Douglas Harding

The result of observing only the universe is anxiety. Only observing the Observer of the universe will put a stop to a man's worrying and fussing and scheming. When his interest is diverted inwards he naturally relaxes his hold - his stranglehold - on the outer world. Having withdrawn his capital and paid it into his own Central Bank (where it appreciates to infinity), he has nothing to lose out there and no reason for interfering. He knows how to let things be and work out in their own time. He's in no hurry. Knowing the Self, he can hardly fail to trust its products.

To render them (our lives) safe and sound we must rebuild them on the bedrock of I am what I see I am here; what you see is just one of my regional appearances.

At root, all you perceive is Yourself, heavily disguised as someone else, for your entertainment and refreshment. It would be difficult to overstate the practical importance of this discovery, its consequences for everyday living. All alienation, all separation, the many-sided threat of hostile things and persons and situations - these are no more than bad dreams. All is You. How could you fear Yourself? How could you despise, resent, be bored by Yourself? How could you not love Yourself?

That instead of being a thing among things you are Space for things...

The price of saying no to what we are getting can be very high. Depression and exaggerated anxieties and irrational fears, along with their bodily counterparts, are danger signals indicating that an enlargement of consciousness is required.

Is there any other way to true self-abandonment but falling into the arms of the One who is infinitely more you than you are yourself?

Watch your emotions. Take the time to sit quietly twice a day, first thing in the morning and before you fall asleep, and see what your heart is telling you. Not to the endless justifications or judgments in the mind, but to the knots or tensions in the background. Can you feel these? What are they related to? Can you bring up words to describe these knots? Do you have mixed feelings about the day’s events? Where are the contradictions?

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Francis Lucille self inquiry

Here is what I suggest as a self enquiry and abidance practice: find whatever experiential evidence there seems to be, either at the level of thoughts, or of feelings, or of sense perceptions, that confirms that your ordinary consciousness, meaning that which is perceiving these words right now, is limited in any fashion or form, either in space or time. If you carefully examine such evidence, you will soon convince yourself beyond the shadow of a doubt that it doesn't support at all the limited or confined consciousness theory. That will leave you in a state of not knowing who you are. Abide in this state until you notice that you have again begun to think, feel, perceive, or act from the perspective of being a limited consciousness. At this point, resume the same investigation, which should be much shorter this time, and lead to the same state of not knowing. Abide in this state for as long as it lasts. And so on, and so on. At some point, as you stabilize in this state of not knowing, the light of your own presence, the "I-I" of which Ramana Maharshi speaks in his talks, will reveal itself in his limitlessness and immortality, beyond all doubts. The guidance of a teacher is however in most cases necessary to initiate and facilitate the process, failing which you may find yourself giving up after a few first attempts, or shifting to a different type of practice.

Robert Wolfe:

If there were a principle of the universe, it would be that anything which anything does is okay.

When you have come to terms with being as you are, you then allow others to be as they are.

An absence of self-interest results in an attentive day-to-day existence notably only for its freedom from strife.

To have in mind any ideal is to set yourself up for dissatisfaction with what is.

The self cannot endure in the moment which knows no past.

Images of what has passed and ideas of what is to come are the tendrils of the vine of attachment.

Suspend your hopes, ideas, beliefs or preferences; for whatever is present, to be anything other than what it is.

Life is like looking out of the window while sitting in a train. You have no control over what appears in view.

Adyashanti

All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.

"It is my experience that most people do not know what is truly trustworthy within themselves. Learning what to trust within yourself is one of the first and most important tasks of any good spiritual teaching. We all know (I hope) how incredibly easy it is to delude ourselves; a good spiritual teaching will help us to see this too. But learning what to trust within ourselves is also extremely important. And here I mean a trust that far transcends our personal preferences and opinions. In a sense it is a wisdom not belonging to us, but to the quiet and silent spaces within us. Wisdom arises out of a spacious mind, a mind not cluttered with resistance to "what is." So our trust arises from our alignment with the "what-is-ness" of each moment.

To be here, all you have to do is to let go of who you think you are. That’s all! And then you realize, ‘I’m here.’ Here is where thoughts aren’t believed. Every time you come here, you are nothing.

