The real freedom is within. Nothing….no thing….in the apparent external world has to change for you to be utterly, completely free right this moment. But something internal has to. The internal reality most of us experience is “apparent” too, but not to me…not yet.

Recently I was talking with a friend about ascension. There are aspects I probably cannot articulate yet, but I have known for a long time that part of the process is that the soul releases its identification with form. That does not means we die. We are so trained to equate form with physical life, but that’s part of the problem. The spiritual release and dropping the identification of form (which is so much more than the physical body) is an act of soul and consciousness. It sounds airy-fairy and unrelated to the nuts and bolts of life, but it is neither. It IS profoundly practical and just profound overall.

I longed for this state for most of my life. I studied it. If anyone who experienced it wrote about it, I read it their accounts. I used to be a walking encyclopedia of written spiritual accounts of humans who had awakened to non-duality, soul freedom, ascension. After decades of inquiry, I concluded the shift is an act of grace. If fervor, longing, sincere desire, intuitive knowing, etc., could cause this state, I would have experienced it many times over. I can’t say that none of that matters, because maybe it does and it doesn’t matter anyway because once you have a taste for it, you cannot let it go and you long for that freedom. We long for it because we know it is our true state. But what pulls the final lever of awakening? It seems to be the soul. The human cannot cause it.

I do Zoom calls with Byron Katie almost every week and have done so for over four year. BK is an awakened human. She does not describe herself that way, which is all the more telling of her authenticity, so these are my words and my experience of her. She too has said that her “experience on the floor” (see any of her books to know how she woke up on the floor one morning and nothing was the same) was an act of grace.