Yet there are always a few who are not content to spend their lives indoors. Simply knowing there is something unknown beyond their reach makes them acutely restless. They have to see what lies outside – if only, as George Mallory said of Everest, “because it’s there.”

This is true of adventurers of every kind, but especially of those who seek to explore not mountains or jungles but consciousness itself: whose real drive, we might say, is not so much to know the unknown as to know the knower. Such men and women can be found in every age and every culture. While the rest of us stay put, they quietly slip out to see what lies beyond.

Then, so far as we can tell, they disappear. We have no idea where they have gone; we can’t even imagine. But every now and then, like friends who have run off to some exotic land, they send back reports: breathless messages describing fantastic adventures, rambling letters about a world beyond ordinary experience, urgent telegrams begging us to come and see. “Look at this view! Isn’t it breathtaking? Wish you could see this. Wish you were here.”
- Easwaran Ed., Eknath (2009-06-01). The Bhagavad Gita (Classics of Indian Spirituality)

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
- translation by Coleman Barks

There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position— a perspective, an opinion, a judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words: You need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are. Not only a person, but also a situation can be made wrong through complaining and reactivity, which always implies that “this should not be happening.” Being right places you in a position of imagined moral superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself. - Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Belief is an ego function and as long as your origin is open to believe at all you ARE regarding it from and the ego viewpoint. When teaching is no longer necessary you will merely KNOW God. Believe that there IS another way is the loftiest idea of which ego thinking is capable. That is because it contains a hint of recognition that the ego is NOT the self. Undermining the egos thought system must be perceived as painful even though this is anything but true. Babies scream in rage if you take away a knife or scissors even though they may well harm themselves if you do not. The speed up has placed you in the same position.

To have finally dealt with suffering is to consume it into yourself. Which means you have to, with eyes open, be able to keep your heart open in hell. You have to look at what is, and say 'Yeah, Right.' And what it involves is bearing the unbearable. And in a way, who you *think* you are can’t do it. Who you *really* are, can do it. So that who you think you are has to die in the process.

What is most beautiful is when a human is being undone as an ego, when the belief in a personal self is merging with its own source—the universal Being. When the tribal is absorbed in the universal, the human being has moved from person to pure presence and is in harmony. This is the real yoga.