7.6 ‘I have worked hard at meditation, made some progress, then I became stuck at some point – what is happening?’

There is one simple test to establish whether you are genuinely progressing towards enlightenment. The test is whether you experience your day-to-day life, in all its ordinariness, as a constantly unfolding process of change. If you experience your life as an endlessly flowing and changing process, then you are progressing along the path; if you experience your life as repetitive or static in its ordinariness, then you are stuck and will need to take corrective action before you can proceed along the path.

The teaching in this section identifies the most common faults which may block your progress on the path. It will provide you with practical advice on how to recognise and overcome the blocks. These blocks are purely temporary and can be overcome with the awakening of self-knowledge.

The whole process of enlightenment is to awaken your self-knowledge. It is a considerable error to confuse self-knowledge with solely contemplating your personality. That is a very limited and destructive form of self-obsession, which has only the remotest connection with self-knowledge and the quest for enlightenment.

Attaining self-knowledge requires facing up to, and going beyond, the limitations of your personality. This is invariably a painful and unpleasant experience. It is also unavoidable if you are to attain enlightenment.

The basic error you are making, in your search for enlightenment, is that you are not facing up to the simple truths about yourself which reality is teaching you through the events of your life. This error occurs in two common forms in your life – failure to face those aspects of reality of which you are aware, and failure to face those aspects of reality of which you are unaware. Both incur severe karmic penalties, which you experience as emotional and physical suffering and misery.

You cannot escape from this apparently remorseless process of misery by attaining, or hoping to attain, some object you desire. As you progress along the path, you will discover that even desiring enlightenment is a block to attaining that state of freedom from emotional constraints. To pin your hopes of fulfilment and freedom on achieving this aim, or attaining that object or person, is to delude yourself with fantasy.

There is only one path to a genuine and lasting sense of joyous freedom and release from the misery of emotional and physical distress. That path is to set yourself directly face to face with reality as you experience it each moment. To be set on your journey along that path, you must learn to overcome the obstacles in your way.