The me always brings you back into relationship with another; it can be the world and me, my job and me, the dog and me, whatever. Have you noticed how the way you relate to your thoughts, feelings, and sensations is often slightly adversarial? How it’s never quite the right moment? How it’s almost perfect, but not quite?

When we’re not so attached to thought, there’s a knowing that arises from not trying to figure everything out.

Awareness is always there, but it doesn’t do you much good until you bring consciousness to it, even for brief moments. Don’t be too concerned with how long you can sustain it. It’s more important how often you check in. If you keep checking in, the sustaining of it happens on its own.

Rampant thinking is your mind looking for peace. As if, if you could just think enough and understand enough, your mind could be at peace. But the mind never thinks its way to a lasting peace. In fact, in the mind’s rush to find peace and security it overlooks the peace that is already present within the presence of awareness. So contemplate what your mind is trying to run away from, and what it is looking for. And begin to show your mind that peace is available in the present. Literally bring your mind’s attention to the greater peace of awareness. And give your mind something to do in the form of following your breath. Just follow the breath whenever you can during the day, because it will calm your nervous system and give your mind something to do other than to obsessively think.

Just notice what do you really care about. When you are in conflict, what do you really care about? What is driving it along is the quality of your human engagement. Unless we take a look what is operating is our conditioning.

John Sherman:

The cause of suffering is the idea that you are at stake in what happens with these thoughts, and that these thoughts are you. It’s that at-stakeness that gives rise to this undercurrent of anxiety and fearfulness, out of which comes all suffering.

I would sit on my bunk, and I would close my eyes, and I would get one-pointed with my attention, and I would move my attention looking for any object within the scope of my consciousness that felt like me, by which I mean small, contracted, mean-spirited, selfish, greedy, and stupid. And I would settle on something that felt like that, and I would tightly hold it with my attention.

What is it to be here? What does that feel like? How do I know I am here? How can I be so certain? But I am here, I am here. Not here in this room, but here. Is it not true that you are here? Just look and see if that is not true. Now look at that again. And keep looking at that as often as you can.

When the inquiry does its work, what is missing is this underlying sense of anxiety and fearfulness, of being at stake in what is happening here. There is an easing off of the whole dramatic entanglement with the events of the life.

And in the midst of anything, you can find a time, a moment, to just stop for a second and check and see if you are not still here, and if you have been touched by any of it.

Hedderman

Our attention is drawn into thoughts because we think the thoughts are about us.

“I am not that”, which intimates that which you are. Whatever that which is appearing, I am not that.

Mainly it’s the feeling of being special.

Your attention orbits around the planet Self all day, because the self provides the gravitational pull to all the thoughts, making them about YOU. If you realized they weren’t about the real you, they could simply come and go.

Rupert

There can only be a change or a difference in that which you are aware of. That which we are aware of has objective qualities. And only that which has an objective quality can change or disappear. But that with which our experience is known, that is, the knowing element in all experience, has no objective qualities; for this reason, it cannot change or disappear. But it is not enough to logically deduce that it cannot change or disappear, although that is a beginning. See in your actual experience that the knowing element in all experience has never moved or changed or evolved. It doesn’t have a shape or an age or a location. It cannot be known as an object, you can’t direct your attention toward it, because it is only possible to direct our attention towards something with objective qualities.

Consciousness or awareness without an object is our most intimate, primary and fundamental experience. It is what we call ‘I’. It is not inherently mixed with anything other than itself. As such, it is empty or transparent. It has no limits. It is only when this transparent, empty consciousness becomes mixed with a thought, sensation or perception that it seems to acquire a limit. In fact what is commonly known as the ego, or separate self, is simply infinite consciousness upon which an apparent limit has been superimposed.

All the desires that anybody ever has is simply the desire to be released of this self contraction, this tension. Any desire that any of us have ever had for an object, a relationship, a substance, an activity is really the single desire that the separate self has to be relieved of this tension or contraction, to be relieved of the limitations, to be relieved of the feeling of separation.

In other words, when a thought or a feeling appears, instead of knowing and feeling that we are simply aware of these passing objects, instead of simply feeling I know that thought or feeling, pure consciousness gets mixed up with the thought and feeling and we believe and feel instead I am that thought and feeling.

