Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament
Metadata
- Title: Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament
- Author: Michael A. Singer
- Book URL: https://amazon.com/dp/B09LLTRR3Z?tag=malvaonlin-20
- Open in Kindle: kindle://book/?action=open&asin=B09LLTRR3Z
- Last Updated on: Saturday, May 21, 2022
Highlights & Notes
life on Earth rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to, and if we resist, our experience can be quite unpleasant. Resistance creates tension and anxiety, and it makes life a burden.
Only by accepting reality can we work with the flow of life as it passes by and create a better world.
Acceptance is best understood as nonresistance to reality. Try as you may, no one can make an event that has already happened not have happened. Your only choice is to accept the event or resist it.
Just like when you were shown the three photographs, you were not any of the photos—you were the one looking at them. Likewise, when you look out at the mirror, you are not what you see—you are the one who sees it.
The question is: Are you willing to let go of who you thought you were? Because who you thought you were is not who you are.
People project their sense of self onto things that are not their self. When they do that, they feel afraid to lose those things. As you work your way through your inner growth, you won’t identify with these outer objects anymore. You’ll identify with the deeper sense of self within.
Everybody wants the same thing: they would like it to be nice in there.
They’re asking how to make it nice in there, while the more relevant question is why is it not nice? If you find out why it’s not nice, and you get rid of that, you’re going to find out it can be really nice in there. Life doesn’t have to be a game of, “Since it’s not nice in here, I need to find things that will compensate for that in order to feel a little bit better.” That is what everybody’s doing. They are trying to find people, places, and things in the outside world that will unfold in a way that makes it more comfortable inside. People are trying to use the outside to fix the inside—better to find out why it’s not nice inside to begin with.
“I’m in here. I’m conscious, and what I am conscious of is that it’s not always so nice in here.”
Thus, the outside world is one of the things you deal with that has a profound effect on your inner state.
Thoughts are just another thing you notice in there. You notice the world coming in from outside, and you notice the thoughts that are generated inside.
The third thing you experience is your feelings or emotions.
The outside world has a major influence on your thoughts, and your thoughts and emotions will generally line up.
You will at some point realize that’s all you’ve done your entire life—try to be okay.
First you think about what will make you okay, then you go out and try to make it happen.
When we’re through, you’ll realize that what really matters is not the thoughts, the emotions, nor the outside world. What really matters is You in there, who is experiencing these things. How are you doing? What we’ll see is that you in there are higher than any experience you’ve ever had.
Your entire life is composed of consciously experiencing the three objects of consciousness (the outer world, the thoughts, and the emotions).
When you are no longer distracted by any of the three great distractors, your consciousness will no longer be pulled into those objects. The focus of consciousness will very naturally remain in the source of consciousness.
There is a state of great peace within you that cannot be disturbed by the world, your thoughts, or even your emotions. These objects can continue to freely exist, but they will no longer dominate your life. You will be free to fully interact in life, but you will do so out of a sense of love and service, rather than fear or desire.
By accepting instead of resisting, you will eventually attain a permanent seat of clarity—it’s called becoming established in the seat of Self.
The problem is, you have made a really big deal out the moment in front of you throughout your life by bringing your personal preferences into that moment. Notice that the billions of people who are not looking at the moment in front of you don’t have any problem with it. They couldn’t care less about it. It’s not stirring up their thoughts, and it’s not stirring up their emotions.
One of the most amazing things you will ever realize is that the moment in front of you is not bothering you—you are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. It’s not personal—you are making it personal. There are countless moments unfolding in the universe at any given time, and your relationship to all of them is exactly the same: you are the subject, they are the object.
Regardless, some people ask, “Don’t these scientific facts challenge my belief that God is the creator of the universe?” An appropriate response would be, “Of course not. They merely show you how God created all the structures in the universe.”
You’re not the doer; you are the experiencer of reality.
It has nothing to do with you. It has to do with the forces that caused it to be the way it is, and those forces stretch back billions of years. The total acceptance of this truth is surrender. You must let go of the part of you that thinks it has the right to like and dislike the result of billions of years of interactions. Surrender is letting go of the part of you that is not living the truth. That is true surrender.
People make such a big deal out of science versus God, as if the two are at odds with each other. The real problem is that people don’t truly believe in either. If you believed that science explains the creation of all things, you would live your life with the constant awareness that everything you are interacting with is emanating from the quantum field, pulling itself together into atoms and molecules, then appearing as the form before you. You would not like it or dislike it; you would be in awe of it. Likewise, if you really believed God was the creator of all things, you would live in awe and appreciation of the marvel of the Divine Creation. You would not like it or dislike it; you would be blown away that it even exists.
We live in a world that is so perfect it should constantly blow our minds. But we are so lost in making it all personal that we miss both the greatness of science and the greatness of God.
From now on, everywhere you look and everything you interact with, be sure to say, “Thank you.” And be sure to pay tribute to the stars. They are not just romantic things twinkling in the night sky. They are the furnaces of the universe. They have created everything for you. Can you thank them? Can you appreciate this truth, and understand that you didn’t do anything to deserve the trees, the oceans, and the sky? You don’t even know where You came from. You’re just in there experiencing this amazing gift unfolding before you. This is spirituality—coming into harmony with reality, instead of your personal self.
You are capable of experiencing three distinct things: the outside world, the mind, and the emotions.
Take a moment to digest that fact. Your consciousness has the ability to be aware of things that machines can’t detect: thoughts and emotions.
Mind is the field of energy in which thoughts are capable of existing. Just as clouds are not the sky, but they exist in the sky and are formed out of the substance of the sky, so thoughts are not the mind, but they exist in the mind and are formed out of the substance of mind.
Now that we’ve examined the concept of empty mind, let’s begin the process of forming objects in the field of mind. In order for you in there, consciousness, to be aware of the physical plane, you were given a physical body to house the five senses that pick up sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. This body is a gift that the stars gave you and that evolution perfected. Because of the senses, the vibrations from the outside world come in. They pass through the sensory receptors, up the sensory nerves, into the brain, and then manifest in the mind where you experience them. This rendering of the outside world is one of the most basic functions of mind. It’s very much like watching a ball game being played in California while you’re in Florida. The actual physical light and sound vibrations are picked up by the cameras at the game. They are then digitized and transmitted to a receiver at your home. The received signals are then rendered onto your flat-screen TV. It seems like you are looking at the game, but you are not. You are looking at the rendering of the transmitted signals that the cameras picked up.
As we discussed, you are not looking out into the world. The outside is being reproduced in your mind, and you are looking at that mental image. It’s really not that different from when you are dreaming. In the dream state, images are being created in the mind, and you are looking at them. The waking state is the same, except that the mental images are being generated by the senses instead of by the mind itself.
