More on Gradualism vs Atiyoga/Simultanist Practices

The Marginalian covers Sam Harris's take on the paradoxes and tensions between meditative practice styles, covered here in relation to Tibetan Buddhist traditions and their derivatives; regarding gradualism: 

"We wouldn’t attempt to meditate, or engage in any other contemplative practice, if we didn’t feel that something about our experience needed to be improved. But here lies one of the central paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present."

"[This approach] encourages confusion at the outset regarding the nature of the problem one is trying to solve."

From my experience I can say that the "doing of non-doing" is the more potent practice for me; this is what I've found: 

1. When one is engaged in surrendered meditation, one's normal self cannot take anything from the experience. When practicing the gradualist path, I was always susceptible to an increase of personal meaning. In other words, whilst one part of my mind was positively affected by say obtaining some insight or other, another aspect of ego was strengthened through an identification with the spiritual path: "I am progressing", "things are happening", "I'm doing well", etc. When one is resting as awareness, meditation becomes an act of  stripping away, instead of accumulation. The thought of "progress" for the ego is just another thought, which carries very little meaning.
2. It is free from ideology. When one is directing the mind towards an object understood intellectually  as positive, one is simultaneously rejecting other states and other objects understood as not-positive, these understandings arise only through ideology which pre-supposes a knowledge of what is good and bad. This in turn can arise from notions embedded from childhood. Traumatised and wounded individuals like me can easily fall into black and white thinking and are attracted to ideology. When the mind is simply "known", there is no interference from preference or self-directed control, everything is natural and there is the possibility of the unknown, unconscious or unexpected coming up into consciousness.
3. Surrendered meditation almost immediately becomes a physical practice, where trauma and other unconscious patterns reside. As a gradualist, I could use meditation as a way of escaping or Spiritually-Bypassing unwanted feelings and traumas. This led to a sense of my being "stuck". In surrender, there is no escaping as there is no control, whatever needs attention in the body comes into non-directed awareness, where it can find acceptance and release any tensions or information it contains.

This is not to detract from the paradox of having to navigate spiritual practice from the egoic state in the first instance. I would say however, ultimately, due to the very confusion Sam Harris is pointing to, that one will find out that the ego actually doesn't want to lose control and it doesn't really want to change, it will simply co-opt spiritual activity. Only the I AM that just is can step back from this knot.