That is the great discovery to make, that what I am is not a cluster of thoughts, feelings and sensations that was born in a particular time and place, that is moving, evolving, growing old and is one day going to disappear. This what we essentially are, this ever present, luminous, empty, transparent awareness which is intimately one with all appearances, just like the screen is intimately one with the image that appears on it but at the same time absolutely free; the screen is not stained by the movie. You are not stained or hurt or harmed by any thought, by any activity, by anything, life can’t hurt you.

What is it that makes me think that I am this amorphous tingling cluster of vibrations that I experience as my body? This tingling sensation behind the eyes that seems to be me is no different than the blue sky visual perception or the sound of traffic; all are made of that same stuff, knowing.

Cease being interested, at least for the time being, in the content of your experience, including even what I am saying; cease being interested in your thoughts and feelings, the sight of the room, the issues and concerns and sensations you feel. Just cease being interested in them and become interested instead in whatever it is that knows them.

When we become interested in whatever it is that knows our experience, there is not a directing of our attention towards an object, but rather a relaxation or a falling back of the attention, a softening of the focus of our attention. And in this softening of the focus of our attention our attention gradually sinks back into its source.

One of the first things we notice about the source of our attention, this field of knowing, or awareness, is that it is peaceful, colorless, empty, open, allowing. It is like a peaceful, aware presence in the background of the mind, available twenty four seven. We tend not to notice it, because our attention is exclusively focused outwards, toward objects.

Now go to a feeling, whatever you are feeling at the moment, you may be happy, content, bored, irritated, depressed, lonely, whatever you are feeling. Don’t try to change it, just go back and forth from the feeling to the knowing of it, back to the feeling, back to the knowing of it. Do you really go back and forth between two different experiences or two different substances?

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John Sherman

The cause of suffering is the idea that you are at stake in what happens with these thoughts, and that these thoughts are you. The thing that eliminates suffering is eliminating the belief that you are this life. That belief gives rise to a deep, equally unseen conviction that I am at stake here, that it is really important that I get this right, and that if I have bad thoughts that seem to be causing suffering, before everything else, I have to do something about them, because I am at stake here. This is me, you see? And it’s that at-stakeness that gives rise to this undercurrent of anxiety and fearfulness, out of which comes all suffering.

But I can’t find any place where this mind ends. So, missing in this local cluster is this sense that I am this life, and that I am at stake in this life. That is gone in this local cluster. So, the gift is the wonder of the full participation in the life, the full welcoming and seeing the amazing, miraculous gift of being in the life. That is the result of having an end to that idea that I am this life.

The apparatus operating is always entirely spontaneous, it just arises. The planning arises, the fulfillment of the plans, or the failure to fulfill them, that arises, too. But the idea that the planning is going to save you from anxiety and fearfulness about losing control, that is just misery and suffering. And that only can arise because of the deep-seated, unseen belief that you are at stake in this life.

The only thing that really interests me is what it takes to destroy whatever it is that is present in you that makes you think that you need something that you don’t have; that there is something to see that you are not seeing, and that you are at stake in this life. That is all that needs to go. And the one activity that, in my experience, is the final act, and brings about the end of the search, is the exposing of this apparatus to the reality of its nature, by looking at yourself.

The most bone-headed impulses that you follow can’t hurt you, and they can’t help you, and they can’t prevent you from seeing that, in the midst of all of this, you are here. Unmoved, unchanged, the same. And when you see that, then you can see that these very impulses and the freaking out, and all the wrongheaded stuff actually is your ally, because against the backdrop of that craziness, you can see the unchanging, unmoving, permanent reality of you starkly, because it is so different from this jingle jangle wildness.

You go through life, and there is this undercurrent that is not always big, and is not always even noticeable. But there is an energetic undercurrent of being careful that you don’t do the wrong thing, think the wrong thing, want the wrong thing, try to get rid of the wrong thing. And, for the most part, this is like a murmur of at-stakeness. That is the anxiety I speak of. At times, it flares up into a fire of fearfulness, "Oh, my god, I have done something wrong. I have failed. Oh, wait a minute, I wish I could take that back." Or, "Oh, my god, I’m gonna die." That anxiety and fearfulness is what characterizes the life of one who believes oneself to be at stake in the life, one who believes oneself to be the life. And that is always present.

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Ramana

Continuous attentiveness will only come with long practice. If you are truly watchful, each thought will dissolve at the moment that it appears. But to reach this level of disassociation you must have no attachments at all. If you have the slightest interest in any particular thought, it will evade your attentiveness, connect with other thoughts, and take over your mind for a few seconds. This will happen more easily if you are accustomed to reacting emotionally to a particular thought.

