This means that your relationship to the teaching must be one of respect, consideration, love, appreciation, gratitude, and service, always, at all times, regardless of your particular momentary feelings and opinions, because that is the attitude you need to have toward your Essence. By learning and understanding your relationship to the teaching, you will be able to actualize the true relationship to your Essence, for the teaching is a true expression of Essence. It is expected that various manifestations of the Work – tasks, aims, regulations, whatever – will produce certain reactions in you. Whatever the reactions are, they are to be understood and not to be acted out, regardless of what the reactions are. Otherwise you are taking the side of your false personality against your Essence.

Making a correct relationship to the teaching will create the correct relationship to your Essence. And the beautiful thing is that if you do, you are being there. You are being what you’re looking for! So, even in giving to the Work, you are being given to. That is the situation, and this situation must eventually be understood and actualized.

Reality is beyond any teachings that can be formulated and promulgated. Reality simply is. Everything we say about it is extra, a creation of the human mind. We cannot adhere to teachings as if they are reality. We use teachings and benefit from them, but then we discard them, we drop them. To carry teachings with us after we learn to live in reality is to carry an extra load. We need only reality, and the teachings are simply vehicles through which to reach and live in reality. Reality is beyond tools, methods, and helpful perspectives. Reality is innocent of it all. The point is not to be enlightened or to be God-realized. Rather, we are to live the way we are supposed to live. That is all, and simply so. We are to live reality the way reality actually is. Teachings approximate, and at best express, what that means and suggest how to go about it. Ultimately, teachings have no objective validity but are conceptual tools created by well-meaning individuals to help us live our life in the most natural and complete way possible. Once they have served their function, teachings are to be dropped. Otherwise, they will remain addendums to reality, a weight for us to carry. I am not saying that teachings are inaccurate, or are empty fabrications. The real ones are accurate and express reality faithfully, but they are still an addition to simply living reality.

Nevertheless, the situation necessitates that each individual search for the teaching most appropriate for her or him. This is especially true in our postmodern times, where all the teachings of humankind are available. The presence of such plethora of teachings, both ancient and new, can present quite a dilemma to the seeker. The seeker will have to be intelligent and sensitive in his or her choices to be able to connect with an appropriate teaching, which means a teaching that possesses a logos that has a great overlap with the seeker’s personal logos. Under normal circumstances, this means the seeker, in approaching various teachings, needs to be sensitive to which one he or she seems to resonate with. In other words, the choice is not only dictated by the quality of the teacher, which is also very important, and not by the reputation or the glorious stories of a particular teaching. One has to feel a real resonance with the teaching, and intuit that it makes sense somehow, even though one will not be able to tell precisely how, until one breaks the teaching’s code. Another way of stating this is that one must be sensitive to the direction and promptings that the universal logos is unfolding within one’s experience. It is the universal logos that unfolds our experience, and if we listen to its guidance and intimations we may discern which way it is taking us.

What we are finding here is that the inner work is a very intimate and personal thing. General teachings, regardless of how deep and universal, do not work. The teaching will have to be formulated and communicated in a way that will effect the particular student in the most intimate and personal manner. The teaching must speak to the student's heart. He has to be able to relate the teaching to his own life in a very personal way. He has to see that it deals with his everyday concerns and conflicts, specifically and deeply. Otherwise the teaching is not useful, is not effective.

The Work must be done according to your own inquiry; the Work that we do here is only a guidance. Your motivation has to be pure, real and true; your flame has to be there; otherwise you’ll use the Work for the wrong purpose. You’ll get somewhere according to an idea, but it is not necessarily where your Being would take you without constraint. You can develop this and that, become free from this and that, but how do you know whether that will fulfill your destiny? You might think you’re supposed to be more loving, or less afraid, or more comfortable, or more relaxed, or richer, or more beautiful. Maybe you are, maybe not. These are just ideas. But true questioning, sincere questioning doesn’t have a particular goal. If you think you have a goal, an end, and if you think you’re going to go there, you’ve already extinguished the flame. If you’ve told yourself you’re here because you want to be enlightened, you want to be free, you want to be loving, you want to be this or that, that means that you already know. But you don’t know, really. It’s a lie to believe that you know. It’s true that there’s a question and that you don’t know the answer—that is the truth. The most honest answer you can give to the question “Why am I here?” is that I am here because I don’t know. The truest reason for you to be here is to fan that flame of inquiry. These questions are not theoretical or philosophical. They are at the root and heart of your life, relevant for every moment of your life, whatever you’re doing. If you don’t know but you’re pretending that you know, you’re wasting the moment. It’s a complete waste, regardless of what you’re doing. It’s not only that the idea in your mind might be the wrong one for you—the fact that it is an idea, instead of a direct perception, puts out the flame of the search, and your unfoldment is blocked. Whenever the answer is not a direct perception it will block or distort your experience.