Highlights
▪ you can’t deal well with a situation if you’re getting anxious, scared, or angry about it. The first problem you have to deal with is your own reaction. You will not be able to solve anything outside until you own how the situation affects you inside. (Idea of stoicism)
▪ when you’re driving down a highway, you probably pass thousands of trees. They don’t leave impressions on you. They’re gone as soon as they’re perceived. (People should have same impact like trees.)
▪ Allow yourself to experience every note the heart can play. If you relax and release, this purification of your heart is a wonderful thing. (Just smile all the day…
It is best way to spread love)
▪ people don’t deal with fear objectively, they don’t understand it. They end up keeping their fear and trying to prevent things from happening that would stimulate it (I feared not driving but I feared judgement of people talking about my inability to drive. so let go thoughts of how people think)
▪ As long as you’re watching, you’re not getting lost in it. The key is to understand that if you don’t let go immediately, the disturbing force of the activated energy draws the focus of your consciousness. As your consciousness gets immersed in the disturbance, you lose your clear seat of Self (practice watching by meditation)
▪ the “I” who is always talking inside will never be content. It always has a problem with something
▪ When a problem is disturbing you, don’t ask, “What should I do about it?” Ask, “What part of me is being disturbed by this?”
▪ If you’re feeling jealousy, instead of trying to see how you can protect yourself, just ask, “What part of me is jealous?
▪ The process of seeing something requires a subject-object relationship. The subject is called “The Witness” because it is the one who sees what’s happening. The object is what you are seeing
▪ act of maintaining objective awareness of the inner problem is always better than losing yourself in the outer situation.
▪ To attain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them
▪ Problems are generally not what they appear to be. When you get clear enough, you will realize that the real problem is that there is something inside of you that can have a problem with almost anything. The first step is to deal with that part of you. This involves a change from “outer solution consciousness” to “inner solution consciousness.” You have to break the habit of thinking that the solution to your problems is to rearrange things outside. The only permanent solution to your problems is to go inside and let go of the part of you that seems to have so many problems with reality. Once you do that, you’ll be clear enough to deal with what’s left.
▪ You can watch yourself be jealous or angry. You don’t have to think about it or analyze it; you can just be aware of it.
▪ Once you take that seat of consciousness, you can get rid of these personal disturbances. You start by watching. Just be aware that you are aware of what is going on in there. It’s easy. What you’ll notice is that you’re watching a human being’s personality with all its strengths and weaknesses.
▪ If you would like to meet your roommate, just try to sit inside yourself for a while in complete solitude and silence. You have the right; it’s your inner domain. But instead of finding silence, you’re going to listen to incessant chatter:
▪ you’re not alone in there. There are two distinct aspects of your inner being. The first is you, the awareness, the witness, the center of your willful intentions; and the other is that which you watch. The problem is, the part that you watch never shuts up. If you could get rid of that part, even for a moment, the peace and serenity would be the nicest vacation you’ve ever had.
▪ If you haven’t reached this awareness yet, just start to watch. Spend a day watching every single thing your roommate does. Start in the morning and see if you can notice what it’s saying in every situation. Every time you meet somebody, every time the phone rings, just try to watch. A good time to watch it talk is while you’re taking a shower. Just watch what that voice has to say.
▪ Just try to get to know what you live with inside by externalizing the voice. Give it a body and put it out there in the world just like everybody else. Let it be a person who says on the outside exactly what the voice of your mind says inside. Now make that person your best friend. After all, how many friends do you spend all of your time with and pay absolute attention to every word they say?
▪ “Who am I? Who sees when I see? Who hears when I hear? Who knows that I am aware? Who am I?”
▪ Who sees when you see? Who hears when you hear? Who watches the dreams? Who looks at the image in the mirror? Who is it that is having all these experiences? If you try to just give honest, intuitive answers, you are simply going to say, “Me. It’s me. I’m in here experiencing all of this.” That’s about the best answer you’ll have.
▪ you are the one who is looking at something, then that something is not you. So right away, in one fell swoop, you know what you’re not: you’re not the outside world. You’re the one who is inside looking out at that world.