Bhagavan sometimes used the analogy of a besiged fort. If one systematically closes off all the entrances to such a fort and then picks off the occupants one by one as they try to come out, sooner or later the fort will be empty. Bhagavan said that we should apply these same tactics to the mind. How to go about doing this? Seal off the entrances and exits to the mind by not reacting to rising thoughts or sense impressions. Don't let new ideas, judgements, likes, dislikes, etc. enter the mind, and don't let rising thoughts flourish and escape your attention. When you have sealed off the mind in this way, challenge each emerging thought as it appears by asking, 'Where have you come from?' or 'Who is the person who is having this thought?' If you can do this continuously, with full attention, new thoughts will appear momentarily and then disappear. If you can maintain the siege for long enough, a time will come when no more thoughts arise; or if they do, they will only be fleeting, undistracting images on the periphery of consciousness. In that thought-free state you will begin to experience yourself as consciousness, not as mind or body.

However, if you relax your vigilance even for a few seconds and allow new thoughts to escape and develop unchallenged, the siege will be lifted and the mind will regain some or all of its former strength.

In a real fort the occupants need a continuous supply of food and water to hold out during a siege. When the supplies run out, the occupants must surrender or die. In the fort of the mind the occupants, which are thoughts, need a thinker to pay attention to them and indulge in them. If the thinker withholds his attention from rising thoughts or challenges them before they have a chance to develop, the thoughts will all die of starvation. You challenge them by repeatedly asking yourself 'Who am I? Who is the person who is having these thoughts?' If the challenge is to be effective you must make it before the rising thought has had a chance to develop into a stream of thoughts.

Mind is only a collection of thoughts and the thinker who thinks them. The thinker is the 'I'-thought, the primal thought which rises from the Self before all others, which identifies with all other thoughts and says, 'I am this body'. When you have eradicated all thoughts except for the thinker himself by ceaseless enquiry or by refusing to give them any attention, the 'I'-thought sinks into the Heart and surrenders, leaving behind it only an awareness of consciousness. This surrender will only take place when the 'I'-thought has ceased to identify with rising thoughts. While there are still stray thoughts which attract or evade your attention, the 'I'-thought will always be directing its attention outwards rather than inwards. The purpose of self-enquiry is to make the 'I'-thought move inwards, towards the Self. This will happen automatically as soon as you cease to be interested in any of your rising thoughts.

Inquiring into the nature of one's self that is in bondage and realizing one's true nature is release.

I do not mean by “heart” any physiological organ or any plexus or nerves or anything like that; but so long as a man identifies himself with the body or thinks he is in the body, he is advised to see where in the body the “I” - thought arises and merges again. It must be the heart at the right side of the chest since every man of whatever race and religion and in whatever language he may be speaking, points to the right side of the chest to indicate himself when he says “I.” This is so all over the world, so that must be the place. And by keenly watching the emergence of the “I” - thought on waking and its subsidence on going to sleep, one can see that it is in the heart on the right side.

Sphurana [the Heart] can be felt in a subtle way even when meditation has sufficiently stabilized and deepened, and the Ultimate Consciousness is very near, or during a sudden great fright or shock, when the mind comes to a standstill. It draws attention to itself, so that the meditator’s mind, rendered sensitive by calmness, may become aware of it, gravitate towards it, and finally plunge into it, the Self.

You need not eliminate the wrong “I.” … All that you need do is to find out its origin and abide there.

Meditation should be on the Self. Everyone knows “I am.” Who is the “I”?

Just on waking from sleep and before becoming aware of the world there is that pure ‘I.. .I. Hold it without sleeping or without allowing thoughts to possess you. If that is held firm it does not matter even though the world is seen. The seer remains unaffected by the phenomena.

The mind is by nature restless. Begin liberating it from its restlessness; give it peace; make it free from distractedness; train it to look inward; make this a habit. This is done by ignoring the external world and removing the obstacles to peace of mind.

‘Who am I?’ is the source of all acts of questioning. If in stillness we direct our attention inward to the place of its arising, so that its truth is known, the dispute that gave rise to the question will be ended completely.

