Taking a step back

 Progress on the spiritual path is unnecessary and nothing to be attached to. All positive states are equally as undesirable as neutral or negative ones. We should seek righteousness and skillfulness while learning to detach ourselves from identifying with them. Our attachment, desire for, or personal identification with positive states can be a great obstacle from reaching them and perceiving truth. Our personal identification with the condition of the body or mind perpetuates ensnaring karma. All identification with conditioned states perpetuates dukkha or conditioned awareness. 

What's strange is that in the sense that most of us know, there is no us that is saved by spiritual effort or grace. You could say that the soul is saved, or even our soul is saved, but this is the witnessing within us, not really the us that is the conditioned being which is identified with numerous conditioned states. The consciousness of the witness or the soul is released from conditioned awareness and then I believe it too passes as the dominant center of awareness. 

The awakening witness within has the power to release awareness from identification with transitory states. This isn't a numbing or a psychological disassociation with parts of self that are identified with conditioned states, it is rather an internalization of consciousness that results as the natural passing or death of the conditioned mind. It is a deepening or maturing of the general structure of consciousness rather than a lateral movement in the range of the typical egoic conditioned mind. 

This also expands rather than eliminates personal experience. It opens the personal to the transcendental, to the infinite, with it's inexplicable variety. It deepens the personal to the depth of the intimacy of the soul, the petal like softness of the witness, and beyond. While the personal appears to be simplified in this general movement, and is, it equally becomes something vastly more complex and subtle. This deepening speaks of the maturity of being, what we can note as our being if we do so wisely. No loss of feeling occurs. How we feel changes, and our total feeling takes on subtlety, depth and greater intensity. 

This release marks the end of what we knew, not the end of who we are. It means the fulfillment we deeply desire, yet find impossible to communicate, to directly know. In knowing, in communicating this with our self, we do experience death. In death, we go beyond, remaining alive in a way we forgot about. A way we keep without seeing, that in its own way died when our ego began to dominate our awareness. 

So in a way taking a step we take a step forward.