The fruit falls when it is ripe

 In my first book, “The Magnificent Experiment”, I had a chapter on coffee consumption. Me and a colleague at work tried cutting our excessive consumption down to two cups a day. And the end of which we both had to concede that we couldn’t do it. At that time I didn’t know that the coffee consumption tried to plaster over the fact that I was depressed. Today I understand the connection, and mysteriously, the craving for coffee has disappeared too.

 

I lost my taste for alcohol when I realized that it cut into my sleep. The early morning hours are when I receive the divine downloads. Why would I consciously deprive myself of this gift? It was not easy to let go of my bottle of wine over the weekend. I still love its taste, but I felt there was no alternative. With coffee it was a very different story. There was no willpower required, one day I simply lost the taste for coffee. I still drink a cup in the morning to get a jolt to get started, but that’s mostly it these days. 

 

We talk a big game when it comes to spirituality. We talk about love and conscious choices, but the truth of the matter is that a lot of the spiritual progress is subconscious in nature. True, we consciously gain insights, and as shown in SuZhen Liu’s Letting Go book, we can even bring interfering subconscious processes to the surface and let go of them. But overall, “the fruit falls when it is ripe”, as Nisargadatta Maharaj once put it. We travel our spiritual journey to the best of our abilities, but the breakthrough comes when it does. There comes a time when the self gets out of the Way. Until this blessed moment, you do the steering to the best of your abilities.