I think the best tip I could possibly give a truth seeker is to do your best to seek to understand what the guru is saying. As I always say, choose your teachers wisely.
This is very different from rolling over and believing what they say. It is about deepening your own understanding and making the teaching your own. It is about eating the food rather than reading the menu. It is about moving beyond the concepts and allowing the experience to find you.
That said, I would like to add this caveat: Its not important to understand everything a teacher says for two reasons.
First, you can only understand what you are ready to understand. If something doesn't resonate, don't worry about it.
Second, teachers give us many more pathways than we need. It is much more important to understand one pathway deeply, rather than conceptually understanding many. The mind likes to consume concepts and it is continuously looking for more. Be mindful of falling into this trap. Think of it as if you were digging a well looking for water. You have a better chance of finding water if you dig one well a hundred feet deep, rather than a hundred wells one foot deep.
The use of metaphors is a powerful way to communicate concepts. As an example of seeking to understand, I would now like to share one of my favorite metaphors that I got from Francis Lucille; the ice cream metaphor. Experiential understanding of this metaphor is very sweet :)
Imagine you loved strawberry ice cream. Now imagine that every time you ate strawberry ice cream, you imagined eating sweet strawberries. In other words, in ignorance, you somewhat equated your love of strawberry ice cream with eating actual strawberries (since they are both red and sweet).
Then one day you went to the ice cream factory and got a glimpse of the truth. At the factory you saw that the reality of the strawberry ice cream is cream and sugar. In fact, there are no strawberries anywhere to be found in the factory!!
The 'strawberry' part of the ice cream experience was just a tiny bit of color and flavoring added into the cream and sugar after the ice cream was already made. After this glimpse of the truth, I now understand fully completely that what I really love about strawberry ice cream is not actually strawberries but rather cream and sugar because that's the essence of ice cream. In wisdom, when I eat strawberry ice cream I now equate my pleasure with my love of cream and sugar.
In this metaphor strawberry or chocolate or vanilla flavoring = thoughts, sensations, perceptions and the cream and sugar = consciousness = reality.
What we love about life is not the objects of experience, but rather it is our love of Consciousness. The joy of being alive = the joy of being conscious. In other words, the substance or reality of all experience is Consciousness. Deeply contemplate this understanding the next time you eat a strawberry or smell the fragrance of a forest or admire the beauty of your pet or anything else that you love about life. In reality, what we experience is always Consciousness and only Consciousness.
This is a delicious metaphor and can be called upon to understand the reality of any experience. Enjoy.
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