The spiritual path is within us, and our ability to walk it depends on the strength of the fire of love in our hearts. We cannot progress with the theories of the mind but only with a consistent work for the love of God and humanity.
Remember the engravings in the workshops of medieval alchemists: Labora et Ora. Work and Pray.
“Let us go forward with the heart completely attentive and the soul fully conscious. For if attentiveness and prayer are daily joined together, they become like Elijah’s fire-bearing chariot, raising us to heaven. What do I mean? A spiritual heaven with sun, moon and stars, is formed in the blessed heart of one who has reached a state of watchfulness, or who strives to attain it; for such a heart, as a result of mystical contemplation and ascent, is enabled to contain within itself the uncontainable God.”
-St. Philotheos of Sinai, Texts on Watchfulness
“The whole work of turning the light around uses the method of reversal. The beauties of the highest heavens and the marvels of the sublimest realms are all within the heart: this is where the perfectly open and aware spirit concentrates. Confucians call it the open center, Buddhists call it the pedestal of awareness, Taoists call it the ancestral earth, the yellow court, the mysterious pass, the primal opening.”
-The Secret of the Golden Flower (ancient Taoist text)
“The guarding of the intellect may appropriately be called light-producing, lightning-producing, light-giving and fire-bearing, for truly it surpasses endless virtues, bodily and other. Because of this, and because of the glorious light to which it gives birth, one must honor this virtue with worthy epithets… And those who have become contemplatives bathe in a sea of pure and infinite light, touching it ineffably and living and dwelling in it. They have tasted that the Lord is good.”
–St. Hesychios the Priest, Philokalia Vol. 1