Finder

There's no "you" who's going towards the "darkness" and therefore must feel guilty.

"feeling guilty about going into the darkness" is a false self-referential narrative.

Thoughts are arising but not "your" thoughts.

If you have a thorn in your arm, you pluck it out.  It doesn't matter that your body is apparent, your arm is apparent and the thorn is apparent, there is appearance in the self that happens.

Same with prayer, e.g. If you have apparent trouble in your apparent love life, you can pray to apparent Venus for relief.

On ‎6‎/‎12‎/‎2019 at 3:06 AM, Spotless said:

In the case of grace - turning in the "right" direction may be willfulness - in the metaphor it can be many things but it appears the main appeal is to an openness to grace - and an openness to grace is an openness to abandoning willfulness and the identified self - dropping the white knuckles and giving the tiller way to the winds and the currents and the flow.

Yes, turning in the "right" direction is not willfulness if one considers it as an abandonment of resistance to what is.

A melting...a relaxation....a surrender.

Language can be so deceptive, because the implicit assumption is status quo = doing nothing.

But status quo here is very much doing "something" - maintaining resistance.

So you're not doing "something" to turn to grace, you're ceasing to do something.

I'm in the process of integrating my awakening and hopefully I can be of help sharing my experiences upto this point as well as read about the experiences of others.  

This looks like a nice place and I've been impressed by the quality of the some of the posts I've looked through.