We have now gone from empty mind to a mind that renders the outside world so you can experience your surroundings. Experience is the nectar of life. You’re in there, and you’re capable of experiencing because of the rendering capability of your mind. Of what meaning is life if you don’t experience it?
The real world is outside, it is being reflected in your mind, and you are aware of the image right in front of you. In this very simple state, you are experiencing what you were meant to experience: the gift of the moment that’s being given to you. It comes in, and you learn from it simply because you experienced it. There are no distractions; there is just total oneness with the moment in front of you.
That is what The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali describes as the experiencer and the experience becoming one. You have allowed a merger between subject and object. There’s nothing distracting your consciousness from what is happening right in front of you. This is the yogic state of dharana—one-pointed concentration.
When consciousness merges with the object of consciousness, you can feel the presence of God.
When Self focuses one-pointedly on a single object, one experiences the nature of Self—total peace, contentment, and overwhelming bliss. This is available to us at any time if we can just learn to enter the undistracted state of one-pointed consciousness.
There are no problems; there are just learning experiences. No matter what happens, you are becoming greater.
Your consciousness is a force, and you are focusing that force on a particular mental object. When the force of consciousness is focused on a mental object, that object cannot pass through the mind like the other objects. Just as the solar winds interfere with objects passing through space, so focused consciousness is a force that affects objects passing through the mind.
When you focus consciousness on a particular mental form, you impede that form’s ability to pass through the mind. The very act of concentrating on it makes it stay in your mind. You know this.
Concentration of consciousness freezes forms in the mind so that they don’t just pass through.
Both clinging and resisting keep the mental renderings in your mind. This is very important to understand. Experiential mind was meant to be like a clear TV screen: it renders the image being sent to it. But now you’ve held on to images that are no longer being generated by the outside world. They got stuck in your mind as mental patterns, and as a result, you’re out of harmony with reality. You were in there experiencing the gift of reality; now you are also experiencing the patterns you held on to in your mind. These patterns in your mind are totally different from the patterns in other people’s minds. Each person’s trapped mental patterns are unique and very personal. They come from how we interacted with our past experiences. Since we’ve all had different past experiences, and interacted with them differently, the impressions held in our minds are totally different. This is the birth of the personal mind. The problem is: reality is not personal. As you’ve already seen, we didn’t create this world. We are simply experiencing the miracle of creation unfolding around us. Yes, there are rattlesnakes and butterflies in the world, along with lots of other things. But now there are RATTLESNAKES and BUTTERFLIES in your mind, even when they are not actually in front of you. Now that you’ve held these leftover mental impressions in your mind, reality has to compete with them for your attention. Your ability to fully focus on the outer world is going to be hindered by the constant distraction of these inner impressions.
What does “reminds you of” mean? It’s not a rattlesnake; it’s a rope. Nonetheless, when the rope comes in, consciousness now has a choice: pay full attention to the rope that came in, or be distracted by the negative rattlesnake image stuck in your mind. The
Now you have a preference—you would rather experience the mental image of the butterfly than the reality in front of you. There has become a whole new world for consciousness to focus on—the world you built in your mind. That world does not match the reality of creation. That inner world is your own personal creation made out of the mental objects you didn’t let pass through. That’s what those images in your mind represent: things that happened in the past that you willfully kept in your mind. As we shall see, these impressions are the initial seeds that eventually grew into the self-concept or personal self.
We said earlier that nothing is really personal. But you have chosen to fill the sanctity of your mind with frozen images from your past.
These impressions will stay in your mind and will pull your consciousness toward them. You now have a limited and biased view of reality that will distort all of your experiences for the rest of your life. That is the power of the personal mind.
Once you create preferences, they will dominate your entire experience of life.
If you are quietly centered in conscious awareness, you can see what is passing before you. You are the ultimate experiencer of your mind; you’re just not paying attention.
Instead of paying attention, you’re getting so uptight about wanting butterflies, and not wanting rattlesnakes, that you’re losing your centered awareness. When the world around you comes in and hits, or activates, your stored patterns, you can no longer observe reality objectively. Your consciousness gets drawn into the activated samskaras, and everything becomes distorted. This is the foundation of the psyche, your personal self.
What is the psyche? It’s something you build inside of the mind that’s about you: “I’m the one who doesn’t like rattlesnakes. I’m the one who likes butterflies.” You just built a self-concept. Someone else doesn’t have that. They have a psyche built around thunderstorms, dogs that bite, and kittens that snuggle. Everyone has had different experiences, and therefore, everyone is building a different personal mind inside.
The highest state is to be comfortable learning and growing from life’s experiences. But if you’re not comfortable with some experiences, you use your will to resist them. That merely means you’re not evolved enough in that area.
“It’s none of my business.” That’s the correct response for every bit of reality that took billions of years to end up in front of you.
The real question is not whether you like things, it’s why are you not okay with them? The reason is actually quite simple: because you can’t digest them. It’s hard to let some experiences just pass through without residual disturbance.
The soul can learn. You in there, the consciousness, can learn to experience reality. In order to do so, you must not resist. Otherwise, you’re going to immediately push reality away. That’s what acceptance is: nonresistance. It is having the commitment to fully allow reality to pass directly into the highest part of your being. In the end, all you are surrendering is your resistance to reality. You learn to let it come in, even if it is not comfortable as it pours into you.
This is the opposite of Be Here Now; you’re practicing Be There Then. You just had a beautiful experience, and you ruined it. You ruined it by holding on to it, like the butterfly. You ruined it by creating a preference about one of life’s experiences.
Blocked energies in the mind are like a computer virus that distorts both the conscious and subconscious minds.
When you commit to spiritual growth, you work on letting go of the stored blockages from the past and not storing any more from the present. This does not mean the mind’s normal memory storage process does not take place. You are not willfully forgetting life’s experiences. You are simply not resisting or clinging to the experiences, and thus not storing them as samskaras. They remain harmless, objective memories.
Normal memory is there when you need it—it does not haunt you throughout your life.
This is how you fell out of the garden of reality. Impressions stayed inside your mind and became the foundation blocks upon which you built your psyche.
Your psyche is like a computer program running in your mind based on your samskaras. It’s in there talking to you about things that happened before, what you wish would happen now, and what you hope does or doesn’t happen tomorrow. You’ve actually created an alternate reality inside your mind that is very complex.
The truth is, life is not hitting your weak spots, you are projecting your weak spots onto life.
If anything reminds you of what bothered you before, you lose. If you are not getting to reexperience what you liked before, you lose.
