Using inner guidance to tune in and know what the correct path for you is constitutes the most important component of spiritual awakening. There is no “ultimately correct”, or “right”, or “normal” path – there is YOUR path and the paths of others. 

We must not set our standard of “normal” according to another’s perception. The ability to claim what we perceive as real and investigate it, determining if it is beneficial to us or not (sometimes we have to become it in order to know) is the only way to find our own path, our own destiny.

No one else’s path will be your own. You can choose to trace someone else’s path as a means of “lifting the veil”, to support your own expansion of consciousness, but at some point you will have to stand in your own truth.

When we follow someone else’s path to the point of readiness, but instead of claiming our own perception insist on “this path itself is the only true path”, we get lost instead of lifting the veil of illusion. Claiming personal truth might be one of the hardest things to ever have to do. Why? 

When we are exploring the lower realms of illusion, we are supported by the multitudes of other people traveling on the same path. Even if the path itself is not conventional, there might be more than enough people on it for you to feel safe – as a part of a spiritual community, part of a church group, or an ashram, or a group of skeptics.

But once you get to the veil itself, to the point of breakthrough, unless you let go of the group’s beliefs and walk alone – you won’t lift the veil. There are some things that we can only do alone – this is one of them.

It is all the more difficult to take this step if your truth is perceived by others as unconventional and even “crazy”. This is the point of “trial”, the “test” that all spiritual traditions talk about – can you stand in your own perceptional truth, your own personal reality, even if you are alone? 

If you can, you make your perceptional truth your reality. If it is an expanded truth, one way or another connected to the Higher Self, then this new reality you enter will be harmonious and will benefit your spiritual development. The beliefs and realities of other people are there for us to reflect upon – they are the triggers for asking the proper questions, which are meant to clarify our own path.

If a society blindly conforms to the norms of the ancestors without adjustments, it stagnates. If we follow the accepted norm, we become limited by the perceptory range of others. 

Change only comes from daring to be different!

When we claim what we perceive as real (even if it goes against the norm), we create a point of reference of what is possible, which serves us and others in awakening. We each have an innate Code for progress, for discovery – this is how we awaken.

But everyone is different and one person might be having a “need to explore and know” lifetime, while another might be having a “rest” lifetime. We all take these rest lifetimes, when we just coast along, not making any waves.

But everyone occasionally has a lifetime when they are due to make a very big wave (some more often than others). Not everyone is curious about the working of the cells, or the atomic composition of matter, or life on other planets… But some are and their persistent belief in their personal truth is what allows us all to become a little bit more awake. 

If people hadn’t gone traveling, they would not have found other cultures, different from their own. If someone hadn’t chosen to go into the open seas, we would never have found other continents. If someone hadn’t built a telescope, looked into it, and then claimed that what he saw was real, we would never have known that the Earth is round and that it rotates around the Sun. Human history (and any other material planetary history) is always based on the ones who “rock the boat” of conventional norm.

Unfortunately the saying “ignorance breeds fear” is very true… If someone is in their Lower Self, they will feel fear in relation to what they cannot understand. If one is in their Higher Self, they will feel curiosity instead! 

But one “cannot get there from here” – it is not possible to just switch from fear to curiosity without the intermediate step – the Self. This is why knowledge and self-awareness of personal reality is so important, without it we are trapped in fear-based surviving. In the higher truth, every perception is valid. 

We tend to fear what we do not understand because our Lower Self, trapped in survival, lives in duality and believes that “if they are right, I must be wrong” and thus it judges the other’s perceptional truth as “wrong” and dangerous. Yet every “simulated reality” is here to inspire us to awaken. Someone might have to hate, to kill, to betray in order to become a harmonious Self, while someone else might have already passed that stage and now perceives more of the bigger picture, hence the knowledge that by harming another we only harm ourselves. But no one can just tell someone that – they have to go through the required steps of direct experience in order to comprehend that concept.

The Higher Mind/Reason is derived from Spirit. We can use the Higher Mind as a path to lead us into Spirit. Imagine you are lost in the desert. How do you know where to go? You can randomly start walking, perhaps you can examine all information available to you and then decide where to go, or you can follow one of many paths left in the sand by others. This is where you really need to use your discernment in order to pick the direction appropriate for you. Unfortunately most people just wander in circles. Few people make their own unique path. The rest follow the paths that already exist. There is no right or wrong choice here – choosing to leave the desert is already a form of awakening.