Once you have had a direct taste of enlightenment and you graduate from seeker to finder, the whole purpose and direction of spiritual practice changes radically and completely.

Paradoxically, it is only from this vantage point that real progress can be made on the path – you actually need to be a finder of absolute truth for practice to be truly profound and transformational. While you are still a seeker, the territory is as yet only theoretical or conceptual – and practice, while important, only points toward the goal.

Once you have had the kind of higher state experience that directly reveals the goal and the territory, this creates a completely new context for practice. Having mapped the territory, you are now an intrepid explorer, no longer distracted by ideas about what enlightenment is or is not, nor by existential doubts about your own capacity to attain anything in particular.

Once that Rubicon has been crossed, you’ve had a tantalising glimpse of what it means to be doubtless. In that nondual Samadhic revelation, you know without any doubt that you have always been free, that separation is an illusion, and that unenlightenment is merely a thought. Now the only question is, what are you going to do about it?

Even when we have had such rarefied glimpses, we’re so emotionally, psychologically and biologically conditioned that we need to work ceaselessly to hone and develop our spiritual musculature. We need to continually align and realign ourselves with what we’ve realised – to respond to the vast and impersonal revelation of the Absolute, and recognise with humility the demands of a spiritual life lived in earnest.

If we’re a sensitive and intelligent soul, appropriately humbled by the immense and profound implications of enlightenment, we realise that we have to become very serious in the wake of such a realisation. So in the new context we have discovered, practice becomes an expression of our willingness to take responsibility for what has been seen or understood.

Andrew Cohen shares his deepest insights on the true nature of spiritual practice from the perspective of being an authentic finder. Through sharing his own unique ecology of practice, Andrew reveals how, in the wake of higher state experiences, only an absolute commitment to a spiritual path makes any sense – and that commitment itself is the very fuel that makes the fire of spiritual liberation burn bright and strong.