The practice of abidance in the Self is to firmly hold the mind in abeyance within the Heart. It is not an act of thinking.

Whatever it is that attracts the mind will always cause a disturbance within it, giving rise to the cycle of pleasure and pain. Will this happen if, turning inward, the mind attains the realisation of the reality which lies within the Heart?

The ego functions as the knot between the Self which is the pure Consciousness and the physical body which is inert and insentient. The ego is therefore called the Chit-jada granthi. In your investigation into the Source of Aham-vritti, you take the essential Chit aspect of the ego; and for this reason the enquiry must lead to the realization of the pure Consciousness of the Self.

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Wheeler

It is the interest in the mind that keeps it in spin. It is like being on an exercise bicycle. Once you stop pedaling, the ride is over. It is the person on the bicycle who keeps it going. If he or she is wondering “when will it stop?”, it is a misplaced evaluation, really. Nisargadatta Maharaj used to say, “Stop paying attention to the mind and it simply disappears.” So ultimately, there is nothing to wait for, nothing to stop, nothing that needs to come to an end, except our own continued interest in the mind.

The means to cut through the mind’s doubts is not to track into the mind and its variable experiences, but to discover that which is not susceptible to the mind’s activities. Your true nature is not present at the level of the mind, or even consciousness, and is not affected by concepts and experiences. So considering this (what you are) takes you straight out of the doubts and the influence of the mind altogether. That is why there is no answer in the mind. Beyond the mind and consciousness, at the level of one’s genuine being, there are no doubts or questions to address. The mind is a phenomenon whose existence is based on something else. We are interested in the “something else”, not the mind or its projections.

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Aziz

Look into your mind, into your head. Is there anything that you can call "I", apart from coming and going of thoughts and mental information which are changing all through life? Is there anything that is immediate? Before a thought comes, is there anything already waiting? Is there anything, which carries the same flavor all your life and that you can recognize as Me? Or does such a thing not exist?

When you observe thinking, you are observing this that you are not. This does not mean that thinking does not belong to you, it is simply not your center. A thought cannot be the center because it has a momentary existence.

So, what you are trying to do is to create stability in the way you experience yourself, a certain inner solidity. When the solidity is there, you are simply resting in a state which is comfortable, which has continuity from moment to moment. There is the continuity of your I Am, which means you have an abiding place beyond the mind, an inner refuge.

Everyone wants to escape from the mind; everyone wants to dis-identify with the mind, but where to go? To go beyond the mind does not mean to stop the mind but to find a new location within your existence. This new location is called I Am.

Do not allow your emotions to rule you, otherwise you will suffer. To ground yourself and discover the real center, is your life's purpose.

Look back, as if towards the back of your skull. As you direct energy inside your head, you will encounter the seer.

When you are one with the breath, the experience of Being is reached easier. But what is important here is the element of surrender. For example, when you exhale, when the breath goes out, you are supposed to surrender, drop into non-doing; let go with breath… like a dewdrop from a leaf falling on the earth. And in this moment you shift into Being, into non-doing.

If you separate yourself from your mind, your memories, from all this information inside your brain, do you still exist or is there nothing? This type of enquiry, this type of longing, this type of intuition can bridge one with the state of I Am.

Trust is simply a certain psychological confidence that everything is well. It is a certain knowing that there is wisdom behind your life, that there is a purpose, that you are being protected from a higher perspective; that all is taken care of.

When a thought appears, it imposes its identity on you. The thought wants to be the boss; it wants to be the most important. The thought is not just a piece of information, it is information which almost always relates to you. A thought which is neutral has no power over you. This is the case if you think about something which is not related directly to your life. You can deal with this thought in a relaxed way. But when the thought relates to your security, to your sense of well-being, to your survival or to your emotional satisfaction – it does have power because it also engages your emotional body. You see, it is not the thought alone which has control over you, but it is the thought in combination with the emotional response. It is your emotional identification which

makes the thought really important to you. For example, a thought threatens you or promises some benefits and you immediately become emotionally identified.

Jan Frazier

Whatever is seen is not in service to the psychologically understood "self." What’s happening isn’t felt to be about you, but simply is. In this mode of being, the familiar self is often felt literally to dissolve - or, if there’s awareness of its presence, it appears to be a made-up thing (rather like a thought).

