To ever get out of the gate you have to think only about you;
you have to abandon man’s natural tendency to think about other people;
all of the horrible and stupid things they do, and how they affect you,
and how you feel about them;
at the basic animalistic level the constant thinking about others helps individual men survive and at the more complex human one, helps hold civilization together.
Just a bit of notice reveals that the vast majority of your brain’s
thinking about other people involves no matters significant to your survival,
but is rather nothing more than salacious gossip and condemnation:
entertaining to ordinary minds, but certainly nothing of objective value.
And for the extraordinary few who want to get-out-of-the-city & to-the-bottom-of-things
it is worse than useless  --  it is additional urban distraction.
 

You have not even started toward the city limits until you have gotten over
being interested in your thoughts’ palaver about other human beings, (that is):
you are not only no longer fascinated or irritated by the lives and thoughts of others --
you simply no longer perceive of them as being relevant in any way to your goal,    (which they are not, by the way  –  and also, by the way:
if you still have not caught on by now:
no one can be converted to this view or to anything about TheThing;
you are either born with an interest in it and the ability to make sense of it and use it when you hear about it or you are not, and nothing will ever change this.
The rest of the ordinary world is not wrong and the few right –
it is simply how it is  --  and on that you can safely bet the farm and all the tractors.  Ordinary people would interpret the above as a call to be heartless; to not think about other people and thus not care about them,
and while this is not true, it is also not untrue --
not in the mental/verbal realm in which routine minds are made to work.
This offers another stark example of the impassable divide between
the standard way life wires and programs human brains,
and that anomalistic version extant in the few.)
So once you come to realize on your own that other people are totally irrelevant to what you want, all of your recreational thinking becomes about you.
Even those who make this one step away from the center of CityConsciousness
seldom go further;
they get stuck thinking about all of their perceived behavioral shortcomings:
“I eat too much!”  “I dope too much!”
“I get angry too easily  –  defensive, too readily”  “I am too lazy” and so on,
but this is not the thinking about yourself that is necessary;
you must abandon that kind of thinking about your actions,
and focus your thinking exclusively on your thinking:
this is the vital first step.

And it is easy to spend decades so involved, and for the proper person,
they are years of unequaled joy, excitement and private discovery,
but most of those who make it this far, make it no further;
and if it is going to occur, it is usually at this stage that a man will have that most extraordinary neural experience the few have historically been given to call: Awakening, orEnlightenment,
a state experienced in and by the brain which is so singular and astounding that
it tends to fixate a man’s thinking thereabout for the rest of his life, in memory that is, after the ephemeral experience itself has uncontrollably passed.
It is difficult not to constructively stop your efforts after this;
to think only of how marvelous was that mental state, and to dream incessantly of
its return, (which with those for whom it happens, it often does,
but always unpredictably and beyond any of your willful doing).
This is what is so commonly and conclusively recorded in the mystical literature:
“Then one day, after forty years of effort, monk Z suddenly:  had-his-enlightenment!” and truth be known, if monk Z was average for such persons,
it marked the end of his efforts --
not because there was nothing further he could do and understand,
but because finally having that experience satisfies most of those who are
to it born and for it toil.
Now, thinking of the experience and what they realized during its duration,
becomes the home base of their mental life.
The totally head-clearing experience lives on in them in memory –
and in that memory  --   they live the rest of their life.
No harm done  --  just as there is no harm done in the rest of the world
never having the experience;
this is just how it is.
 

Fact: no amount or type of thinking brings about the ability to produce this extraordinary condition in your brain at will,
which could be a factor in the failure of most people who experience it
to continue their efforts afterwards --  once this fact becomes obvious.
 

But there is something more you-of-the-few can do;
something that is not exactly the same as the unpredictable, classically recounted: “Moments of Enlightenment”  but states quite similar and in no way inferior,
and over which, (comparably speaking), you can exercise some control.
They come into existence by your relentless pressing on even when
nothing you have ever read or heard indicates there may be more
after the neural experience of having once “Waked up from the dream” –
and indeed your own thinking may offer no encouragement;
it may seem as though mind/thought-&-consciousness has gone as far as it literally can in trying to directly perceive of itself, (which is all that ThisThing is really about --
..........there is actually a bit more to it than this,
          but it is too close to the MissingPossibility to go into),
but there is nothing physically to stop you from grabbing your mind,
and forcibly dragging it along with you as you pick back up your trek
away from the heart of man’s inner, collective MentalCity.
Here is where you can see more, understand more, and have more fun with your brain
than even occurs in the: It-all-fell-upon-me-suddenly: Times of Awakening;
and it comes about (as best can be put in words)
by an unrelenting thinking about all possible aspects of what thinking might be;
through a merciless effort to have your consciousness become
fully conscious of itself;
working for that plainly impossible goal of having a mirror
suddenly turn around SO quickly that it sees its own reflection in itself!
Something obviously impossible --
but don’t bet against it if you want to realize what few humans ever do.
 
 

But there is even another step:
the one which truly gives the affair its world class curiosity status:
you must stop thinking about your thinking;
now that you pursued thinking about your thinking until things occur regularly
in your brain that have long ago done away with all questions,
you can undertake to understand why it could now be said that you should
stop thinking about you and your thinking entirely.
What might be the reality behind that idea?
 
 

What if the reason it is so difficult to achieve enlightenment
is because you are not the one seeking it.
 
 

Mistaking a passive for an active can cost you more than you can pay  –  and get away with.