Standing Alone

As someone who was a long-term seeker/practitioner I unwittingly absorbed many beliefs and conditionings along the way. Many teachers have a tendency to believe that they have the only truth, the only right perspective and the only correct way of seeing, and this attitude is passed onto their students. It was relatively easy for me to see through and past this falsehood as it has been many years since I was embedded in a specific teaching or tradition. However, I was still carrying many non-dual concepts and ideas that I’d picked up along the way. Concepts and ideas that I had accepted as the truth without fully examining and testing them in my own experience. At a certain point I had to go back to the beginning and examine everything I thought I knew (an ongoing project). This has been/is invaluable to me, and I believe it would be greatly useful to any sincere seeker.

What I think is very much missing in the spiritual domain is the willingness to see that every belief system/tradition/teaching is an interpretation of reality but is not reality itself ("The map is not the territory" Ken Wilber). A useful and immensely valuable construct to help us along the way but at a certain point all of it has to go. Far too many of us have very fixed ideas about enlightenment/truth/reality that are in sharp disagreement with other valid and informed ways of seeing and interpreting, but once again at a certain point all of it has to go.

Can we stand naked and alone in the truth of our own knowing without referencing any of it?