The continuous entity that you appear to be, over time, exists only when you think about it - that is, when you reflect on yourself, on your life, looking at the before and the after of experiences.

The familiar self experiences the mind’s contents as being of the same order of reality as what’s actually taking place here and now. This self has a pretty constant need for content, and the mind happily obliges. Over and over again, life is happening here but attention is elsewhere. The goal is to learn not to confuse a mental construct (however useful it may be) with reality. As soon as you stop thinking the thought, whatever it points to ceases to be.

Nothing lasts. You cannot experience anything later (however much your mind might try to get you to).

The best thing that can ever happen is when things stop meaning something. When whatever comes along, or whatever gets done, is left to be its plain self. Unelaborated, unadorned, unnamed.

it must surely be a good idea to keep an unwavering eye on the ongoing maintenance and expression of the dear old apparent self, the one that’s able to suffer, to get lost in thought, to experience life as a series of problems and goals (among them, the search for a method to awaken). And to remember constantly that this self is not It. This self is incapable of sustained peace and well-being.

We think that our ideas about life, about ourselves, are reality itself. This is the cause of our suffering. Our mental pictures have us so convinced of their objectivity, their legitimacy, that it doesn’t occur to us to consider another possibility.

Why don’t people see this door? Why didn’t I? To step through its opening is to leave behind many cherished things: grudges, wounds, ambitions. Identity. Dignity, self-esteem, familial pride. Anger and hope. Defenses. So many things that we hold to ourselves, like comforting clothing. The irony is terrible, as all of this is what causes us to suffer.

It seems to have to do with perspective. Stumbling through the door separating our usual way from the alternate one is about looking at something you’ve previously looked through, like a lens. You’re looking from a different place. Things don’t look the same from this point of view.

It’s like looking at a room, at the structure you’ve occupied your whole life, from the outside, whereas before, you’ve lived entirely in it. Only before, you didn’t realize this was a room you were in. (Let alone that there was an “outside” the room.) You always thought this room was just . . . reality. Having no idea that you had constructed the place, using your ideas about things.

The room each of us occupies appears to be the whole reality. What each of us calls "my life." It isn’t necessary for the mind to be quiet. All that matters is that you not listen to what it’s saying, as if it were true. One of the primary building materials of the room that seems to be you is the mental stream. When you invest in your thoughts, you are laying down cinderblocks and smearing mortar between them, busily keeping yourself feeling okay about yourself with more and better cinderblocks.

If you look around at the structure of the room and its furnishings, you will see all of your formative experience, how your relationships define you, the contents of your value system, your goals, your work life, the things you’re admired for, the stuff you’re lousy at. You’ll see your image in a mirror and how you feel about that. Your ethnicity, gender, sexual preference. Your name. The atmosphere in the room is your earnest attempt to improve one thing and another, in yourself (and maybe in others). If you allow yourself to grow quiet and still for a few moments, and you feel around inside your body, inside your awareness, to see if you can tell whether you’re alive, right now - if you do that . . . sure enough, you can tell. Yes! Alive! Aware!

How can you tell? What did you use to know that?

That "knower," that looker, is not inside the claustrophobic room where suffering thrives. It’s in that vast space.

Living awake feels like being in a child’s story, a simple story about a simple thing. The restoration to innocence, to the time before time, with no possibility of harm. Once-upon-a-time. That’s what it feels like. A person who has awakened feels like a little kid. Everything is fresh and new, every ordinary thing. How good it feels to brush your hair! How the trees look moving in the wind.

This is what you are restored to at awakening, when the self you thought you were ceases to enthrall. Names for things are still there, retrievable. It’s still possible for thinking to occur. But only when you want it to. Thinking no longer runs the show, the constant noise of it. Thought serves at the pleasure of what you have discovered yourself to be: consciousness itself.

Anything mental is secondary, if it’s there at all. You have entered an existence made of primary experience - felt, sensory life, this moment. There’s no distance between you and what you’re aware of. You are what you experience. You and the moment are the same thing.

If you think you aren’t meditating "right," move your attention from the exhausting effort to improve and see if you can simply be more truly present to life itself. Feel the difference between receptivity and effort. See what happens when you stop trying so hard and instead let yourself be soft, vulnerable to this moment of life, willing to be with whatever is there. Allowing life to be your teacher.

