Ethos of the Ego - Part II, Question 2 and 3

Question #2: OK, so here we are on this side.. now what?

Deliberation: Now the actual deliberation begins, so having understood the context, the premise and the circumstances that could have landed us in the position that we are in, we need understand whats next. The next obvious step is to cross over and commence the next part of our journey of evolution, Lets call this entire journey 'spirituality' and the desire to pursue this journey, a Spiritual inclination.  So for all those with this inclination, we have established that there exists a need to crossover to the other side, we need to figure out how, and that leads us to the next question...

Question #3: How do we cross ?

Deliberation: Well, how does anyone cross a raging river? We can either jump in and swim across, or build ourselves a boat that can carry us through. We'll consider both these cases and liken it to our context and premise.In this allegory so far, somethings might seem disconnected, lets string them together.

To put it literally, in the case where we just dive in and swim across, there is a need for high degree of clarity (of the route to take), a very high level conviction (to overcome challenges), an extremely trained physical body with swimming skills, an extremely determined intent of will and mind and courage. Such training most certainly calls for a dedicated trainer, arduous training and complete surrender on the part of the trainee, with I am sure most will agree is itself  very intimidating.

Metaphorically speaking,
'clarity'  is achieved with intense intellectual discernment and understanding of the path ahead and the need that drives this  pursuit.
'conviction'  refers to the intensity of spiritual conviction in the sadhaka's (pursuer),
'skill' refers to the techniques that the sadhaka pursues to better his chances of survival and enhance his potential, it could be any or many of the paths of yoga (Jnana, Raja, Karma, Bhakti) or different schools of practices, like the Kriya yoga, or other esoteric techniques.
The 'dedicated trainer' has a to be an effective Guru who has the bandwidth of time, space and capacity to train, protect, guide, mentor and initiate the sadhaka throughout his pursuit.
ALL of these falling into place seems seems less likely for most of us, and hence we find ourselves amidst the remaining set of people, the "boat builders".

99.99% of the human life forms will find themselves in this category, i.e. this side of the river and needing a boat to build, however it is imperative that we remind ourselves often, that our objective is  to simply cross. Most of the times we find ourselves so engrossed in our boat building affair, that by the time we remind ourselves of our true objective and get the damn boat into the water to test its strength and resolve, its time for us to leave and come back in another form (depending on our karmic obligations) and start building a new one. This BOAT .. is what I liken to the EGO, while on one hand the ego is undoubtedly essential for most of us to cross this deceptively perilous river (of maya), on the other we get so carried away with it, that we forget why we started building it in the first place.

Bottom-line is, to cross, we need to build ourselves a boat, flexible enough to navigate the river, and resilient enough to withstand withstand it's perils (known and known).