If you are not expecting anything in particular from a situation, and then something special happens, it can touch you really deeply. It could be a beautiful sunset, the first unexpected kiss, or some other welcome surprise. If it touches you so deeply because you have no samskaras in your mind about the event—you have beginner’s mind.
That said, what is the average human doing with their mind? Einstein used his mind to ponder “thought experiments” about the behavior of light, gravity, and the physics of outer space (even though no human had ever been there!). Meanwhile, you keep your mind busy with relationships, what people think of you, and how to get what you want and avoid what you don’t want.
The question is not whether your mind is brilliant; the question is what are you doing with that brilliance?
You can think of this as layers of the mind. The first layer is where the rendering of the present external experience is taking place. We can call that the here-and-now layer. The next layer is the stored patterns from the past that you did not release when the external experience was over. We can call that the samskara layer. But there is yet another layer. This layer is what you are doing with your brilliant mind to try to solve the discomforts created by the samskaras. This is the personal-thoughts layer, and it is the one you identify with the most—you think this is who you are. The combination of these three layers is what we call the personal mind. Yours is completely unique to you and you alone.
We create the personal-thoughts layer when we use the tremendous intellectual power of our mind to conceptualize an outside world that will not bother us and will, in fact, make us feel good. It seems perfectly logical. The problem is, what we think will make us feel good or bad is simply the result of blocked mental patterns from the past. If we use our mind’s brilliance to develop thought patterns based on how everyone and everything needs to be for us to feel okay, we have limited our life to serving our samskaras. And our personal thoughts don’t stop here. What good is it to analyze how you need things to be if you’re not also going to think about how to get them that way? First we figure out the strategy of how to be okay, then we figure out the tactics of how to make it happen. Strategy and tactics—that’s military training. In essence, we are at war with the world.
The moment in front of you is the result of all the natural forces that caused it to be as it is. The preference system in your mind is the result of the past experiences that you couldn’t handle. These are two totally different sets of forces that have nothing to do with each other.
You actually think that the universe should be the way you want it to be.
Once you create thoughts about what you want and don’t want, and how to force the world to be that way, you will never be okay inside. You will lose much of the great power of abstract thought because you cannot abstract from yourself. Life will become a battle between reality and your mental preferences. This use of mind is called the personal mind because its thoughts are all about you and your concepts, views, and preferences.
Focusing on the moment is one way to get your consciousness off its incessant addiction to the personal. Another way to transcend the personal mind is by using your intellectual mind to create and do things that are not personal in nature. This includes being an engineer who reasons out problems or a medical researcher who studies diseases and how to cure them. Artistry, computer science, mathematics—all of these are examples of beautiful uses of the impersonal mind. The mind is great; it’s just not supposed to be used for storing all your personal preferences and then thinking the whole world is supposed to match what you stored.
The outside world is simply not going to magically match what you’ve stored in your mind. In fact, it is not very intelligent to expect it to. Is it really intelligent to devote your life to fighting with life so it aligns with your past good and bad experiences? How can you enjoy life if you are always worrying and struggling to get it your way?
If you pay attention, you will see that your past experiences determine your preferences. You didn’t just make it all up from scratch—your views, opinions, and preferences are formulated based on data from your past.
If you really resist it, it will get shoved down into the subconscious where it will fester and spread its disturbance throughout the mind. In either case, you are storing what you are afraid of in your mind. If you do this, you will be afraid of your own thoughts. How could you not be? You made a collection of unpleasant thoughts in your mind, and they are going to keep coming back up. Now, in order to live in there, the analytical aspect of mind must be utilized to figure out what needs to happen outside for you to be okay. This is where preferences come from. They are simply attempts to use outside events to solve the fact that you are not doing well inside. This results in the constant practice of judging everything that’s unfolding based on your preferences.
We can certainly force ourselves to conform to other ways of thinking in order to gain acceptance, but that just makes living inside all the more complicated. You not only have your default way of thinking resulting from your stored past impressions, but now you must suppress parts of that in order to conform to the “group” mindset. No wonder it gets messy in there!
The inevitable result is that if the moment in front of you happens to align well with your stored patterns, you feel great. You feel open, excited, and enthused. If it doesn’t align well with your stored patterns, you get upset. You immediately close, get defensive, and maybe even get depressed.
You were given free will, and what you did with your free will was make a mess out of your mind. Instead of being in awe that the moment in front of you even exists, you fight with it to make it match what you want.
All your preferences exist because you stored experiences from the past inside your personal mind. This makes it difficult to live in there, but instead of fixing it, you double down and try to satisfy your preferences. “I want to feel good, and the way to feel good is by getting the house I want.” “The way to feel good is by owning the car I’ve always wanted.” “The way to feel good is by finding a better relationship—this one’s not doing it for me.” These attempts to compensate for your blockages are, at best, short lived because you are not actually getting rid of the blockages.
The foundational choice we have in life is either constantly control life to compensate for our blockages or devote our lives to getting rid of our blockages.
That is why you tend to have so much trouble making decisions. You’re trying to figure out how each choice will make you feel later.
Don’t let the mind always be thinking about itself and what it wants. Learn to enjoy life as it is—instead of limiting the ways you can enjoy it to serve your past impressions.
The self-centered, analyzing layer of mind is the worst. It is the model you build about how everything and everybody needs to be for you to feel okay, including the weather tomorrow. “It better not rain tomorrow, I’m going camping.”
Eventually you catch on that you’ve developed an entire intellectual model of how every single thing needs to be: how people should behave, how your spouse should be dressed when you’re going out, even how much traffic there should be. How many things do you do this about? Pretty much every single thing. You honestly believe that what you made up is how it should be. The truth of the matter is, that’s absurd. There is no way what you made up in your head, based upon your very limited past experiences, has anything to do with what’s supposed to be happening in the real world.
A wise person realizes that the world is not going to unfold the way they want it to because it’s not supposed to. No two of us agree how it’s supposed to unfold, yet there’s only one world out there. We best leave reality to either science or God, not to everyone’s individual preferences. The world in front of you has the power of reality behind it. It is unfolding in accordance to the influences that made it be the way it is, and there are billions of influences going back billions of years. In contrast, you’re just making up how it’s supposed to be based on the impressions you held inside from your past. When reality doesn’t happen the way you want, you say reality is wrong. “I don’t like that. It should not have happened.”
If you do this, you’ll find yourself being thankful that you get to have your daily experiences. They are certainly better than empty space. That’s how a wise person lives. The alternative is to suffer because things are not the way you want. Previously, we discussed Buddha’s first noble truth: All of life is suffering. Now we get to the second noble truth: The cause of suffering is desire. In other words, the cause of suffering is preference, deciding how you want things to be and getting upset when they’re not that way.
Events don’t cause mental or emotional suffering—you cause yourself mental and emotional suffering about the events.
