It all comes down to us asking ourselves the question, truly and deeply, with startling courage and candor, Which do I prefer, to dream or to live Reality? If living Reality means that we must endure a measure of suffering and discomfort, would we choose to undertake the burden, even if to sleep the sleep of denial and illusion would ensure us some freedom from discomfort? Can we choose Reality Itself, in any condition, simply because it is Reality as opposed to a fantasy, a dream? This is the one question that we must live, dream or Reality. It cannot be resolved through emotion. It cannot be answered through thought. It can only be Known, Apprehended through Direct Experience; when and if we become Reality Itself in all of its glory, in all of its pain, without reservation. The conditioned mind; being composed of attachments, addictions, preconceived notions, preconceptions and assumptions-in-complex, is the filter, the shield, the shealth which spins between us and Reality. The more we indulge in it, the more we feed it and use it, the thicker and larger it grows, the faster it spins and the more our Awareness becomes obscurred. Within this spinning matrix there are gaps, spaces, moments of silence through which we have an opportunity to experience Reality. But the longer we have lived enshrouded, the shorter and less penetrative these spaces or intervals are, the less opportunity we have to experience and accept that experience as not merely another illusion. We have all had moments, even if so very brief, when these gaps in our illusory sheaths have opened and the Light of Reality shines through. Such moments, when we come to acknowledge the validity of the experience despite its strangeness, are often called 'spiritual experiences'. These opening moments are when we forget who we are, we lose all sense of the roles and stories which we have mistakenly taken to be our 'self' and we Experience the Emptiness that is indefinable because once we put a label or interpretation on it, we construct another story and begin the illusion of self-ness once again, thereby returning to enshroudedness. The central principle and practice of all true spiritual teachings is two-fold: to learn to more fully accept these spaces in self-ness as authentic, and to gradually reduce the matrix of the conditioned mind that is our self-ness so that such spaces become increasingly common until Awakening is our Ground State.