For whatever it may be worth....

I think that mystic experience is like sex: its essential to life, but there isn't a path towards ultimate attainment, or even a path of ever-improving attainment.

I think that people who sell books on how to attaining enlightenment are a lot like people who sell books on how to bed beautiful women. Its true there are practices, both healthy and unhealthy, that will help. Working out will help. Learning how to tell the lies that beautiful women want to hear will help. Becoming more successful professionally will usually help. Becoming a better person may help. But it all only goes so far, everybody has a ceiling.

Its like athletic achievement. We can ask Lebron James what is his secret to success, and he can tell us about what he has done to get where he is, and come up with some ideas that he thinks might help other people. Working out, practicing hard, eating healthily, and mentally devoting oneself to what one loves are all positive things to do. But following these practices will not get a person to his level.

A difference with spiritual achievement is that since so much of it is hidden and poorly understood, its harder to discern what our natural limits are. So if ten psychically powerful people write books, with nine of them saying that there's not much we can do besides living our lives the best we can, and the tenth promising great results if we follow his method, only one of those books will wind up on the bookshelf.

When you pursue a spiritual practice, you may get remarkable results, often in flashes. Are those results a taste of what is possible if you persist? Our are they glimpses of mental states of others who are psychically connected to those practices, and not results from the practice? When someone tries to sign you up for their diet plan, or their steps to prosperity, they always start by showing you something of what they have attained. But its rarely the case that the method they're teaching is the full story of how they attained those results.

Ostensibly all of our efforts accumulate over the course of many lives. I think that its true that results accumulate. But I think the idea that those results accumulate for "oneself" over the course of many lives doesn't even make much sense as a hypothesis. So what matters are whether the results that are accumulating are positive or not. And the results are going to be more positive if our beliefs and actions accommodate themselves to reality.

You can train your dog, but you can't beat your dog until he learns to speak. You can improve your mind through self-inquiry, but you can't discipline your mind until you reach nirvana.