you will only keep on getting lost in the machinations of who you think you are.

And I am not referring to the majority of these so called "awakened teachers" who currently proliferate this planet with their "about" teachings. These folk may well inspire you to do or look for more than your normal daily drudgery because they appeal to your mind and partly to your heart. They will not and cannot bring you directly home to the heart because that is not where they consciously reside. They themselves are still learning - "gradually," even though their "gradual" may well be faster than your "gradual" - about who they are not.

A self realizer is a window of opportunity to the heart.