What you experience while practicing on the path of awakening, especially the recognition of the source, does not have to make sense. By that I mean that it doesn’t have to fit nicely into one form of reasoning or another. Philosophical inquiry tends to fall short when compared to more empirical forms of inquiry. (It was Aristotle who claimed that objects should fall at a rate relative to their weight, so that heavier objects will fall faster than lighter objects. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Well, it did – until Galileo demonstrated otherwise.)

The same is true about awakening. You will no doubt have experiences that confirm your preconceived ideas about the nature of reality. But I guarantee you that if you keep it up, those ideas will need to be thrown out, again and again, until you hold very little regard for ideas at all. Reality is the way it is, regardless of whether or not what is observed by human perception makes sense in terms of human reason.

No doubt, many people are fearful of the idea that their ability to reason is not all it’s cracked up to be. Many of us came from religious backgrounds that extolled the virtues of blind faith. Having been taught to believe what we’re told, regardless of whether it makes sense to the secular world, it can be frightening to turn away from the very faculties of reason that allowed us to escape the bondage of fundamentalism. At least that’s how it went for me.

But in the same way we must ascend up to reason from blind faith, we must then ascend out of reason into Truth – not by faith, and not by thinking or reasoning or philosophizing. Rather, by investigating and experiencing. No need to draw many conclusions, as the fact that the Truth is self-evident becomes more clear the more it is recognized. No need to write it down and proclaim it as gospel. Your own experience is all the gospel you need.

But it isn’t easy. There are no free lunches on the path of awakening. Although the Truth is the Truth is the Truth, there’s a hell of a lot of de-programming that happens before it can recognized as such in a lasting way. That’s why we investigate, meditate, practice.

It doesn’t have to make sense, but you also don’t have to take my word for it, or anyone else’s either. Come see for yourself.