You’re not going to deprogram yourself, significantly alter your perception of reality, or gain personal agency by consuming information.

You need to take whatever techniques or insights you learn and put them into daily, moment by moment practice. If you are serious about exploring reality, you will find that you actually need very little outside instruction. You can take what you find and field test it with enthusiasm and curiosity. You become a scientist, researching your own life and perceptions.

It would, for instance, be perfectly balanced for a person to discover a new idea or technique and then spend the following three months practicing it, incorporating it, field testing it…without consuming any more spiritual information during those three months. That’s the kind of ratio I’m talking about.

Most people don’t do this. They are on a spiritual information IV drip, and they’ve mistaken this setup for authentic spiritual practice, for earnest life investigation. It’s not even close. If anything, it engenders a kind of passivity and torpor.

Take an honest look at your ratio. What does it look like?

Spiritual problems?

If you are trying to fix the gears on your bicycle, reading a manual on jet engine repair is not going to help you. Similarly, many people think a specific issue they are having is a “spiritual” issue when it’s not. It’s usually a psychological issue, or an issue of overcoming conditioning or programming.

Take a good look at your “issues” and get honest and clear about their nature. There is nothing so confusing as trying to solve a psychological problem by reading a discourse on non-dual reality by an enlightened guru!