Here’s the reasons why ‘you’ can’t become enlightened:

• Enlightenment, awakening, liberation — this starts with the end of identifying as the false self you have always thought you were.
• Consequently, that false self has nothing to do with you becoming enlightened. The only thing it can do is go: stop bothering you: expire: leave.
• Except — it can’t go. It can’t get rid of itself — because you are holding onto it like grim death, thinking it is you.
• So, something else has to do the job for you, in you. Most people where this has happened, when asked for a description, attribute the ridding of it to an ‘act of grace’: this meaning something that happens, that you have not done anything to deserve.
• What acts? Well there’s a good question. You expect me to know? Well, I don’t know — one aspect of getting to what is called “enlightenment” is the loss of all “knowing”-ness. I don’t know. So — let’s call it, say, ‘the Divine’, or ‘the Source’ — it’s the unknowable essence that is behind Life. Call it what you will, all names are hopelessly wrong anyway because they restrict, and it is not restricted. Otherwise it couldn’t act impossibly in grace, could it?

Can you do anything to encourage this process? No, and yes. No, the seeking self can’t do anything except keeping on seeking: it cannot find. The being behind the self — that has led you to ask the questions, that is keeping you here reading all this — well that being is already enlightened — except it does not need any such description or label; it was already, is now, and never has been other than the true being behind the false self.

So anything that can be done to bring that true being into awareness now, this moment where you live, right now, even for the tinest fraction of a second — well that is bridging the impossible, untraversable gap between what you think you are and what you are, both of which cannot be the truth.

And that’s why people do this work.

Perhaps, if you do that, repeatedly, you might just be more likely to be Amazed by Grace. Maybe. There’s no cause and effect operating at that level of reality; that’s all part of the dream from which you are endeavouring to awaken.

But it must all be done without expecting an outcome, because that expectation will bind the false self more firmly to you. Just do it, do the work and — watch. And all of this is easier done than said.

Stop digging. Just start.