▪ you have a subject-object relationship with your thoughts. You are the subject, and thoughts are just another object you can be aware of. You are not your thoughts. You are simply aware of your thoughts
▪ Eventually, you will get to a point within yourself where you realize that you, the experiencer, have a certain quality. And that quality is awareness, consciousness, an intuitive sense of existence.
▪ consciousness experiment.
▪ When a thought is created in this state of awareness, instead of getting lost in it, you remain aware that you are the one who is thinking the thought. You are lucid.
▪ essence of consciousness is awareness, and awareness has the ability to become more aware of one thing and less aware of something else.
▪ consciousness, has the ability to selectively focus awareness on specific objects.
▪ If you step back, you will clearly see that objects are constantly passing before you at all three levels: mental, emotional, and physical. When you’re not centered, your consciousness invariably gets attracted toward one or more of those objects and focuses on them. If it concentrates enough, your sense of awareness loses itself in the object. It is no longer aware that it is aware of the object; it just becomes object-conscious. Have you ever noticed that when you’re deeply absorbed in watching TV, you have no awareness of where you’re sitting or what else is going on in the room?
▪ The lost soul is the consciousness that has dropped into the place where one human’s thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell are all synchronized.
▪ your self-concept is just a collection of thoughts about yourself.
▪ The only aspect of your being that remains the same is the consciousness that is aware of these objects. It is the same center of awareness that was aware of your old set of thoughts, emotions, and sensory input.
▪ Consciousness is neither pure nor impure; it has no qualities. It’s just there, aware that it’s aware.
▪ In the highest state, the focus of consciousness is turned back to the Self.
▪ Once you become conscious of the consciousness itself, you attain a totally different state. You are now aware of who you are. You have become an awakened being.
▪ You realize that you’re not who you thought you were. You’re not even a human being. You just happen to be watching one
▪ every movement of your body, every emotion you have, and every thought that passes through your mind is an expenditure of energy.
▪ if you look at the times in your life when you were in love, or excited and inspired by something, you were so filled with energy that you didn’t even want to eat.
▪ The only reason you don’t feel this energy all the time is because you block it. You block it by closing your heart, by closing your mind, and by pulling yourself into a restrictive space inside
▪ The yogis call energy centers chakras. When you close your heart center, energy can’t flow in. When energy can’t flow in, there’s darkness.
▪ The only thing you have to know is that opening allows energy in, and closing blocks it out. Now you have to decide whether or not you want this energy. How high do you want to get? How much love do you want to feel? How much enthusiasm do you want to have for the things you do? If enjoying a full life means experiencing high energy, love, and enthusiasm all the time, then don’t ever close.
▪ You can actually train yourself to forget how to close. Closing is a habit, and just like any other habit, it can be broken.
▪ If you like energy, and you do, then don’t ever close. The more you learn to stay open, the more the energy can flow into you. You practice opening by not closing.
▪ You just make a commitment to explore your capacity for receiving unlimited energy
▪ if you can always feel excited about the experience of the moment, then it doesn’t make any difference what the experience is. No matter what it is, it’s beautiful when you feel that way inside
▪ Once you’ve attained this very high state, your energy level will be phenomenal.
▪ As long as you are defining what you like and what you don’t like, you will open and close. You are actually defining your limits. You are allowing your mind to create triggers that open and close you. Let go of that. Dare to be different. Enjoy all of life.
▪ if you’re always inspired and filled with energy, then every minute of every day is an exciting experience. Learn to work with these things. Through meditation, through awareness and willful efforts, you can learn to keep your centers open.
▪ if you think that you feel an instrument, it’s only because it touched your heart. Your heart is an instrument made of extremely subtle energy
▪ If at any given point in time the heart happens to open, we fall in love. If at any given point in time it happens to close, the love stops. If the heart happens to hurt, we get angry, and if we stop feeling it altogether, we get empty
▪ heart is actually very simple to understand. It is an energy center, a chakra.
▪ an energy center is an area within your being through which your energy focuses, distributes, and flows. This energy flow has been referred to as Shakti, Spirit, and Chi, and it plays an intricate part in your life. You feel the heart’s energy all the time.
▪ You can be experiencing great feelings of love while in the presence of someone, until they say something you don’t like. Then your heart closes toward them, and you simply don’t feel the love anymore.
