The realization of Truth and Reality can never be created by the mind ... it always comes as a gift of grace. Inquiry clears away misperceptions and illusions, making one available to the movements of grace.
In silence a question has great power, because in silence a question will always lead you deeper into your experience. If there is no grounding in silence, a spiritual question is going to lead you into your mind.
Human beings have a drive for security and safety, which is often what fuels the spiritual search. This very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion. Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. So, in seeking security and safety, you actually distance yourself from the freedom you want. There is no security in freedom, at least not in the sense that we normally think of security. This is, of course, why it is so free: there's nothing there to grab hold of.
There is nothing wrong with thought and it can be used whenever necessary. But in every moment you can choose to follow your thoughts or you can recognize that which is not thinking. Don’t try to stop thinking, let it happen. Just recognize that which is not thinking.
The mind wants to land, to fixate, to hold a concept, but the only way you can be really free is by not fixating. That's part of true maturity, and it's one of the hardest things for spiritual people who have had true and powerful revelations to go through - to accept the degree of surrender needed to literally let go of all experience and all self-reference. Even in great revelations, there is almost always something that wants to claim, "I am this." Every time you claim, "I am this", you just claimed another sense perception, thought, emotion, or feeling.
Most people don't get out of childhood, or adolescence, without being wounded for telling the truth. Someone says 'you can't say that' or 'you shouldn't say that' or 'that wasn't appropriate' so most of us human beings have a very deep underlying conditioning that says that just to be who we are is not OK.......Most human beings have an imprinting that if they're real, if they're honest, somebody's not gonna like it. And they won't be able to control their environment if they tell the truth.
When we start to suffer, it tells us something very valuable. It means that we are not seeing the truth, and we are not relating from the truth. It's a beautiful pointer. It never fails.
No matter what identity we cling to, it takes great courage to step out of the old masks we wear and the old scripts that we live by, and open ourselves to the mysterious inner core of our being.
As I often tell my students, the person you’ll have the hardest time opening to and truly loving without reserve is yourself. Once you can do that, you can love the whole universe unconditionally.
The mind may accept or deny that you are awareness, but either way it can’t really understand. It cannot comprehend. Thought cannot comprehend what is beyond thought.