Likewise, in this life you go through many different experiences. They should not cause suffering. Experiences are not suffering. They are experiences. But if you decide how you want them to be, and they’re not that way, then you suffer. Suffering is caused by the contrast between what you mentally decided you wanted and the reality unfolding in front of you. To whatever degree they don’t match, you suffer.
You have set up in your mind what you like and what you don’t like based on your past impressions. Now you honestly believe the world should be that way. Obviously, that’s not a belief founded in reality. As long as you do that, you’re going to have a very hard time in life.
We have seen that the first layer of mind is the one that receives the senses. The second layer is the samskaras we did not let pass through as life flowed into us. Based on this foundation, we built very personal thought patterns of like and dislike and how to get life to unfold the way we want. These impressions of what we liked and disliked are so powerful that our consciousness becomes completely absorbed in the model of life they generate. In fact, we focus on it so completely that it forms our self-concept. “I am the one who likes this, doesn’t like that, and I’m dead serious about getting what I want.” We are so distracted by this model that we’re not even aware of being back there watching all this. But we are—how else would we know it’s going on?
In general, there are two very distinct types of thoughts: willful and automatic.
The important thing to realize is there’s always a reason why your mind creates one thought versus another.
This is the nature of almost all your automatic thoughts. They are not to be seen as some important truth or great insight into what is really going on. They are simply your mind attempting to cleanse the patterns you have stored in there.
Once you stop suppressing uncomfortable experiences, one thing you’re going to realize is that there really is no subconscious mind, per se. The conscious mind and the subconscious mind are actually the same one mind, and the only reason we see a difference is because we artificially created a division.
That is exactly what you’ve done to create the subconscious mind. The part of your mind you’re not willing to look at is what we call the subconscious.
Fortunately, these artificially divided parts of your mind will merge once you stop suppressing. You will get the rest of your mind back, and you will be able to use its full power. Imagine how much mental power you waste by pushing all that mess into the subconscious. Then you have to keep it down there for the rest of your life. It’s really amazing what a mess we make because we can’t handle the moments passing in front of us.
The common thread between your waking and dreaming states is that it’s the same consciousness that is aware of both. You who is watching the dream is the same you who watches your waking thoughts and experiences the outside world.
The vast majority of energy you have stored inside is because of things you didn’t like. When subsequent events happen that stimulate these negative samskaras, the new events are automatically experienced as negative. In essence, the negativity keeps compounding.
There are billions of things that can happen in life that don’t match your preferences, and there are only a few that do. Under these conditions, the probability that life is going to be a negative experience is extremely high. This is not because life is negative. It is because the only thing that isn’t negative to you is that which exactly matches your preferences.
It is so important to understand this. You have set up a system in which you can’t win. You have expanded what can bother you to include all experiences that remind you of what bothered you before. What is more, life almost never totally satisfies you because everything has to be exactly what you want—to a T. This shows you the power of past and present preferences—the more preferences you have, the less you will be okay.
As if it’s not enough that you built this entire structure in your mind, you then committed your life to thinking about how to serve it. Your consciousness is pretty lost, constantly focusing on this false mental concept of self.
This is not about shutting up the voice. Don’t ever fight with your mind. You’re the one who did this to your mind; how dare you complain about the mind. If you keep eating food that’s making you sick, do you yell at the food? Of course not—you change your behavior.
The way to do this is quite simple: release the samskaras you’ve already stored and don’t store any more. Easier said than done, but we will certainly explore how to do this.
The combination of your thoughts and emotions makes up what can be called your psyche, or your personal self. The psyche is completely distinct from your physical body. The psyche is the nonphysical world going on inside you.
Emotions are not something you see; they are something you feel. In fact, the words “emotions” and “feelings” are interchangeable.
You are always having inner feelings, but you don’t notice them until they change. Notice that you only talk about emotions when they go to the extremes. “It hurt me tremendously. I can’t believe how you hurt me.” Or, “I felt so much love. It was the most beautiful feeling I ever had.” These are examples of extremes in your emotions, and they catch your attention. You probably don’t notice it, but you have a normal state of emotional energy flowing through your heart all day. When it drops out, you notice the change and say, “My heart fell out from under me. I lost my strength.” Your heart can fall out from under you when fear takes over. Something happens and the energy just drops. In contrast, you can say, “My heart has wings.” All of a sudden the emotional energy in your heart rises up and inspires you. These are changes from the steady state of emotional energy that normally flows through your heart. As you get more and more in tune with your emotions, you will notice that, like thoughts, emotions are almost always there.
Just as with thoughts, the questions become: Who is it that feels these emotional shifts? How do you know you feel anger? How do you know you feel love? You know because you are in there, and you are aware of what is going on in there.
You remain the one who notices the emotions, hears the thoughts, and looks out through the eyes.
Either way, your mind is telling your heart, “It’s okay, I’ll take care of it.” You’re simply directing your awareness to your mind, so you don’t have to feel the difficult emotions emanating from your heart.
The mind becomes a place the soul goes to hide from the heart. To transcend this tendency to hide in either your heart or your mind, simply realize that it is always the same conscious awareness experiencing what is going on inside.
The heart is a very sophisticated instrument that few people know how to play. If the heart opens, they try to possess the things that helped it open. If the heart closes, they try to protect themselves from the things that caused it to close.
Generally, the heart opens and closes on its own, and people just have to live with the consequences.
What the mind says when the heart is closed is not you. It’s just the mind expressing the state of the closed heart. You are the one who notices.
It is very dangerous to live this way—you are not in charge of your life, your past impressions are.
Your psyche is the net result of all your blockages and how the energy manages to flow through them.
Understanding the effects of these blockages helps explain why it’s so difficult to make personal decisions.
There may be many samskaras in there, but there are not many of you in there. There is only one consciousness watching all these competing patterns and identifying with them.
When you become one integrated seer—the single witness watching all these different things pass by inside—you are centered. You are clear. You are free. But when you don’t sit in the seat of the witness, and your sense of being is split amongst all these diverse inner patterns, things become very confusing. It’s almost as though each path the energy takes through your field of samskaras creates a slightly different personality. You’re one person around this friend and you’re another person around someone else. You can even have totally different inner dialogs going on when you’re around different people. Look at what happens when you go to your childhood home or a high school reunion. The surroundings stimulate past samskaras, and you begin to think and feel the way you used to in that environment. Amazingly, in these situations you feel completely at home with these different versions of yourself.
