There is no goal; there is only process.
As commonly conceived, there is actually no such thing as “objective reality.” We can approach it, but the closer we come, the more uncertain it becomes. In Particle Physics, for example, we have long known the mere act of observing an event changes it. More recently, it was noted a choice made in the present can alter reality itself for the unknown past. That is, on the level of quantum particles, a change you introduce to one set of observable particles now will affect other particles you have not yet observed. You can probably read up on such experiments, but it quickly becomes a huge project just understanding it. Yet, at some fundamental level, all of reality, such as it may be, is actually dependent on observation.
There is a sense in which this extrapolates to everything you experience. Perception is reality. The business of escaping the prison is setting your perception free from the confinement or mere emotion and reason, by adding an upper layer of perception drawn from the subconscious. A life of conditioning under the mass hypnosis of the rational animal world starts with breaking the regimentation of time. Thus the exercise of getting alone with yourself and learning to open your physical perception in a way which holds no objective, no particular purpose other than learning to perceive.
Furthermore, nothing in the rational mind can enhance this process, except to get out of the way. An awful lot of Eastern Mystical religious exercises are actually overly regimented, with elaborate prescribed routines, and often the results are equally artificial. At the same time, too much of what passes for Western Mysticism is really just another brand of reason, still intellectual, just a different framework. What we seek is to harness reason and thinking as servants to much higher faculty. We learn to evaluate in that upper realm, not with the rational faculty. Rather, the mind serves to organize your response to what is demanded by that higher grasp.
The most important thing to open up is the discovery process of your own internal reality. The one thing in this life most worth knowing is yourself, particularly what makes you tick. There is no analytical framework capable of doing this for you. What matters most is simply knowing what matters most. From birth you are imprinted with a unique character, and the first few years of life add to it. From that time on, the issue is not formation but awareness, and the current system all over the world seeks to prevent that awareness.
You can flavor your discovery any way you like, but the clinical understanding is referring to imperatives, those things you simply cannot walk away from, haunting you when you dare to ignore them. Those times alone in silence should have the effect of clarifying under the debris of prison conditioning what was there all along, what it is that makes you what you are. It means fully embracing a lot of things you probably were taught to hate, to doubt, to fear. Until you dig up that bedrock of identity, you cannot possibly escape the prison.
This discovery is not something accomplished, but engaged, because along with major blocks of revelation, there are subtle nuances which escape us until the time is ripe to know them.
