Ramakrishna said, “Only two kinds of people can attain to self-knowledge: those whose minds are not encumbered at all with learning—that is to say, not overcrowded with thoughts borrowed from others—and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realize that they know nothing.”

His thesis was that the original yogi mystics of India were mushroom eaters from the mountains in the north who’d come down into the Indus Valley; but the sacred mushrooms didn’t grow there, and so they then developed all the yogic practices—pranayama and hatha yoga and raja yoga—to try to reproduce the same states of consciousness to which the mus

The witness that’s useful in our spiritual work has a totally different quality. It isn’t judging—good, bad, it’s all the same. This witness isn’t trying to change anything—it’s just seeing it all. It is the completely uncommitted; it’s not committed to your enlightenment, it’s not trying to get you ahead, it’s simply witnessing, nothing else.

When we say, “Trust your intuition,” when we start to encourage that, we’re reversing the process. As we awaken, we begin to act from the inside out rather than from the outside in—and that’s the transformation we’re really looking for. It leads to behavior that is based not on enlightened self-interest, but on the workings of an awakened heart.

trusting takes deep faith.

Ramana Maharshi’s practice was to continually ask himself, “Who am I?” It’s a form of self-inquiry. He wrote, “If the mind uninterruptedly investigates its own true nature, it discovers that there is no such thing as mind. Such constant practice is the shortest path for attaining true wisdom.”

Instead of always preoccupying ourselves with trying to get what we think we want or need, we’ll start to quiet, we’ll start to listen. We’ll wait for that inner prompting. We’ll try to hear, rather than decide, what it is we should do next.

The freer I get, the higher I go. The higher I go, the more I see. The more I see, the less I know. The less I know, the more I’m free.

And to feel it, we have to experience it directly: through doing japa, through singing kirtan, through ritual and mantra and prayer, through remembering— through all the practices of merging in love, and letting love happen to each of us. That’s the only way we will come to know about bhakti practices.