What do you mean by spiritual progress? What are your beliefs about this? Where did these beliefs come from? Did they come from the inside or the outside?

For example, why do you believe there is a path? What path?

Back when I first started exploring, I read a lot of books and even went to a few sessions where people glorified the guru. One group believed that by meditating on the gurus framed portrait, enlightenment would be transmitted to them. The other session, the guru showed up and people were kissing his feet, singing songs to him, and he actually sat in a flowered throne on a stage surrounded by offerings. That was it for me with that stuff.

I stopped with the books and searching. I rejected it all and just meditated and explored what was within me, which included my belief systems. Much of which I discarded

Eventually, I had a real awakening and all this inner knowledge and creativity began to flow out, changing everything. It was quite mind-blowing. It comes down to this: I'm a unique consciousness creating and having a unique experience. The universe within me is not the same as the one within you.

If some man in a robe, holding a bowl comes along and calls himself the Buddha and talks about enlightenment and all these rules to end suffering, he's no different than my sister coming into my experience and thumping her bible and telling me all of Jesus' maxims on how to find heaven. The Buddha is just a guy that poops and pees and sleeps and eats and creates like everyone else that has come into my experience, that's all. He tells some stories, and will leave my experience eventually. I can form beliefs from what he's told me. And while he's present, I can kiss his feet and call him enlightened, but it's all just a belief system I've bought into and made part of my conditioning, and thus see the world through theses beliefs and create probable realities or experiences from them.

So what's left after letting go of these beliefs? Creativity. Probabilities. Emotions. Imagination. Memories. Talents. Potential. And the here and now. What is. And all of this for me is personal, unique and alive. I exist here, now in this reality to create a life as consciously as I can, like an artist would a painting, or a director a movie. I imagine first, then act to create the experience. I'm constantly translating my energy into creating experience from a vast field of possible ones, some more probable than others. I can make some experiences happen with the only action being visualization, while other experiences require 1 or more creative actions.

Meditation is just one experience I can create. First I imagine myself sitting and focusing on breath, then I create the experience. I make it happen with desire. But I realized a long time ago that meditation is a word. And that focusing on breath is someone else's idea. It's a choreographed dance that someone else created and I was following. I also discovered that I could focus on anything within and follow that. So, sometimes I might do breath for fun, or I might follow thought, or listen to sounds or whatever. I might consciously fantasize. I play and have fun. To heck with anyone and their beliefs about what it is in my consciousness and how I'm supposed to go about accessing it and creating while I'm there. And what progress is supposed to be.

And lastly, creativity runs deep. Deep.