"To move forward, you must figure out exactly what is obstructing you. Whatever it is, it isn't really there; it has no reality, no substance. It's your own creation, a phantom lurking in the shadows of your mind, a shadow demon. Your obstructions are your demons, and your demons are shadow dwellers. They live and thrive in the half-light of ignorance, so the way to slay a demon is by illuminating it with the full force and power of your focused attention; by looking at it, hard. Banish shadow with light and see for yourself that no obstruction exists, nor ever did. We create our demons and we feed them. To awaken we must slay them. That's really the whole process: Slay one demon, take one step.

Repeat."

"Spiritual Dissonance is what occurs where our inner world meets our outer world; where what we think is true butts up against what apprears to be true; where internal belief collides with external reality.  It's the discomfort that occurs where self and not-self come into contact.

Ego is like a thin sheath of atmosphere between the earth of self and the infinite space of not-self, holding one in and the other out.  We live out our lives in this narrow band, never digging too far down or testing our upper limits.This is where our emotional energy is spent, pumped into this gap between two incompatible surfaces, keeping them from grinding against each other and jolting us out of our slumber.

That grinding, when it does occur, is spiritual dissonance.

The egoic wall has no independent reality.  When we stop pumping energy into it, it starts dissolving.  That's what ego is, a segregated state, and that's the use to which we put our emotional energy.  The egoic shell in which we dwell is of our own making, like a force field that requires a constant source of emotional energy."  ~ Jed McKenna


Death is the key to life.  Death defines life, gives it shape and meaning and context.  Without a clear and honest relationship with our mortality, we live in a state of endless spiritual sprawl, a soupy gray fog that creates the hellish illusion of life stretching endlessly in all directions.

We've homogenized our lives by hiding the parts we're afraid of, and in so doing, we've removed all sense of urgency from life.  We have taken death out of life and that allows us to live unconsciously.  Death never left, of course, we've just turned away from it, pretended it wasn't there.  If we wish to awaken - and that's a mighty big if - then we must welcome death back into our lives.  Death is our personal Zen master, our source of power, our path to lucidity, but we have to stop running from it in blind panic.  We need only stop and turn around and there it is, inches away, staring at us with an unblinking gaze, finger poised, every second of our lives. That finger is the one true thing in the dream-state, and it will, for a fact, come down.

Death -awareness is the universal spiritual practice.  What we have sought in books, and magazines, in teachers and teachings, in ancient cultures and foreign lands, has been breathing down our neck the entire time.  It's not just another mood-making spiritual technique that you dabble with for a few weeks and blame yourself when it doesn't deliver.  Death always delivers.  Death is your only true friend, the only friend that will never abandon you and that no one can take away.  It slices through every lie, ridicules every belief, mocks every vanity and reduces ego to absurdity.  He's sitting with you right now.  If you want to know something, ask him.  Death doesn't lie.