I greatly admire the open and honest sharings here about the challenges of walking the spiritual path.

A couple of key things spring to mind...

• society is essentially a complex avoidance mechanism. People have gotten used to burying their true feelings, and placating the tightness with quick fixes: food, distraction, entertainment, busyness, soft drugs, and then, when even that doesn't work, medicinal drugs
• and when the divine connection is discovered, then there are a myriad of other avoidance mechanisms causing people to attune, and attach, to false love and light for example, that there must be this perfect nirvana as an experience, in this density, here and now.

To me, the answer for it all is the Void of Presence itself. It is infinite peace, right at the centre of the storm, that encompasses and embraces the storm within it, that needs none of these situations to go away or be resolved, that needs nothing from the creation, yet creation happens through it - just not always the way ego mind would want it.

Coming into the Void is the deepest challenge, and upon arrival, suddenly you realise all the questions are answered - just by the sense of it. You realise every conundrum, every question, every search, was always leading to that hallowed place.

I believe many approaches in the spiritual mainstream have inadvertently 'packaged' peace and acceptance as another avoidance mechanism - there's the search for the immediate phenomenal experience of peace, found by detaching from any experience that would cause disharmony or by simply dropping your 'story' - which can sabotage the soul flowing through the story. And especially, dropping any tightness you might encounter as you journey into the Void - 'dropping the hot coals' is the metaphor that is often shared. But we must first become as-one with the heat, otherwise you create identity avoiding the heat.

Essentially, your journeying progressively through inner layers. And each layer is going to have various levels of karmic disharmony within it. Surrender and acceptance is absolutely essential, yes. However, it must be surrender to what is, to what wants to come up, whatever that might be. Then 'equalising' with that disharmony - which means to express into it, not to try to fix or change it, because there is truth in the expression, truth in the heart of that distortion. And we must seek to align the soul within the disharmony - the soul is the thread which leads all the way back to presence.

It's like progressively contracting into the eye of a needle, where the distortion is being focussed into your reality - allowing that to happen. It's like the distortion blows up and becomes your reality. It's like looking into the distortion through a powerful microscope. So rather than avoidance of this tightness, you're doing the absolute opposite. The distortion is now all around you, in many of the things that you'll be doing - in your relationships and living circumstances for example. So now you pick your way through it, step by step, realigning your reactions into conscious responses. So with each passage, you're integrating and forging soul.

Now at any point of such passage - passing through the eye of a particular needle - you can suddenly drop into the Void, and all the lights come on. You feel expanded, interconnected, at true peace - even in the storm, even with the hot coals. But don't expect or require that experience to stay. Because then the soul will journey deeper, and more will come up. The peace will disappear again, but if you keep confronting, and keep breaking through, then one day, all the lights in the Universe come on, AND STAY ON!

You find yourself resting in the Void, with life happening through you. This is Enlightenment.

Open