True conviction of sin is a high spiritual attainment. It’s when you realize after years of practice and professed surrender that you haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of your rebellion against your True Self, the One Consciousness who is the rightful owner of your life. You get a glimpse of the selfishness that still pervades your practice, and you realize for a moment that you’re never going to get what you want out of this, not if you go all the way. It’s another moment of reckoning: do I keep going, now that I see that so many of the desires fueling my practice will never be fulfilled and were never meant to be fulfilled? So many desires systematically being revealed as false, impure, irrelevant—will there be any motivation left?

You have tasted God, you have seen the light, you still have faith that your true life will be found on the other side of yet another level of letting go. But in that moment of reckoning, when it becomes clear you must give up everything, there’s only grief and fear. It’s dark, and faith is all you have to go on. From here, your true identity is foreign, strange, an unknown quantity. Everything you thought you were has nothing to do with who you actually are. On this side of awakening, you may as well hear it: God wants you to die. Are you still in?

But who can discern their own errors?
    Forgive my hidden faults…
— Psalm 19:12