▪ This is how the overall system of perception is meant to work. It’s meant to take things in, allow you to experience them, and then let them pass through so that you’re fully present in the next moment.
▪ Moment after moment, experiences are coming in and you’re learning and growing. Your heart and mind are expanding and you are being touched at a very deep level. If experience is the best teacher, there’s nothing that comes close to the experience of life.
▪ When you are unable to allow life’s events to pass through you, they stay inside and become a problem. These patterns may be held within you for a very long time.
▪ Samskara is a blockage, an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life.
▪ Samskara is a cycle of stored past energy patterns in a state of relative equilibrium. It is your resistance to experiencing these patterns that causes the energy to keep cycling around itself. There is no other place for it to go. You won’t let it. This is how most people process their issues. This packet of cycling energy is literally stored in your energetic heart center. All the Samskaras you have collected over your life are stored there.
▪ It is these impressions, these Samskaras, that encrust the valve of the spiritual heart. That encrustation builds up and restricts the energy flow.
▪ The energy that’s stored there is real, and it interacts with the flow of current thoughts and events. The dynamics of this interaction cause the vibrations that are stored as Samskaras to get activated, sometimes years later
▪ it is just as important to realize that most of what you take in does not get blocked; it makes it right through you. Imagine how many things you see all day. They’re not all stored like that. Of all these impressions, the only ones that get blocked are those that cause either problems or some extraordinary sense of enjoyment. Yes, you store positive impressions too.
▪ two kinds of experiences can occur that block the heart. You are either trying to push energies away because they bother you, or you are trying to keep energies close because you like them. In both cases, you are not letting them pass, and you are wasting precious energy by blocking the flow through resisting and clinging.
▪ alternative is to enjoy life instead of clinging to it or pushing it away. If you can live like that, each moment will change you. If you are willing to experience the gift of life instead of fighting with it, you will be moved to the depth of your being.
▪ It’s that easy. When that light blue Mustang drives by and you feel fear or jealousy, just smile. Be happy that this Samskara, which has been stored down there for all this time, has the opportunity to make it through you. Just open, relax your heart, forgive, laugh, or do anything you want.
▪ you want to continue to walk around with stored pain blocking your heart and limiting your life. The alternative is to be willing to let it go when it gets stimulated. It only hurts for a minute and then it’s over.
▪ most primal energy flow is the survival instinct
▪ We now experience the daily need to defend our self-concepts rather than our bodies. Our major struggles end up being with our own inner fears, insecurities, and destructive behavior patterns, and not with outside forces.
▪ You are protecting your ego, your self-concept. Although a situation may present no physical danger, it may cause you to experience disturbance, fear, insecurity, and other emotional problems.
▪ we constantly use our energies to close around it and protect ourselves. But this process only hides the problems; it doesn’t fix them. You’re locking your illness inside yourself, and it will only get worse.
▪ order to reach this state of awareness, you must let your entire psyche surface. Every little separated piece of it must be permitted to pass through
▪ You start by watching life and noticing the constant flow of people and situations that hit your stuff every day. How often do you find yourself trying to protect and defend that weak part of you?
▪ You are just having fun experiencing whatever happens next. Because you got rid of that scared part of you, you don’t ever have to worry about getting hurt or disturbed.
▪ If you aren’t centered, your consciousness is just following whatever catches its attention. You see the car drive by and you’re off doing something about it. Another day you see a boat, and then it is all about the boat, and you forget about the car.
▪ They’re just all over the place; their energy is very scattered
▪ technique of freeing yourself is done with the understanding that thoughts and emotions are just objects of consciousness.
▪ When you concentrate on these thoughts and emotions, they become charged with energy and power. This is why thoughts and emotions get stronger the more attention you give them
▪ If you focus on it, it grows in importance and demands more of your attention. Then, because your attention feeds it, it becomes infused with even more energy and draws more attention
▪ We tend to let ourselves get bothered by the little, meaningless things that happen every day. For example, somebody beeps at you at the stoplight. As these little things happen, you will feel your energy change. The moment you feel a change, relax your shoulders and relax the area around your heart. The moment the energy moves, you simply relax and release. Play with letting go and falling behind this sense of being bothered. Let’s say someone at work took your pencil, and you notice that every time you go to use another one, your inner energy shifts—even the slightest amount. Are you willing to release the old pencil in order to liberate yourself? This is how you make freedom a game. Instead of getting into being bothered, you get into being free. When you reach for a pencil, and you see yourself getting a little uptight, let go.
