Most people spend their lives within the confines of the thoughts which imprison them, limiting themselves, dragging themselves through life immersed in compulsive thinking. Such thinking, however, is not reality: it is a basic delusion, for within us there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than thought. In ancient scripts it was often called the Christ within one’s Budda nature, Brahman, the Tao.
If one can go beyond the narrow mindedness of everyday ‘reality’ and recognize that the thoughts that go through one’s head are merely a ‘mind-made’ sense of self, totally conditioned by past experiences, unconsciously designed to enhance our always deficient sense of ‘self’ through being ‘right’ and making someone or something else ‘wrong’, we see that the human mind mistakes the constant stream of thinking for reality: failing to recognize that reality is that timeless inner space where the content of one’s life unfolds
The human mind, a powerful tool, tries to take over our life completely, forming the egoic ‘I’ but though thinking is useful it is also restrictive: for it has the desire to control us and leads us to mistake its viewpoints for the truth. It covers up the essence of who we are. When we dont know who we are, we create a mind-made ‘self’ as a substitute for our divine being and cling desperately to this needy ‘self’, protecting and enhancing it.
The short-lived entity ‘self’ is not the essence of who we are. We find peace not in the arranging and rearranging of the structure of our lives. We find peace in the deeper sphere of our being Reality is not as we judge it to be with our human mind. It is a unified whole where nothing exists in and by itself. Reality is a realm of consciousness which thought and the human mind cannot comprehend.
Spiritual awakening is an awakening from the deception of thought. Spiritual awakening is wisdom. It is the awakening from the delusion of thought. It is a ‘knowing’. It is a giving of one’s full attention. Attention is pure consciousness which transcends thought: where there is no separation between perceiver and perceived. It is a unifying experience and awareness. But human beings forget who they are. They lose themselves in the world of thought, and confusion and conflict arises.
They forget, or have forgotten, that they them-selves are that deep realm of pure consciousness. They forget that they are not the content of life, but that they are life. They are consciousness. In order to give one’s full attention, one must be in the Here and Now. Having your attention in the Here and Now is recognizing what is primary. With ‘Now’ as the primary focus in life, life will unfold with ease - for Past and Future are but mental abstractions.
The Past can only be remembered ‘Now’, and we remember it ‘Now’. Also the Future, when it comes, is the ‘Now’. But when one is engaged in thinking one is in a conceptual prison, giving one a false sense of ‘knowing’. Life appears to consist of a thousand moments of ‘knowing’. Yet, is there ever more than ‘this moment’ ? Whatever happens, however much life changes, it is always in ‘this moment’.
A false sense of ‘knowing’ leads to prejudices, for the mind is constantly searching for nourishment for its depleted sense of ‘self’. When we speak of ‘myself’ what we generally mean is ‘me’. The ‘me’ that is the ‘I’ of our likes and dislikes. It is our mind-made sense of who we are: this fleeting ‘I’. Prejudice means that we see only our own concept of ‘self ‘, or of another human being. It is the giving of attention to our prejudices and the interpretation of the stories we tell ourselves which forms the self-created pain that makes us, and others, unhappy.