People in this state struggle to find themselves. They feel they must choose which of these personalities is really them. The answer is quite clear: none of them are you. Please don’t pick one of them and let that choice determine your life. None of your thoughts are more you than any other thought. You are the one who is experiencing the thoughts. There’s not a single thing about those shifting energy patterns that is you. It is certainly difficult knowing what to do when all that inner commotion going on. The only lasting solution is to realize that it’s the same you noticing all of it. You are the one who is aware that your thoughts and emotions are shifting. It happens to us all the time. Just relax and be the one who notices. Be the One who sees the many—this is the path to self-realization.
An emotion is caused by the shakti hitting the blockages in your heart and shooting out to release the blocked energies. This creates enough disturbance to your normal flow that your attention gets drawn to these disturbed energies. Emotions are a release of blocked energy. This goes for both negative and positive emotions.
A lot of people don’t feel their heart very much. They are so used to focusing on their mind that they don’t notice the shifts in the heart until those shifts are too strong to ignore. Emotions are messy and much too sensitive, so people suppress them. They want to be analytical, not emotional. No one told these people that if they bothered to do the work necessary to clean out the heart, the increased energy flow coming into the mind would result in more inspiration, more creativity, and more intuitive brilliance.
To begin to work with the heart, you must first be able to objectively watch as it opens and closes. What you will see is that the stored patterns from your past are getting activated by outside situations and causing the heart to open or close.
The bottom line is that you have blockages stored inside, and they are going to determine your level of openness in any given situation. All it takes is one word said in just the right way, and the heart will open. Likewise, all it takes is one word said in just the wrong way, and the heart will close.
The greatest secret of the heart is revealed when you get rid of the samskaras instead of finding a way around them. If you get rid of the blockages that are restricting the energy from flowing into and through your heart, you will feel love all the time. It will always be brimming through you. Once you reach that state, if you simply wave your hand in front of your heart, you will feel waves of ecstatic love pour through you. That’s how easy it will be to experience love. Love will become the core of your being. Now, go share it. By all means, share the beautiful love you are feeling. You will be able to do this without attachment or need because your love is not dependent upon anyone or anything else. You are whole and complete within yourself. We call that self-effulgence. To reach this great state, you must do the necessary work on yourself to release your samskaras instead of constantly trying to find a way around them.
Once you open your heart to that level, it will always be beautiful inside, as long as you choose to focus your awareness on the love instead of what is left of your lower self.
If something’s blocking the stream, don’t waste your time trying to make the water flow around the blockage—just remove it. The same is true of the flow of shakti through the heart—just remove the blockages and love will be your natural state.
The most meaningful questions regarding quality of life are not about what you own, or what you do, they are about how you’re doing inside. Most people can relate to a response similar to: “There are moments that are so beautiful I wouldn’t trade them for anything. But there are also moments I don’t want to last for another second. In general, I work hard to keep it okay in here.” Such is the human predicament.
Throughout our lives we’ve stored patterns inside ourselves, samskaras, based upon past experiences we resisted. We then used these stored patterns to build a self-concept consisting of what we like and don’t like and how to get events in the world to unfold accordingly. If we succeed in our efforts, it’s generally nice inside; if we don’t, it’s not.
You end up relying on your brilliant analytical mind to figure out how to be okay. Your mind does this by imagining what would work for you. It just starts making up things, playing make-believe. As these imagined thoughts arise, you can feel how they affect your blockages. You’re trying to see how the world needs to be to fit you the best.
Everything going on in your personal mind is because you’re either trying to match the stored patterns that will make you feel better or avoid the patterns that will make you feel worse. Both ways, the stored patterns are running your life. Don’t feel bad about it; it’s that way for pretty much everyone and always has been.
You now have a deeper understanding of what we’ll call the predicament: you’re in there, you’re not okay in there, and you have developed concepts of how everything needs to be for you to be okay in there. If you are not careful, you will struggle to satisfy these needs for the rest of your life. A perfect example of this burden is the all-too-common practice of worrying. Why do you worry? There are only two reasons for worrying: you either worry that you’re not going to get what you want, or you worry that you’re going to get what you don’t want. This drives you to work outside in the world to satisfy your needs. But the root of discomfort is your stored patterns from the past. You are deciding you need to do things outside in order to appease these patterns that are inside. This does not get rid of the stored patterns—it actually reinforces your commitment to them. Over time, they will continue to bother you.
Eventually, we wake up and realize that compensating for what’s wrong is not good enough—we must solve the root cause of why we are not okay. There is a state within you that is always filled with love and a sense of happiness.
Notice that your problems all start with, “I’m not okay in here.” If you were okay, you wouldn’t be worrying and complaining. You’d be in there enjoying the beauty of the experience you’re having.
Enjoying your inner state doesn’t mean nothing will happen outside. Nobody is saying you don’t interact with the world. You just don’t interact with the world in an attempt to solve your inner problems. The outside cannot solve your inner blockages. All the outside world can do is temporarily allow the energy to go around a blockage or not hit it as much. This creates some relief, but it’s not going to get rid of the blockage.
Working on releasing inner blockages, instead of struggling with life to get what you want, can seem like something is being taken away from you. But if what is being taken away from you is causing suffering, this should not be a problem. If you’re eating something that makes you sick, and someone wants to give you food that makes you healthy, you must first stop eating what makes you sick. This is not an act of renunciation; it’s simple wisdom. Taking on this inner work does not mean you don’t get married, have a job, or fully put your heart into whatever you’re doing. You can do all of that, but not for the purpose of solving your inner problems. If you are letting the avoidance of your inner problems define what you’re doing, all you’re doing is expressing your inner problems outside. Say a psychologist held up a Rorschach inkblot and you got upset about what you saw in it. Is the solution to tell them to stop holding up that piece of paper? That would be ridiculous. You would not solve anything. Yet trying to solve inner problems by rearranging the outside is exactly what everybody is doing.
Why not go directly to the root and say, “What I want is to feel love and joy. What I want is every moment of every day to feel complete well-being as high as I’ve ever felt before, and to be inspired by everything I do.”
The simple fact that things exist will be sufficient to move you.
You only have two choices: either you devote your life to getting the world to match your samskaras, or you devote your life to letting go of your samskaras. If you choose the latter, you don’t end up with both a worldly life and a spiritual life—you end up with one life.
Every single moment of your life, you are either naturally enjoying what is or letting go of what’s keeping you from enjoying what is. If you let go of the wants and fears that are limiting you, you’ll always be okay. Letting go of yourself, instead of serving yourself, is the real paradigm shift.
Spirituality is about learning to thank your heart for the beautiful expressions it is creating within you.
It’s as though you are not evolved enough to handle the fullness of your heart, so you resist it. Just like you resist the world when it is not how you want, you resist your heart when you’re not comfortable with its expressions.
If you let an unbridled emotion act out externally, it has the power to change the course of your life—not usually for the better.
