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Thanks for the interest lightsplasher! You're right, there are a lot of different ways of interpreting it. I've been reading through a lot of articles on here where people are writing about a lot of experiences in phenomena and I think that this distracts from what people should be paying attention to in their practice. Originally I ended with Shankara's 3 stages of practice to make a little more sense of it (1st stage: god I worship you, 2nd stage: god I am a part of you, 3rd stage: God verily I am you/I am that) if one were to become the Buddha then they couldn't possibly be distracted by Buddha. But, I didn't want to mention "god" and potentially offend anyone (happened a lot when I was studying eastern philosophy in college).

It is really tough to talk about any of these types of things without offending someone at some level. I've recently got into a bit of a heated argument over such concepts as 'personal will' and aligning it with a higher power. I just have to laugh about it all at this point. People are fun. :)

I think that the problem is that this sort of thing isn't something that you can simply agree with and understand. It's like trying to perceive beyond your own level of experience and the mind doesn't have any reference for it. Anyways, speaking of free will I wrote on on that a while back that you might like https://steemit.com/philosophy/@read3986/free-will-and-life-s-path

Interesting read, free will is such a complex subject. The problem with communication over complex spiritual issues does have a lot to do with finding some type of common grounds for discussion. Direct experience is not always a great reference when dealing with mysticism.

I like Teal Swans explanation of the differences between free will and determinism.

I like Teal Swan as a person but her explanation sounds sort of Hermetic or relative to early stages of practice. John-Roger was one of the first people talking about the Christ consciousness (msia)in the early 70's and the term has gotten a lot more popular now. If you're interested in that path he might be worth checking out?

My personal views tend to lean in a variety of directions - I haven't heard of John-Roger so I may check him out. I think it is interesting to see how all these things became a part of our collective belief system.

Your personal view sounds like the way to go, being open minded. John-Roger was the founder of the Movement of spiritual inner awareness (msia). His teachings center around the christ-consciousness and were the earliest to use the term that I know of. He died a few years back but he's written a lot of books on the subject and has a lot of videos on youtube. I was involved with his organization for quite some time. It has some similarities to Eckankar if you're familiar with that tradition.

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