Stairway to heaven
Take a moment to appreciate just how deeply the idea of spiritual progression is rooted in our collective conditioning.
Liberation, happiness, awakening, salvation, nirvana: these must be earned and achieved, they’re not just floating around for the taking. Definitely not for poor, flawed, sinful me.
Heaven requires serious, dedicated, prolonged improvement and practice — we simply can’t hear anything else.
But the nondual message is that this already is the heaven we’re desiring. Heaven is what we are.
What makes this seem like not-heaven, are our deeply conditioned, false beliefs about what this is, and what we are.
There’s no stairway to what already is.
But then there must be a stairway to realizing that there is no stairway!
No, we’re simply too distracted by the conditioning that says this can’t be heaven.
Then there must be a stairway to stop believing the conditioning!
No, but belief in the thoughts that seem to produce not-heaven can and does end.
There’s no stairway to that. Even direct inquiry is not a path to that.
Inquiry tries to short-circuit or crash the belief system, so that a timeless moment of direct, thought-less, unfiltered experience occurs.
It’s this direct recognition of heaven that undoes the belief in a stairway to it.