Like an instrument playing something beautiful, your heart is composing a song of sadness for you. The trouble is you’re not okay with that. Eventually you will realize that the emotion itself is not the problem—the problem is you’re not able to handle the emotion. We come back to the same place again and again: Do you want to devote your life to controlling the world so your heart never feels emotions you can’t handle? Or do you want to devote yourself to the evolutionary work of becoming comfortable with your heart?
It should be clear by now that the problem is not outside in the world; the problem is your inability to handle your heart’s full expression of the world. Learning to handle these expressions is the solution, and it is the essence of spiritual growth. Feelings of loss or fear or anger in your heart are just objects of consciousness that Self is experiencing. They cannot harm you, unless you resist them. They actually make you richer because you experienced them. Every experience makes you a greater person if you don’t resist it.
Creation has put a full orchestra inside you, free of charge. This makes life so much more interesting and vibrant. Learn to enjoy your heart by ceasing to resist it. It’s not about losing yourself in your emotions. It’s about being willing to experience them in the same way you experience a beautiful sunset. You simply let the sunset come in. You’re not doing anything. You are simply allowing awareness to be aware of what is in front of it. Sometimes it’s a beautiful sunset, sometimes it’s a sense of loss. The process is exactly the same: consciousness is experiencing an object of consciousness. You are not clinging to it or suppressing it. You are simply experiencing it.
If you cling to the object, it stays. If you suppress it, it stays. If it stays, it will distort reality. You are no longer open to life—you have a bias for or against certain things. These samskaras are powerful packets of energy. They distort your perception of life, and you constantly pay the price. When thoughts and emotions are suppressed, they rot down there. They will pop up at different times and cause serious problems in your life.
Though it is true that you don’t want to suppress emotions, you also don’t want them running your life. There is a sacred place between suppression and expression—pure experience. In this state, you are neither suppressing the energy internally nor expressing it externally. You are simply willing to experience the energy coming from your heart and mind. The sorrow of death and the joy of birth are both coming up inside and feeding your soul. They are touching you all the way to the core of your being. You are not touching them—they are touching you. There’s nothing to do about it. It is all simply a gift God is giving you. The mind is free to think; the heart is free to feel. All of this leaves you at peace, in a state of gratitude. This is the way life is meant to be.
The only data the mind currently has is based upon its past experiences, so the mind always thinks it’s right. This is part of the predicament. Please understand that your mind will always think it’s right. The mind is not dumb; it knows what it experienced. But it doesn’t know what it didn’t experience—which is an infinitely larger body of knowledge. This is why the wise sage Lao Tzu reflected that a wise man does not argue—for what purpose? You have your mindset, and another person has their mindset. All their lifelong data says one thing, and your totally different lifelong data sees it differently. There’s nothing you’re going to do about that, except be humble enough to realize that at any given moment the data you are taking in is less than .00001 percent of what’s going on everywhere. It’s meaningless; it rounds to zero. In essence, you’ve had a whole bunch of zero-breadth experiences that add up to zero. The personal mind is so caught up in itself, it will never want to look at that truth.
Deep spiritual teachings embrace that truth. They ask you to look at the world in front of you and realize it took billions of years for that exact moment to manifest before you. Accept that. Honor that. Surrender to that. This begins by first accepting reality, not resisting it. It’s not about doing or not doing anything—it’s about surrendering your initial resistance to what is. You see what’s there, and then let go of all the stuff that comes up due to your stored samskaras. Inevitably, your mind is going to start talking about likes and dislikes. Just don’t listen. Why would you listen to that? It’s just your personal blockages superimposed on reality.
You can now understand what you are accepting and surrendering to: reality. What else is there? Reality is truth, at least for the moment. It is what’s real versus past mental impressions that are simply leftover thoughts. The way to deal with these mental impressions is to realize they are perfectly natural. Reality is going to come in, it’s going to hit your blockages, and your mind is going to talk about it. Fine, be that as it may—you don’t have to listen. It’s that simple. If you know your mind doesn’t know what it’s talking about, why listen? As we’ve seen, the personal mind can’t know anything except for the data it has collected. That data is nothing compared to the universal set of data it has missed every moment. The data the mind has in there is what we…
A wise person doesn’t renounce the world; they honor the reality that’s unfolding in front of them. Likewise, a wise person doesn’t renounce the use of their mind; they just don’t listen to the personal mind because it’s lost in thoughts about itself. The personal mind is not going to solve your problems. It’s doing the best it…
If your emotions are in harmony with the reality unfolding before you, they are generally healthy and support the quality of your life. When both your heart and mind are in harmony with reality, energies don’t release outwardly because nothing is blocking them. The power of these unblocked energies passing through the lower heart can then be utilized to rise into the higher parts of the heart. Because you are neither suppressing nor expressing, the deeper spiritual states begin to unfold. You can still contribute to what’s happening outside, but your actions are not personal in nature. They are simply beautiful moment-to-moment interactions with reality that are serving the flow of life.
What it requires is a change in attitude: You begin to accept that things are going to happen, they’re going to hit your heart, and your mind is going to create thoughts to release the built-up energies. You commit to being okay with this process. This attitude of acceptance is very different from suppressing the emotions and thoughts or letting yourself get lost in them. Just honor what the heart is doing and learn to sit back and relax behind it. Emotions can become like a breeze blowing across your face—nothing to do except experience the experience.
At first, it’s not easy to relax in the face of what you’ve spent your life avoiding. But it is certainly worth it because the reward is love, freedom, and constant inspiration. After all, you’ve already been through so much pain for so little gain.
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
As long as you are holding inside of you that which bothered you ten or twenty years ago, you are going to suffer.
With positive thinking, you are continually using your will to neutralize negative thoughts with positive ones. With mantra, you are simply using your will to shift the focus of your consciousness from the samskara-generated thoughts to the mantra.
Positive thinking involves creating positive thoughts to replace the negative ones. Mantra involves creating a layer of mind that provides a peaceful and steady environment for rising above the lower layers. Witness consciousness is simply noticing that you are noticing what the mind is doing. You don’t need to interact with the mind. You don’t need to do anything. Just be the one who notices that the mind is creating thoughts, and you are aware of them. In order to do that, you can’t be disturbed by the thoughts that are being created. If the thoughts bother you, you will leave the seat of objective observation and try to change the mind. To truly achieve witness consciousness, you must be willing to let the thoughts be as they may and simply be aware that you are aware of them.
If you want to experience true witness consciousness, just look in front of you. Do you see what’s there? Don’t think about it, just see it. That’s witness consciousness. It’s just seeing. You are simply witnessing what’s there. Now, turn your head and look around. Practice the immediacy of just seeing. Notice that your thoughts often have something to say about what you see. Can you simply notice these thoughts like you noticed what was outside, or do you have to do something about them? Thoughts, emotions—they come up by themselves. Good, now simply notice them.
