The amazing thing about consciousness, perception and Truth is that nobody and I mean NOBODY, institution or governing agency of any kind--whether secular or spiritual--owns them, has 'rights' on them or has any say whatsoever in how or when they are accessed by any human being the world over. If you listen to the religious leaders all around the planet they will say you can get into heaven, nirvana or the happy hunting ground or what you will---if you follow 'their' way. The truth is that there is no guarantee of any kind on where you will 'go' regardless of what you do. The fact is that all this is built up as a buttress against fear. Why not just face the fear instead of running away into the safety of belief? Beliefs are simply covers, 'soothers' for the myriad of fears that thoughts create. You can see this if you go into 'why' you believe something. What happens, ask yourself, if you remove the belief....you will find fear below it, every time (, but you must do this for yourself to see this as a fact for you). Why not just stay with the fear and see what happens? If we do this, we find that there is no reason for 'beliefs'. It's something different if you have a personal experience of an event that happened within your own experience. Then, it isn't a belief for You; it is a fact...for you and for you alone, but then if a friend comes along and you tell them of your experience with Creator, God, Life Force, Whatever and they latch onto that to quell their fear of death, for example, then that is a 'belief' for them and isn't worth anything. Direct Experience is available to all of human kind, but organized religion has made a business out of spirituality; it is vacuous, period. We all have access to the All That Is at any time and in any place because we are in it; we are a part of it. We have access through Direct Perception via Totally Free Observation in which there is no 'Governor' that is observing, which means no fragment of thought has assumed superiority, as the 'Observer'.
This is why Truth is free and available to all. It Is its own purifier. Can you watch without any judgment, which means watching without trying to 'change' anything? If you are trying to change what you 'see', then you are watching through another fragment of thought that has set itself up as the 'authority'. If, when you are observing, the 'observer' is making adjustments, adding, subtracting, talking to itself, then you are not observing thought actually. To observe thought is to observe actually what is going on within yourself without doing anything about it, so it is extraordinarily challenging to actually observe What Is. You are watching the 'watcher'. That is why it is said that "the 'meditator' IS the 'meditation'". To watch your chatter, all your reactions, your fears, your beliefs, which immediately swoop in when you face fear: all of that--to just watch it like a movie, while keeping your hands out of it will begin to show you yourself exactly as you are without any modification. This, in turn will reveal truth and if you are truly selfless in this, then you will get glimpses of God or The All That Is or whatever you want to call it. If you get greedy for these moments of Light, then they will disappear from your experience. That is why no middle man or woman is needed to access Divinity. True Observation is The Purifier.
The activity of being aware of yourself is Eternal: meaning your awareness is what is Eternal, not that which you are aware Of. That which you are aware of comes and goes and is part of the dharma of life. Your awareness is Eternal, not what you identify With. This is a key distinction and where we get tripped up. What we identify with is temporal: my job, my wife, my sorrow, my pleasure, abundance of money, lack of money, I am American, I am Baptist, I am Atheist, etc., etc; the point of awareness is eternal. We all want immortality, but where we are focusing our desire for immortality is in the temporal world, meaning that which is born and dies. Awareness is eternal; the causal world is temporal. Stop chasing immortality. You already have it.
We are looking beyond that which is eternal, which is awareness itself and so we miss it because we are lost in the dharma. We are lost in illusion. We are lost in the rat race of pleasure, position and power and so we strengthen the illusion through our entertaining and support of it and hence we miss what is with us all the time and is closer than our breath itself: the agency to be aware of ourselves as we live and breathe and have our being. This, they say, is what separates us from most of creation (as far as we know): the ability to be objectively aware of ourselves, to observe ourselves, to watch ourselves and discover ourselves exactly as we are. A humble man never says he's humble because that would be pride. A humble man is always on-the-lookout for the movement of pride within himself: that is humility. Humility is already present if I am aware of the movement of pride within myself. I don't have to do anything else. You don't have to try to be a peaceful person or cultivate peace. All that is nonsense. "Make War on Hate" is just more war.
Peace comes forth naturally when you are consciously aware of the movement of violence within you in all the little ways that it expresses itself. The awareness of this without trying to change it brings about peace naturally without any effort. This is like shinning a light on what it is you are without any resistance. Awareness is the flame of attention that has no motive. Just to be aware of whatever IS without moving away from it through another thought-form, but staying with it like you are watching the beauty of a diamond. The diamond tells you all about itself as you watch. You don't tell it what it is, you let it tell you what it is. If you can approach your fears, your constant search for pleasure and avoidance of pain, your sorrows, your hopes and fears in this way, you will be reading the book of yourself which is So Much More Interesting and Beautiful than any so called 'book' here on Earth. Not only that, it is the Book of Humanity that your are reading when you stay with the movement of your own energy through your agency of awareness: your thoughts, your intuitions, your emotions as they breathe and move and morph. You will see that the outside and the inside are interrelated and are part of the same flow and mechanism: what is inside the skin and outside are the skin are in constant dialogue, as it were. It is all interconnected. It is one thing to say it, which Means Nothing at all, but to see it for yourself through your own center-less observation is Everything and that is the magnificence of what we are talking about here. All of this can be tested and proven within your own awareness. These words on this page mean nothing. Your own discovery of this for yourself is Priceless and Is the true gem of existence. There is no authority. There is no arbiter. There is no gatekeeper.
Awareness is free and can be employed by all of humanity. Your intention must be right. Your heart must be right and You must want to understand Yourself and our fundamental Human problems more than anything else in the World. If these things are true, then through awareness you will come to that which cannot be named. It will make its appearance when the self, the 'me' is not.