You have more time to devote to the evolution of consciousness, you have more life experience and maturity, and you’ve been doing this for many years. Shouldn’t you be more enlightened now than you’ve ever been before?

So why doesn’t it seem to work that way? What’s the problem? Why are you still preoccupied with things that you know in your soul are ultimately irrelevant?

We all experience this pain. When you’ve been on the spiritual path for a long time and you haven’t had the breakthrough you’re looking for, it can be horribly disheartening. The truth is, a life lived without meaning is painful, and we all look for relief in things that seem comforting and familiar.

Something has happened to you without you realising it. Over time, almost imperceptibly, doubt has begun to quench the fire that once burned brightly in your heart. You have lost confidence and strength. Even if you know enlightenment is real, you have lost faith in your own ability to access what it promises.

There’s something that I have learned in my many years as a teacher, and also by living through and confronting my own “dark night of the soul”: the most fearsome enemy of enlightenment is doubt. It’s a pernicious enemy, often masquerading as our friend – and this is why it so often overwhelms us.

If we are really serious about becoming enlightened in this lifetime, we need to discover and cultivate a doubtless intention to want to be free more than anything else. We need to know what we really want. More often than not we think we know what we want, but how many of us have interrogated this question deeply? I mean, really deeply?

When we know how to practice this process of deep self-enquiry, we move past doubt and rediscover the miraculous truth that the best part of us always wants to be free more than anything else, and that we are in fact already free.

In an instant, doubt is banished and replaced with a doubtless faith that reaches way beyond the relative. We discover and cultivate an absolute trust in our own capacity to realise and express freedom, because we see directly that it is our natural condition.

In this teaching, I will talk in great depth about this movement from doubt to faith, and I’ll talk about why, on an authentic spiritual path, this is really the foundation of everything.

As we approach the later stages of life, despite the wealth of our experience and our emotional maturity, doubt can erode our deepest values and principles. We can lose conviction and become cynical.

When we doubt the strength of our own conviction, we lose touch with our ability to choose our own spiritual destiny. We stop taking responsibility. And when we don’t consciously choose to take full responsibility for everything – past, present and future – we lose touch with awakened conscience.

If we’re not careful, victimhood can become our default position. Then, as we get older, we can begin to feel tragically indifferent towards life’s most heroic quest: pursuing the ultimate goal of enlightenment, the great and timeless mystery that lies beyond life and death.

Taking full responsibility for everything that has, will or could ever happen to us is one of the fundamental positions of freedom. But if we truly want to become liberated in this life, it’s even bigger than that.

We need to take heroic responsibility, not just for ourselves, but for the entire unfolding cosmic evolutionary process. We need to find the capacity in ourselves to become the biggest hero that it’s possible to be.

In Evolutionary Enlightenment I call this “enlightening the choosing faculty”, and in this teaching I will show you the profound power and importance of conscious choice.

I will show you how to take up the gauntlet and embark on the biggest journey of all: from time-bound victim to timeless, heroically liberated spiritual warrior.

In the early stages of our life, awareness of our mortality is a distant dream. It isn’t truly real to us. But as we age it begins to dawn on us, with ever greater insistence, that physical death lies ahead of us.

When faced with the inevitability of physical death, we are asked to come to terms, in an ultimate sense, with life itself and the totality of our experience.

It’s hard to overestimate the privilege of what it means to be born a human being. After nearly 14 billion years of cosmic evolution, in an inconceivably tiny corner of the vast cosmos, matter has become conscious. After unthinkable aeons of time, the universe is becoming self-aware through you.

That’s why it’s so important, from a spiritual perspective, to move from a fundamental position of fear in the face of what it means to be human, to a fundamental position of courage.

As human beings in the later stages of life, we have a unique opportunity to come to terms with life in an absolute sense. We finally have the opportunity to fearlessly face everything and avoid nothing as if our life depended on it.

In this teaching I want to show you why, in the third stage of life, spiritual realisation is more important than at any other time. I want to show you how moving from fear to courage, in the context of what it means to be human, is essential if we want to be free.

But something begins to change as we enter the third and fourth stages of life. The dramas of our early life seem to lose their potency. We become more objective, and we start to naturally assume a bigger perspective on all of our experience.

You might assume that you’ve simply become older and wiser, but this shift is actually more significant than you may think. The movement away from a fundamentally personal view of reality is actually the beginning of a perceptual shift to what I call the process perspective.

The process perspective allows us to see ourselves not just as individual human beings with personal stories, but rather as part of a vast process of cosmic evolutionary unfolding. In this context, the story becomes infinitely bigger than us, and infinitely more compelling.

This is the journey from personal to impersonal, and in this talk I’m going to speak about the huge significance of the process perspective within the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment.

The truth is, this is not about you. It’s never been about you. The call of spirit comes from the deepest part of the universe, and it is about fulfilling the ultimate will of God, or the absolute principle at the heart of reality.

As you enter the third stage of life, you have the opportunity to bring all of the beauty, truth and goodness that you have accumulated to this ultimate goal – not for your own sake, but for the sake of all sentient beings, for the sake of the evolution of the cosmos.

Can you relinquish your ego’s attachment to all of life so that you can become a vehicle through which the universe can become conscious? Can you surrender so completely that you become a living Bodhisattva?

The deepest reason for all of this is to make the journey from you to God, from “my will” to “thy will”. Ultimately we come to the realisation that, from an absolute perspective, they are one and the same.

In this final teaching, I’ll reveal why a fundamental shift of context from you to God is the ultimate spiritual practice. I’ll show you why the later stages of life provide the most ideal opportunity to finally commit to the spiritual path in a way that leaves no room for doubt.

Your journey doesn't end with this session. I'll give you plenty of direction on how you can develop and sustain stability in your practice, and I'll also talk about the next steps you can take.

I hope you'll want to deepen your understanding and experience of Evolutionary Enlightenment, and there many ways you can continue to connect and stay in touch with other students and adepts to support your onward journey.