When you reach the state where you can observe what is going on in the mind and heart, you’ll notice that you’re not always comfortable with what’s happening inside. What is more, there is the tendency to want to willfully do something about it. That’s very natural. If you want to willfully do something, here’s what you do—relax. This is certainly not the intuitive thing to do. You want to protect yourself from the inner disturbance by getting rid of it. That struggle just makes it worse. You are capable of simply relaxing and not engaging with the disturbed energies. At first this seems impossible because you’re trying to get the disturbance itself to relax…
You are in the seat of awareness, way back inside, watching the dance of mind and heart. It’s a very natural place, this place back inside. If you don’t get pulled into the thoughts and emotions, you can just relax and notice. Don’t think about it. The moment you see what’s going on—just relax. Relax your shoulders, relax your tummy, relax your buttocks, and most importantly, relax your heart. Even if the heart itself won’t relax, the area around your heart will. You have willpower in there, use it. Here’s what you do with your will: relax and release. First relax through your initial resistance, then release the disturbed energy that comes up. When you do this, you are actually providing space for the release of the samskaras causing the disturbance. You are giving them more room to release because you’re not struggling with the…
It’s going to get uncomfortable, and that’s natural. The discomfort you are experiencing is the discomfort of samskaras being released. They were stored with pain; they are going to release with pain—if you let them. This is the pain that ends all pain.
You will find that you’re in the habit of insisting and demanding that things should be the way you want, even if it’s irrational.
If you are wise, you will start to change your reactions to reality instead of fighting with reality. By doing so, you will change your relationship with yourself and with everything else.
Use your higher mind to appreciate and respect reality instead of complaining about it. When you do this, you are willfully using your mind for something positive and constructive. You are raising yourself.
In contrast, if you let go of your reactions to a situation and there is still something in front of you to deal with, then you have some work to do outside. If you lose your job and work with letting go of your negative reaction, that’s good, but you still need to go out and look for a new job. Letting go does not absolve you of your responsibilities in life. You are not letting go of life, you are letting go of your personal reactions to life. Your personal reactions do not help you deal with situations in a constructive manner—they actually cloud your ability to make good decisions.
When all is said and done, you’re going to find the majority of your inner disturbance falls into the category of low-hanging fruit. The only reason there’s a problem is because you defined it that way. You are the problem, and that can’t be solved outside. It can only be solved inside.
Just because something bothered you in the past doesn’t mean it should still be bothering you. After all, it’s no longer happening. You think that since you don’t want to go through it again, you need to remember how bad it was. That’s like saying you need a doggy bag for the food that made you sick so you can take it home, taste it each morning, and remember how sick it made you. You would never do that with bad food, so why do you do it with bad experiences?
We are now ready to pay attention to another area that is very ripe for spiritual growth, your past. You probably won’t agree at first, but it also falls under one-hundred-percent cost and zero benefit. Of what possible benefit could it be to still be bothered by something that happened before that isn’t happening now? It’s already over. There is zero benefit to being bothered by something that is not even happening. On the other hand, there is certainly an amazing cost: your entire mental, emotional, and even physical health.
That is how all your past learning experiences should be, effortlessly there when you actually need them, never bothering you when you don’t. If you process your experiences properly, they will always be there to serve you, never to haunt you.
There’s nothing richer than a fully processed experience integrated into your whole being.
just as the same world works perfectly for everyone’s growth. If you want to see what is really out there, you need to get rid of your inner issues.
To free yourself, the moment you notice disturbance, let go. Don’t wait until that initial disturbance takes over your mind. You are perfectly aware that you’re beginning to get upset before you actually get upset. You feel it. You feel when something starts to bother you. If you want to grow spiritually, that’s the moment when you do the work.
This is the essence of spiritual growth. If you work on yourself, you’re going to create a beautiful place inside to live. This is more important than your marriage or your family. It’s more important than your job or your career. You’re working on yourself directly instead of indirectly. If you create a beautiful inner environment, you can have a wonderful marriage, a wonderful family life, and a wonderful job. But if you have a mess inside, you’ll just be trying to use these outer situations to make yourself okay.
At some point in your growth you will recognize that freeing yourself is worth the discomfort of letting go of past disturbances.
You should be able to look back on your past and say, “Thank you.”
That’s what your life is: the sequence of experiences you got to experience. Learn to love and appreciate your past. Fully embrace it, thank it for teaching you, and let go of any judgment that there was something wrong with it. Your past is uniquely yours. It happened. It’s sacred. It’s beautiful. Nobody else ever had it, and nobody else ever will. Embrace your past, hug it, kiss it—love it to death.
As you do them, always remember that your intent is to cease storing blockages.
There are many forms of meditation, but the bottom line of all of them is letting go of your addiction to focusing on your thoughts. Focus on your breath, count, do mantra, feel the energy—in other words, focus on anything except the thoughts arising in your mind.
Relaxing and releasing on the meditation cushion is the same process as relaxing and releasing during daily activity. Eventually, you will find that you remain clearer throughout the day—you are always aware of what is going on both inside and outside. This clarity of presence is one of the gifts of meditation.
The reason you sit down to meditate is to learn how to remain conscious inside while your mind creates thoughts and your heart creates emotions. Whatever is going on in there is fine—as long as you can objectively observe it. This is called mindful meditation.
Every practice session is about learning. Likewise, there is no such thing as a bad meditation—there is just practicing being aware of what is going on in there.
To appreciate the purpose of spiritual techniques, you have to realize that you are addicted to your mind. You’re more addicted to your mind than people are to drugs. In fact, the reason many people start doing drugs is to get away from their mind’s incessant chatter. That’s also why some people start drinking—the mind can be impossible to live with. If you are like most people, you are addicted to every single word your mind says. If your mind suddenly says, “I don’t like it here, I want to leave,” you leave. If it says, “I think something good will come from being here, I want to stay for a while,” you stay. You are absorbed in your thoughts, and you follow whatever the mind says. In essence, your mind is your guru, and you need to back off from that relationship.
You are the consciousness, and the mind is the object of consciousness. You must be able to withdraw your attention from the mind, even when the mind is talking.
The reason you lose focus on your breath is that consciousness gets distracted by what your mind is saying. In other words, you stopped watching your breath, and you started watching your mind. The moment you catch on that you’ve done that, don’t get down on yourself. Just start watching your breath again. The entire purpose is to practice gaining control of your attention so that it becomes yours again. What you pay attention to determines your experiences in life. You should have the right to consciously decide what to pay attention to. Until you learn to back away from the mind, you have no choice; you pay attention to whatever your mind says.
