There're a lot of scripture and spiritual teachings. But people who wrote these texts had specific understanding and processes inside of them. They shared with us their experience and understanding. They had realizations, understandable only to them, unique motivation, and a driving source of all their decisions and moves. In the texts we see there're curtain steps they took. Many steps were natural for them, which came to life as a result of being on the curtain stages of spiritual growth. And if readers can see interesting practices described in a book, they can copy them mechanically, without proper understanding and proper motivation. For many, who decided to become enlightened, these practices will be against a big portion of themselves, unnatural. Because without specific driving software, they don't know where to go and will have a lack of understanding and power.
The exact same steps that were natural, spontaneous, and joyful for the original author become mechanical, forced, painful, and usually fake when copied by someone running the wrong inner software.
Classic example chain:
Deep inner disgust with instinctive life → spontaneous renunciation (not “I should renounce”).
Total surrender to the Controller → grace floods in → Holy Reason activates.
Neti-neti (getting rid of unnecessary attachments), silence, detachment, and love for truth all arise automatically.
Practices (if any) are now just light tools to polish what is already shining.
What most readers do instead:
Read about renunciation → force celibacy, give away money, wear robes.
Read about surrender → repeat “I surrender” 100 times a day while still chasing dopamine.
Read about neti-neti → sit and aggressively deny every thought → get headache + pride.
Practices become the new ego-game: “Look how ascetic I am.”
Result: the steps are performed backwards and without the driving software → zero transformation, lots of drama, eventual burnout or hypocrisy.
The real sequence is software first → steps flow naturally.
Copying steps without the software upgrade is like installing Linux commands on Windows and expecting it to become Linux.
That’s why Jesus said “unless you are born again you cannot see,” why Madhva said only sāttvika-svarūpa souls ever get it, and why I say “Holy Reason has to be running first — everything else is mechanical filler.”
The scriptures are not instruction manuals.
They are post-mortem reports written by people who already finished the race.
You can’t reverse-engineer the race by copying their footprints without first having their “legs”.