▪ It’s not that you are trying to stop the energies from coming up inside. There is nothing wrong with feeling the energies of fear, jealousy, or attraction. It’s not your fault that such energies exist. All the attractions, repulsions, thoughts, and feelings don’t make any difference. They don’t make you pure or impure. They are not you. You are the one who’s watching, and that one is pure consciousness.
▪ If you can learn to remain centered with the smaller things, you will see that you can also remain centered with bigger things. Over time, you will find that you can even remain centered with the really big things.
▪ Ultimately, even if terrible things happen, you should be able to live without emotional scars and impressions. If you don’t hold these issues inside, you can go about your life without getting psychologically damaged. No matter what events take place in life, it is always better to let go rather than to close.
▪ Change can be viewed as either exciting or frightening, but regardless of how we view it, we must all face the fact that change is the very nature of life.
▪ Your definitions of desirable and undesirable, as well as good and bad, all come about because you have defined how things need to be in order for you to be okay.
▪ fear says so. The part of you inside that’s not okay with itself can’t face the natural unfolding of life because it’s not under your control
▪ The alternative is to decide not to fight with life. You realize and accept that life is not under your control. Life is continuously changing, and if you’re trying to control it, you’ll never be able to fully live it. Instead of living life, you’ll be afraid of life. But once you’ve decided not to fight with life, you’ll have to face the fear that was causing you to fight.
▪ Life creates situations that push you to your edges, all with the effect of removing what is blocked inside of you. That which is blocked and buried within you forms the root of fear. Fear is caused by blockages in the flow of your energy. When your energy is blocked, it can’t come up and feed your heart. Therefore, your heart becomes weak. When your heart is weak it becomes susceptible to lower vibrations, and one of the lowest of all vibrations is fear.
▪ if somebody does something that stimulates fear, you think they did something wrong. You then do everything you can to make sure they never do it again. First you defend yourself, and then you protect yourself. You do whatever you can to keep from feeling disturbance.
▪ If you truly want to grow spiritually, you’ll realize that keeping your stuff is keeping you trapped.
▪ You will then realize that life is actually trying to help you. Life is surrounding you with people and situations that stimulate growth. You don’t have to decide who’s right or wrong. You don’t have to worry about other people’s issues. You only have to be willing to open your heart in the face of anything and everything, and permit the purification process to take place.
▪ You simply permit the pain to come up into your heart and pass through. If you do that, it will pass. If you are sincerely seeking truth, you’ll let go every time. This is the beginning and end of the entire path—you surrender yourself to the process of emptying yourself.
▪ In order to live by this law, you have to understand its principles. First, you must be aware that there is something within you that needs to be released. You must then be aware that you, the one who notices the stuff coming up, are distinct from what you’re experiencing. You are noticing it, but who are you?
▪ Consciousness is always drawn to the most distracting object: the bumped toe, the loud noise, or the hurting heart
▪ it is equally important to see what happens when you are distracted by disturbance—your seat of consciousness falls down to where the disturbance is happening, and the whole world looks different.
▪ Now, as you look out through your disturbed energy, everything is distorted by the haze of your disturbance. Things that looked beautiful now look ugly. Things you liked, now look dark and depressing. But nothing has really changed. It’s just that you’re looking at life from that seat of disturbance.
▪ Once you fall from your seat of relative clarity, you are under the mercy of the disturbed energy. If that blockage is stimulated by an ongoing situation, you may stay down there for a long time. If it happens to be just a passing event, and the energy released by the blockage dissipates immediately, then you’ll find that you drift back up quickly.
▪ When you’re in this state of disturbance, your tendency will be to act in order to try to fix things. You don’t have the clarity to see what’s going on; you just want the disturbance to stop. So you start getting down to your survival instincts. You may feel that you have to do something drastic. You may want to leave your husband or wife, or move, or quit your job. The mind starts saying all kinds of things because it doesn’t like this space, and it wants to get away from it any way it can.
