Inner work is about self-discovery, which is sometimes a daunting and unpleasant experience.

Spiritual awakening is about coming out of the false beliefs of who you thought you were and coming into the conscious knowledge of who you actually are. It essentially comes down to the question of if no books or teachers told you how to act, who would you be?

People like to portray this work as the angels singing and the heavens parting when, in fact, the more you perceive your own 'inherent luminance,' the more you come into the knowledge of everything, what we call the good and the bad, the comfortable aspects of ourselves and those portions which make us want to turn away from them, which nonetheless are just as valid and need to be given attention as those we deem pretty and fluffy.

The process and journey of inner work are simple and baffling. The travail comes because we must get through all those layers of things that are not ours. You must see all the nasty, ugly stuff you have been carrying, which can be daunting. Comfort is not the truth; comfort is in the truth! We don't want more pretty lies, pretty illusions; we want the facts, the truth of ourselves. On the other side of the ugly is a place of enormous power and peace. We have to come to terms with all the dishonesty, betrayal, etc that we have done, the stuff we don't want people to know about, let alone have broadcasted all over social media.

It is all about finding out who you are. Not is this personality you had to put on. We all had to manufacture that personality when we were kids. Initially, we were natural. We squealed with joy when happy and cried when sad. But when we expressed ourselves in such an uninhibited manner, at some point, we ran into social disapproval, sometimes even punishment and cruelty; we learned that being ourselves can be perceived as dangerous to some, and we learned to shut it down. We substitute actual behaviors for false ones that we know will win us approval and acceptance. We then do this for so long that we mistake the manufactured behaviors as our true selves and forget who we are.

The whole point of the work is to discover who you are, the real being behind the mask of the persona you have worn to act and speak through.

Here is the remarkable thing from the Hermetic point of view: everything you have experienced, done, thought, succeeded, and failed at was designed and put into place by what some call their Higher Genius(HG) or God of their Heart(GH).

Even if you are in a job or relationship that sucks, every daily circumstance you encounter is designed to turn your mind eventually [were speaking thousands or millions of incarnations] to the ultimate truth.

We are here to learn and evolve from experience, which necessitates knowing what formerly was 'good and evil' and is now termed 'productive or nonproductive behavior.'

To be continued...