The myth that there is only one true path to higher levels of consciousness is a highly limiting belief that is perhaps the single biggest cause of frustration and failure for people seeking higher levels of consciousness. 

As we’ve seen, access to and knowledge of these practices has traditionally been held in the realm of religion and spirituality, and over the years a tremendous amount of dogma has been introduced into something that’s actually incredibly simple.

One of the things this lead to was a restriction of what people practiced and used. Ultimately, this means that Christians only did practices from within the Christian tradition. Sufi’s from within the Sufi tradition. Buddhist’s from within the Buddhist tradition, and so on.

Fit matters. Today, people have access to methods from many different traditions. When being researched by scientists, people often reported using more than one of the top methods they uncovered, sometimes for decades, yet only one ultimately worked for them. When it did, it often worked quite quickly. Why? Because it’s not enough to just find a good method. You also have to find the right method for where you’re at right now.

As mentioned in a previous myth that’s become the entire basis of the most highly regarded research protocols. Research suggests that even the best methods only work for a small percentage of the population at any given time (generally, 1% to 3% of people who use them).

Imagine if you were locked into a tradition that only had one or two primary methods. Even if by some stroke of luck these were the top two most effective methods on the entire planet, it’s unlikely that they would work for more than a small percentage of adherents.

People who spend a long time practicing a system commonly see some people who transition right away, some a while later, others still later, and so on. What’s happening here? It’s simple. 

As people change over the years and decades, more have the possibility of their psychology and nervous system coming into alignment with the method, and transitioning. However, the reality is that most probably never will. If the latter had just looked a little further afield and tried more methods, they most likely would have transitioned. That’s the path that you want to make sure you take. It’s the path of success with higher levels of consciousness.

People often wonder how people can get stuck in a system for decades, even when it seems like little progress is being made. For some, it’s about belief. They are told the system is the only one that works, or something similar, and they believe it and keep at it. Those folks are in the minority, though.

Most people get locked into a system because they originally benefit from it. It produces some forward movement for a while, and then stops. Because it once seemed to work, people then buy into the ideas around it, and keep at it. Ironically, that’s the worst thing they could do at that point.

Here’s the reality. If you are practicing a method for a solid hour each day, and it stops working, you should keep at it for a couple more weeks and see if it kicks back in. If it does, great! Stick with that method for as long as it works.

If it doesn’t, then its best to assume that the method has done what it’s going to for you, and move on. Many people have difficulty doing this because they’ve often tried a bunch of methods before this one, none of which worked for them. It may have taken them a long time to find something that worked, and they don’t want to give it up.

Methods stop working because they change you, and as a result they are no longer in phase with you and the progress you need to make. They have done their part. You’re different now, and they only worked for the old you. So, you have to let go and find the next method that will work. If you don’t the method can even sometimes pull you backwards, undoing the progress it made for you. You definitely don’t want that, so just drop it, don’t look back, and move on to the next method.

While we’re talking about this, here’s another tip. No method should ever be permanently considered unusable. Let’s say that you tried 10 methods before you found the one that worked.

Now, that method has changed you and is no longer working. At this point it is perfectly fine to go back and try those other 10 methods, because you are a different you. You don’t want to rule them out because they didn’t work. They didn’t work for the old you, not the new you. If you rule them out permanently and one of them is the method you need next, you could significantly delay your progress.

So, now we know that there isn’t any one path to higher levels of consciousness, but is there just one type of it, or one correct form of it? We’ll see in Myth #9…