You need three kinds of faith to progress on this path. You need faith in your Self. If you're going to be with me as a Teacher, you need faith in the Teacher; that the Teacher is real. And the third thing you need faith in is Life; Life itself; the very nature of Life that gives birth to the Wisdom-Mind. That this Thing that we are searching for - Wisdom, Knowledge, Truth - is something that's going to be reveled from within the very power of Life, not from somewhere else. So if you have that triadic unity, faith in your Self, faith in the Teacher, faith in Life, then you have everything. Then it's easy to just melt into Consciousness.
Open Questions to the Sangha: Sleep vs. Spontaneous Process
Lately, the inner movement of expanding/intensifying consciousness is keeping me from sleep. Often, I cannot go to sleep for quite awhile and will lie in bed as the energy surges within me and consciousness pushes its way inward and outward erasing my inner world. Eventually, I go to sleep, but usually wake up again, a couple of hours before I normally would have, again with the ongoing process overriding any tendency towards sleep. I am concerned about this. Surprisingly, I am not as exhausted and sleepy as I thought I might be, but I do get pretty tired and could clearly use more sleep. At these times I try to distract myself from my own inner reality so as to get some more sleep, essentially shutting down the process, but with only limited success. This makes me feel like a coward and a wimp, not to mention an unfaithful lover. On the other hand I am returning to nursing school tomorrow, and nursing school is mean and tough, and I will need proper rest. Any thoughts?