▪ Anything you put out comes back. Imagine if you got upset and fully released your disturbed energies onto another person. This is how people ruin relationships and destroy their lives.
▪ Do you doubt that a single blockage getting hit in your heart could cause a fall that lasts a lifetime? It has been known to happen.
▪ No matter what happens below you, just turn your eyes upward and relax your heart. You do not have to leave the seat of Self in order to deal with the darkness. It will purify itself if you let it.
▪ Just sit in the seat of awareness and never leave. No matter what goes on below you, open your heart and let it go. Your heart will become purified, and you will never know another fall.
▪ Do not rationalize, blame, or try to figure it out. Don’t do anything. Just let go immediately, and allow the energy to go back to the highest center of consciousness it can achieve.
▪ You didn’t solve anything. If you don’t solve the root cause of the problem, but instead, attempt to protect yourself from the problem, it ends up running your life.
▪ You’ll marry the person who makes you feel less lonely, and you’ll think that’s natural and normal. But it’s exactly the same as the person who is avoiding the pain of the thorn instead of taking it out. You have not removed the root of loneliness. You have only attempted to protect yourself from feeling it. Should someone die or leave you, the loneliness would again disturb you. The problem will be back the moment the external situation fails to protect you from what’s inside.
▪ If someone is attracted to you, and this eases your feelings of loneliness, you wish you could say, “How do I need to act in order to please you? I can be any way you want. I just don’t want to feel these periods of loneliness anymore.”
▪ discomfort you’re experiencing isn’t actually the feeling of loneliness. It’s the never-ending thoughts of “Did I say the right thing? Does she really like me, or am I just kidding myself?” The root problem is now buried under all these shallower issues that are all about avoiding the deeper ones.
▪ Do not doubt your ability to remove the root cause of the disturbance inside of you. It really can go away. You can look deep within yourself, to the core of your being, and decide that you don’t want the weakest part of you running your life. You want to be free of this. You want to talk to people because you find them interesting, not because you’re lonely. You want to have relationships with people because you genuinely like them, not because you need for them to like you. You want to love because you truly love, not because you need to avoid your inner problems.
▪ How do you free yourself? In the deepest sense, you free yourself by finding yourself. You are not the pain you feel, nor are you the part that periodically stresses out. None of these disturbances have anything to do with you. You are the one who notices these things
▪ All you have to do is notice who it is that feels the loneliness. The one who notices is already free. If you want to be free of these energies, you must allow them to pass through you instead of hiding them inside of you.
▪ Great art comes from the depth of one’s being. You can experience these very human states without getting lost in them or resisting them.
▪ You can notice that you notice and just watch how experiencing loneliness affects you. Does your posture change? Do you breathe slower or faster? What goes on when loneliness is given the space it needs to pass through you? Be an explorer. Witness it, and then it will go. If you don’t get absorbed in it, the experience will soon pass and something else will come up. Just enjoy all of it. If you can do this, you will be free, and a world of pure energy will open up within you.
▪ This flow has been called Spirit. This is what you begin to experience if you hang out with the Self instead of hanging out with inner disturbances. You don’t have to get rid of loneliness; you just cease to be involved with it. It’s just another thing in the universe, like cars, grass, and the stars. It’s none of your business. Just let things go.
▪ constant situation in which you are suffering to one degree or another. You are either trying to stop suffering, controlling your environment to avoid suffering, or worrying about suffering in the future. This state of affairs is so prevalent that you don’t see it, just as a fish doesn’t see the water.
▪ The body is communicating through its universal language: pain. Your psyche is communicating through its universal language: fear. Self-consciousness, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety—they are all fear.
▪ This act of constantly worrying about yourself is a form of suffering.
▪ The root problem is that you don’t feel whole and complete within yourself. If you don’t identify the root properly, you will seek someone or something to cover it up. You will hide behind finances, people, fame, and adoration.