We are betrayed daily, hourly, by the persisting sense of self. That sense of who I am, and how it tends itself, how it keeps itself seeming real. It’s a betrayal because of how it keeps us from noticing the spaciousness around the self, around everything - the container, you might say.

The familiar self (the very one doing the seeking) is not capable of attaining the longed-for stillness. The reason the stillness is felt, when it is, is that the self has fallen apart. Its maintenance crew has dispersed. Which is to say, thought has stopped.

So the task, for one who wants this, is first to see that the one doing the wanting is incapable of getting. To realize that there is no thought, no succession of thoughts, that can get you to the place beyond thought. And then to omit no opportunity to observe, without judgment or any attempt to change anything, how that real-seeming self keeps itself going. To recognize the maintenance crew every time it shows up. To understand that this - self-maintenance - is what is going on.

This awareness – the knower of the peace that passeth understanding – has no opinions, no habits, no beliefs, no cherished or lamented history. It does not compare itself with how it wishes it would be. It bears no grudges, is identified with nothing, would not think to object to anything or try to

manipulate it to match some image of the desirable. It does not exert effort. It has never felt afraid or proud or ambitious. It does not experience time.

Meanwhile, each time one of those expressions of the familiar, limited self shows up, instead of entering into it, trying to answer its silly questions, to pursue what it thinks is important, instead of all that, do this: notice how these are the ways it maintains itself, by dignifying all of that wasted effort.

And then step to the side of it and look around you. Notice what your senses are picking up. Feel your bodily sensations (including anything emotional that’s grinding around inside, without getting sucked back into the thought stream). See if you can feel what awareness itself feels like, how free it is of thinking. Notice how it feels different from the way thinking feels.

The love of the possible future is all about content. As if what you do in, or with, the now is what makes it worth living. The focus on the content means the container is missed. Consciousness being the container. The content, actually, is irrelevant. What a revelation. Just before death, the truth of this becomes vivid. Let it become vivid now. Don’t waste the rest of your life lying to yourself about the transformational value of content.

The question is, What am I? What is the thing I don’t want to have missed? What is life really about?

Consciousness is attention. It’s different from thinking. Thinking involves processing, labeling, visualizing, categorizing, projecting. It causes emotion. Attention is simple awareness. It’s peaceful (whether or not the immediate scene looks peaceful).

If something is going on in your mind at the moment, being conscious means you’re aware that you’re thinking. That is, you are not “lost in thought.” Something is happening in your mind, and you’re aware of that. It’s just the same as if you were using some other part of your body to do something: if you are using your hands to slice carrots, you’re aware of that. You are paying attention to what you’re doing, whether you’re doing it with your hands or your feet or your mind.

Being unconscious means you’re lost in thought, in the pictures and stories your mind is producing. You have entered the made-up content of your mind and are occupying it as if it were reality itself. Your ego is invested in this content as being real and important, and very likely as a result you are

experiencing some kind of emotion (stirred up by the thinking). You have forgotten that all of it is the product of your mind (even if its content appears to be true or important). As a result, you are missing actual reality, what’s happening in the now — including that you are inventing the thoughts.

The more you become conscious that thought is occurring, during the times the mind is active, the less the mind will run all the time on its own. The reason it runs non-stop is that you enter into its content as if it were real. You don’t notice you’re thinking. You notice what the thoughts are about. If you keep giving yourself the impression that the content of your thought is reality itself — rather than observing that you are thinking — then your ego gets the message that you really must keep thinking all the time, because not to do so would be dangerous. It would be threatening to the well-being of the ego, which seems to be what you are. Thinking seems to be crucial to “your” (the ego’s) continued existence.

As soon as you notice that you are thinking — that you’ve been absorbed in the content as if it were reality itself — some of the steam runs out of the mental activity. It’s only when you believe your thoughts are reality that painful emotions are generated.

The extraordinary is marked by a pronounced relief from the familiar strain and limitation. Time seems to have stopped. A sense of well-being pervades. The mind is quiet. What have appeared to be problems no longer stand out in the landscape, or carry any emotional weight. The enduring impression of separation has settled like sand in water. “You” don’t seem to be there at all.

