It's a great question Sam

You said...

try to go into deep stillness, how deep is deep stillness, .... They are all related by some sort of action from within. There is some monitoring going on inside when you decide to do something. This is not present in the stillness.

Maybe consider it this way: there is ALREADY a great deal of efforting happening in subconscious programming of the ego that are constantly running in the background. It doesn't have to be another efforting to unravel these. There only needs to be awareness to confront them and go beyond. The they unravel themselves in the light of this awareness. It just happens by witnessing.

What is it then that is looking? Is this ego too? No.

Remember the 7 rays of consciousness from the level 2 course? There is a natural aspect of the soul which is the inquiring principle - the ray 3 - what is reality now? What is going on now? This will naturally run without any intention or efforting at all. But, it can, and does, become the identity the "inquirer" or the "questioner" or the "doubter" - because of all the questioning, which people then try to bury or distract from - which just becomes another layer of programming.

So my question is to explore, can you allow the questioning without it crystallising into the questioner? Can you just let it flow and not attach?

If there is no monitoring going on within the stillness, then there is no stillness, because nothing is having an experience.

The presence is intimately interrelated with the relativity. Both must be allowed to co-exist: the presence and the light of the soul.

The ego can decide to ride the ray 3 of the soul deeper inwards. And it will strip away ego in the process.

My personal approach is to go inwards with the breath first. But then to watch the first thread of experience that arises. Watch it, and then equalise with it, meaning not to judge whatever it is. Okay, if pain or impatience come up, then I would allow them to express so as to see if there might be any identification with it. The approach is to keep normalising with the experience. Then to drop through the experience into a deeper layer. Which might be a subtle percpetion. Again I equalise with this, but drop through it. Deeper and deeper. But there is always the ray 3 watching. The ray 3 is mostly, for me, what leads the inquiry.

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