▪ If you try to find the perfect person to love and adore you, and you manage to succeed, then you have actually failed. You did not solve your problem. All you did was involve that person in your problem. That is why people have so much trouble with relationships. You began with a problem inside yourself, and you tried to solve it by getting involved with somebody else. That relationship will have problems because your problems are what caused the relationship. It is all so easy to see once you step back and dare to look at it honestly.
▪ Imagine what fun life would be if you didn’t have those neurotic, personal thoughts going on within you. You could enjoy things, and you could actually get to know people instead of needing them
▪ You can wake up in the morning, look forward to the day, and not worry about what will happen. Your daily life can be like a vacation. Work can be fun; family can be fun; you can just enjoy all of it. That does not mean you don’t do your best; you just have fun doing your best. Then, at night when you go to sleep, you let it all go. You just live your life without getting uptight and worrying about it. You actually live life instead of fearing or fighting it.
▪ It is not hard to understand how to stop smoking. The key word is “stop.”
▪ You just stop telling your mind that its job is to fix your personal problems. This job has broken the mind and disturbed the entire psyche. It has created fear, anxiety, and neurosis
▪ Whenever it starts up telling you what you should or shouldn’t do in order to get the world to match your preconceived concepts, don’t listen. It’s just like when you try to stop smoking
▪ You are the consciousness that is behind the mind and is aware of the thoughts. The minute you stop putting your whole heart and soul into the mind as if it were your savior and protector, you will find yourself behind the mind watching it.
▪ Use these little things that happen in daily life to free yourself. In the above example, you simply choose not to get involved in the psyche.
▪ let go of what is going on right then, and remind yourself that you don’t want to play the mind game.
▪ Just be there, noticing that you notice. It’s like taking inventory. Just check out what’s going on—heart, mind, shoulders, etc. Set up trigger points in everyday life that help you remember who you are and what’s going on inside. These practices create moments of centered consciousness
▪ first you have to get quiet enough so that it’s not so reactive in there. These trigger points will help remind you to remain centered. Eventually it will become quiet enough so that you can simply watch the heart begin to react, and let go before the mind starts.
▪ Even though you may not actually like the feelings of inner disturbance, you must be able to sit quietly inside and face them if you want to see where they come from. Once you can face your disturbances, you will realize that there is a layer of pain seated deep in the core of your heart. This pain is so uncomfortable, so challenging, and so destructive to the individual self, that your entire life is spent avoiding it. Your entire personality is built upon ways of being, thinking, acting, and believing that were developed to avoid this pain.
▪ Inner pain is always there, underneath, hidden by the layers of our thoughts and emotions. We feel it most when our hearts go into turmoil, like when the world does not meet our expectations. This is an inner, psychological pain.
▪ if the feeling of rejection is a major problem for you, you will fear experiences that cause rejection. That fear will become part of your psyche. Even though the actual events causing rejection are infrequent, you will have to deal with the fear of rejection all the time.
▪ If you are doing something to avoid pain, then pain is running your life. All of your thoughts and feelings will be affected by your fears.
▪ How does that generate pain? It is because deep inside there is pain that you have not processed. Your attempt to avoid this pain has created layer upon layer of sensitivities that are all linked to the hidden pain.
▪ How can you let these meaningless things cause pain?
▪ One choice is to leave the pain inside and continue to struggle with the outside. The other choice is to decide that you don’t want to spend your entire life avoiding the inner pain; you’d rather get rid of it.
▪ Do you really want to carry that inside and have to manipulate the world to avoid feeling it? What would your life be like if it wasn’t run by that pain? You would be free. You could walk around this world completely free, just having fun, just being comfortable with whatever happens. You can actually live a life full of interesting experiences and just enjoy these experiences whatever they are.
▪ if you do not learn to be comfortable with it, you will devote your life to avoiding it. If you feel insecurity, it’s just a feeling. You can handle a feeling. If you feel embarrassed, it’s just a feeling. It’s just a part of creation. If you feel jealousy and your heart burns, just look at it objectively, like you would a mild bruise. It’s a thing in the universe that is passing through your system. Laugh at it, have fun with it, but don’t be afraid of it. It cannot touch you unless you touch it.