The awareness that “experiences” the extraordinary is an intelligent spaciousness lacking personal features. It does not seek a certain kind of experience. Let alone does it judge, resist, or attach meaning. The mind-made you cannot do anything but interpret, seek, prefer, be dissatisfied. Being the center of its own universe, it has its eye on self-preservation. Its vigilance is unrelenting. The two – spacious intelligence and the mind-made self – have nothing whatever to do with one another. One does not touch the other. What each kind of awareness experiences as reality is unavailable to the other. The ego-mind has no access to anything outside itself. Awareness can’t be bothered with the ego’s idea of reality.

When you look back to before, you will see (such a revelation!) that what you once absolutely believed to be you was just a hodgepodge of memories, conditioning, personality, physical features, stories, ideas and beliefs, and fleeting emotional states. All of it one big unwieldy blob, having enormous weight and stickiness and emitting a foul odor. This blob was carried along in the suitcase of your mind through every adventure, as if without it all, you would cease to be.

It’s easier to portray the after by saying what’s missing. Time no longer feels real to you. It doesn’t occur to you to resist, or to make up a story about anything. You’ve stopped grousing. No matter what, you’re content. Since all of that other stuff about “you” no longer has substance, you – the newly-experienced you – cannot be harmed or threatened or made to feel insecure. You no longer have the machinery to get your dander up, or to be embarrassed, or to feel especially pleased with yourself. Your mind is quiet, unless you need to think about something.

The compelling question to pose to yourself is What am I? What do you experience yourself as being?

The question is not How can I improve myself? or How can I experience higher consciousness (or get it to last)? or What more do I need to learn?

When the ego gets your attention, and you become dissatisfied (frustrated, afraid, whatever), instead of going where you usually go, which is to try to improve your reaction, thought patterns, emotions, or make an intention to “do better” in the future, simply remind yourself that this thing that suffers, tries harder, gets discouraged, and intends, is not what you are. When you let it engross you, when you believe its thoughts with an eye to solving its “problems,” you are saying you believe it’s what you are, that it’s worthy of attention.

Focus on the nature of what you appear to be. Become intensely curious about how this you functions. How it is generated, how it maintains and defends and asserts and consoles itself. What it clings to for self-definition. So that you can recognize it for what it is, immediately, each time it stirs itself – instead of engaging with its picture of reality, instead of cringing at its antics and trying to make it behave better.

As you observe this invented self functioning, as you see your investment in it, ceaselessly remind yourself – Not this. It – the truth of what I am – is not this. Whatever it is, it isn’t this blob, this ceaseless loop of stories, this emotional stew, a head full of spiritual ideas. However well-meaning it might all be, however noble its aspirations. This isn’t it.

John Kilbourne <john.kilbo@gmail.com>

Apr 28 (1 day ago)

to me

Consciousness is attention. It’s different from thinking. Thinking involves processing, labeling, visualizing, categorizing, projecting. It causes emotion. Attention is simple awareness. It’s peaceful (whether or not the immediate scene looks peaceful).

If something is going on in your mind at the moment, being conscious means you’re aware that you’re thinking. That is, you are not “lost in thought.” Something is happening in your mind, and you’re aware of that. It’s just the same as if you were using some other part of your body to do something: if you are using your hands to slice carrots, you’re aware of that. You are paying attention to what you’re doing, whether you’re doing it with your hands or your feet or your mind.

Being unconscious means you’re lost in thought, in the pictures and stories your mind is producing. You have entered the made-up content of your mind and are occupying it as if it were reality itself. Your ego is invested in this content as being real and important, and very likely as a result you are experiencing some kind of emotion (stirred up by the thinking). You have forgotten that all of it is the product of your mind (even if its content appears to be true or important). As a result, you are missing actual reality, what’s happening in the now — including that you are inventing the thoughts.

The more you become conscious that thought is occurring, during the times the mind is active, the less the mind will run all the time on its own. The reason it runs non-stop is that you enter into its content as if it were real. You don’t notice you’re thinking. You notice what the thoughts are about. If you keep giving yourself the impression that the content of your thought is reality itself — rather than observing that you are thinking — then your ego gets the message that you really must keep thinking all the time, because not to do so would be dangerous. It would be threatening to the well-being of the ego, which seems to be what you are. Thinking seems to be crucial to “your” (the ego’s) continued existence.

As soon as you notice that you are thinking — that you’ve been absorbed in the content as if it were reality itself — some of the steam runs out of the mental activity. It’s only when you believe your thoughts are reality that painful emotions are generated.