You have a choice, but not really

I discovered this insight first in Neal Walsh's Conversations with God: when your spiritual path starts in earnest there is no turning back. You can certainly delay the process, but you can't reverse it.

As you progress spiritually, your sensitivity rises and your interconnectedness with your environment becomes more obvious. As you can connect the impact of your actions with the resulting outcomes in your life quickly, you cannot help doing the things that are consistent with your spiritual path. Specifically, you find out when you harm yourself (even though it sometimes feels so right on the surface) and when you strengthen yourself (even though it sometimes feels like a bitter pill to swallow). The beauty is that you need no guru, holy book or cultural norms to get there. All you need is common sense and sensitivity about yourself and others.

The question I would have for others: could spiritual progress become exponential as we wander along our spiritual path? You would think that once you have taken the first hurdles of self-discovery and built a foundation for yourself, your awareness and connectivity becomes finer and deeper all the time. Keanu Reeves discovered in the Matrix that after removing a few bricks out of the fabric out of the universe, the entire system was at his disposal. Perhaps we could be in for a similar eye-opener.