▪ Somebody says something displeasing, and you feel some disturbance in your heart. Then your mind starts talking: “I don’t have to put up with this. I’ll just walk away and never talk to them again. They’ll be sorry.” Your heart is attempting to pull back from what it’s experiencing and protect itself so that it doesn’t have to experience that feeling again. You do this because you can’t handle the pain you’re feeling. As long as you can’t handle the pain, you will react by closing in order to protect yourself. Once you close, your mind will build an entire psychological structure around your closed energy. Your thoughts will try to rationalize why you’re right, why the other person’s wrong, and what you should do about it.
▪ Wise beings do not want to remain a slave to the fear of pain. They permit the world to be what it is instead of being afraid of it. They wholeheartedly participate in life, but not for the purpose of using life to avoid themselves
▪ When you feel pain, simply view it as energy. Just start seeing these inner experiences as energy passing through your heart and before the eye of your consciousness. Then relax. Do the opposite of contracting and closing. Relax and release. Relax your heart until you are actually face-to-face with the exact place where it hurts. Stay open and receptive so you can be present right where the tension is. You must be willing to be present right at the place of the tightness and pain, and then relax and go even deeper. This is very deep growth and transformation. But you will not want to do this. You will feel tremendous resistance to doing this, and that’s what makes it so powerful.
▪ just as the people in the house had the potential to step out of their own self-made, artificial world into the beauty of the natural light, you can step outside your house of thoughts into the unlimited. Your awareness can expand to encompass vast space instead of the limited space in which you dwell. Then, when you look back at that little house you built, you will wonder why you were ever in there.
▪ When you constantly go beyond yourself, there are no more limitations. There are no more boundaries. Limitations and boundaries only exist at the places where you stop going beyond. If you never stop, then you go beyond boundaries, beyond limitations, beyond the sense of a restricted self.
▪ Boundaries create the appearance of finiteness in infinite space. Things seem finite because your perception hits mental boundaries
▪ Your views, your opinions, your preferences, your concepts, your goals, and your beliefs are all ways of bringing the infinite universe down to the finite where you can feel a sense of control.
▪ If you want to go beyond your model, you have to take the risk of not believing in it. If your mental model is bothering you, it’s because it doesn’t incorporate reality. Your choice is to either resist reality or go beyond the limits of your model.
▪ If you really want to see why you do things, then don’t do them and see what happens. Let’s say you’re a smoker. If you decide to stop smoking, you quickly confront the urges that cause you to smoke
▪ Wake up in the morning and go somewhere disheveled with your hair a mess, and see what happens to the energies inside of you. See what happens to you when you don’t do the things that make you comfortable. What you’ll see is why you’re doing them.
▪ You are constantly trying to stay within your comfort zone. You struggle to keep people, places, and things in a manner that supports your model. If they start to go any other way, you get uncomfortable. Your mind then becomes active telling you how to get things back the way you need them to be.
▪ the confines of your comfort zone create just such a cage. This inner cage doesn’t limit your body; it limits the expanse of your consciousness. Because you are unable to go outside your comfort zone, you are, in essence, locked in confinement.
▪ you will see that you’re willing to stay in this cage because you’re afraid. Your comfort zone is familiar to you; beyond it is the unknown
▪ You see that you’re afraid to tell people what you really think. You see that you’re too self-conscious to freely express yourself. You see that you have to stay on top of everything in order to be okay.
▪ Going beyond means going beyond the borders of the cage. There should be no cage. The soul is infinite. It is free to expand everywhere. It is free to experience all of life. This can only happen when you are willing to face reality without mental boundaries. If you still have barriers, and you know what they are because you hit them every day, you must be willing to go beyond them. Otherwise you remain within your cage. And remember, decorating your cage with beautiful experiences, fond memories, and great dreams is not the same as going beyond. A cage by any other name is still a cage. You must be willing to go beyond.
▪ If he is willing to go beyond his comfort zone, he is free to come and go at will.
▪ When you approach the edges you feel insecurity, jealousy, fear, or self-consciousness. You pull back, and if you are like most people, you stop trying. Spirituality begins when you decide that you’ll never stop trying. Spirituality is the commitment to go beyond, no matter what it takes.
▪ If your edges happen to get hit, the mind doesn’t complain. It all just passes through. This is how great beings live