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There can't seriously be a brick wall. There isn’t of course, unless you place one, as so many do, in your own mind. A bit like those strangely deluded people who deny that the earth is round. We can have eyes but still be completely blind to the world. The object of our exercises so far has been to teach us to see without visible light. To see the world and ourselves as we really are and the world at as great a depth as our knowledge and imagination will allow.

I talked in an earlier chapter about once seeing a statue of Buddha in a shop window and having what appeared at the time to be a completely irrational response to fall down, to prostrate myself.

It was in fact far from irrational. If you have truly taken time to examine your own inner workings and thought about the nature of being human and how we work, you will be aware that while we have certain freedoms a lot of the time we are running like programs on a computer, our responses are not of our choosing. We can't decide to laugh when we injure ourselves badly, we can't think away a viral infection or really control much of anything in fact when we really examine ourselves. We can't chooses to fall in love. These things happen, whether we like them or not. Just as we can't choose to be born, nor can we choose the natural length of our lives or our heights or skin colour.

So we also have built into our beings a need for something greater than ourselves and a knowledge that there is something beyond us. We can of course, as we do with so many things subvert that knowledge and need and twist it into something else but nevertheless it is there in all human beings. No human society on earth has ever been found that did not have a profound certainty that we were not alone and that there was something greater than us that required a response from us.

It comes as part of the basic specification of being human. It is like having a heart, a fundamental part of who we are and how we behave. 

So you see there is no brick wall in engaging with the divine unless we substitute this fundamental need with say a communist personality cult or drown it out with other obsessions.

Therefore we have to, if we are willing and able, to ask why we are built this way, what is this inner need all about, what is divine and what is missing?

It is a feeling of not being complete and we are driven to seek completeness, to make ourselves whole. It is so easy to attempt to fill this gap in our lives, with food, drink, possessions and obsessions. No matter how hard we try, we never achieve that state of completeness through these means. We can never drink, work, earn or have enough to fill that basic human need to be complete.

So where to now?