Now it’s just a question of your level of commitment. Every single time you start to get disturbed, are you willing to relax and release? Or do you still need to go through another round of expressing and defending your blockages?
Real spiritual practice entails devoting every moment of your life to your liberation. Life is your real guru. It’s challenging you to either move further away from Self or come back to Self. Life is your friend. Everything that happens in life is an opportunity to get better at freeing yourself from yourself—dying to be reborn. If you sincerely work on releasing the low-hanging fruit, and if you remain centered in the seat of Self as your past samskaras are released, you will become a more conscious being. You will no longer have to come back to center after a difficult conversation, you will remain centered during the entire experience. At first, this is difficult. Just keep working on it. Make this the most important thing in your life—because it is. It really is the only rational way to live your life. It’s not a religious technique; it’s simply deciding to wake up and make something great of yourself.
If you are sincere on this path, what do you do? First let go. Always let go of your human reaction first. If you are upset and cannot deal with the situation, what good are you? If you can’t handle the sight of blood, you are of no use at the scene of an accident. First let go of your personal reaction so that you can serve the situation to the best of your ability.
You’re not supposed to be interacting with the world outside based on your blockages inside. All that personal talk has nothing to do with the problem at hand. It has to do with the fact that this situation hit your blockages, and now you’re reacting to your issues instead of your child’s issue. If you allow that to happen, you’re going to make every decision based on what makes you feel better, which is likely not what is best for the situation at hand.
If you take things personally, you will try to protect yourself by avoiding disturbing experiences. But difficult situations present an opportunity to change that dynamic. The way to do that is to let go of your entire personal reaction to the situation. You just let it go. You don’t let go of the situation—you let go of your reaction to the situation.
Bottom line, you let go of the personal so you can interact properly with what’s in front of you. It’s the same thing in business. You’re in a meeting, and they’re discussing a project. You have a bright idea that you want to contribute. So you put it out there, but it gets shot down. That hurts. Of course it does. You have an ego in there, and it’s going to get bothered. Now for the rest of the meeting, either you don’t contribute anything because you’re sulking, or you keep bringing up proof that what you said wasn’t so dumb. You no longer belong in that meeting. Your presence has become about you, not about the project. You can’t work like that.
Your underlying motive can’t ever be about you. It has to be about serving what’s happening in front of you. To the absolute best of your ability, you always serve life as it unfolds before you.
The blockages inside you that generate personal thoughts and emotions are nothing but leftover samskaras. They are based on past issues you couldn’t handle, and they will tend to lead you in the wrong direction. Learn to express your higher Self. Express the deeper part of your being that’s in harmony with life.
you want to grow spiritually, if you want to have a beautiful life instead of a midlife crisis, you need to do the inner work.
A midlife crisis happens when you’ve been building and clinging and fighting for half your life in order to be okay, and you’re not. You’re simply not free and at peace inside, even though you have the kids, the marriage, the job. As it turns out, midlife crises are perfectly reasonable. It’s surprising more people don’t have them. Halfway through your life, you realize it hasn’t worked—you’re still not okay. Sure, you’re okay as long the spouse behaves, the kids do well in school, and you get respect at your job. As long as all this happens, and your finances hold up, you’re conditionally okay. But inside you know it can change on a dime, so you must keep struggling to stay ahead. That’s why life is a struggle.
Basically, you won the lottery! You dropped down onto this phenomenal planet that’s always exciting, challenging, and growthful. It has all sorts of colors, shapes, and sounds—it’s unbelievably amazing. Yet, what do you do? You suffer. Why? It’s not the planet causing you to suffer—it’s the stuff you have stored inside.
The logical questions become: Why are you storing all this stuff inside you? And if you’re going to store stuff inside, why not make it nice stuff? People collect all sorts of things as hobbies. Some collect spoons, teacups, stamps, or coins from all over the world. But you had a brilliant idea for a hobby—let’s collect bad experiences. That’s what you did: “I’m going to collect every bad experience I ever had and keep it inside me so it can bother me for the rest of my life.” How can that work out well? If you keep doing it, you’re going to collect more and more bad experiences, and your life will get heavier and heavier.
In essence, you are causing yourself to be unhappy, then you’re going outside and demanding that the world somehow make you happy. The world cannot make you happy while you’re inside making yourself unhappy. It’s that simple.
Understanding this process of blocking and then expressing energies helps us have compassion for our own past behaviors, as well as for others. Compassion means you understand the root cause of people’s behavior. People have trouble handling their blocked energies, and in most cases, they have not been taught how to channel the energies to a higher level. There is a higher level of our being, and those lower energies can be raised up. You have access to a much higher way to deal with inner energies than to simply step aside and let them express. That doesn’t mean they should be suppressed. Your choices are not limited to expression or suppression. As we will discuss, there’s a third choice, transmutation, and that’s where true spirituality comes in.
Suppression blocks inner energy; unchanneled expression wastes its power.
That is what transmutation of the energy means. It involves using the rising energy as a positive force by allowing it to cleanse whatever was blocking it.
The transmutation of the inner energy flow is the answer to all the world’s woes. If people felt whole inside and were fed by the constant flow of love and deep peace, they wouldn’t be fighting with each other.
It is only because people are struggling inside that they are driven to struggle outside.
“I came down to the planet Earth for a short time, and these are the experiences I got to have. They were challenging, but I handled them and am better off because of them.”
You are the Self. You are the conscious witness of all that passes before you. You dwell deep inside, and nothing in there is more powerful than you. You have free will; use it to accept what has already happened rather than letting past events mess up the rest of your life. Free yourself from these samskaras. Transmute your blocked energy flow into a powerful spiritual force.
Inner work is different from outer work. In the outside world, there are things you may not be able to accomplish because of physical limitations. Try as you will, you cannot pick up a mountain or run at the speed of light. You have physical limitations. But inside you have no such limitations because there is no physical aspect to Self. You are pure consciousness, and your will has complete dominion over mind and emotions.
Do you want to be free to live a deep, beautiful life more than you want to avoid discomfort? Plenty of drug addicts have gone through the pain of withdrawal to get their lives back. It comes down to the old adage: where there’s a will, there’s a way. You can let your blockages go—if you really want to.
Surrender is about letting go of weakness and being committed enough to carry out your intent. Surrender is handling anything that needs to be released inside and letting it pass through.
If you are sincere, you use the situation for your growth. It’s not the time to argue with the person; it’s the time to grow spiritually. Calm and centered, you inwardly ask, “What’s happening inside of me? What blockage got hit that caused this shift in energy to take place?” Then, to use the situation for growth, you relax and allow the energy to push the blockage up. You don’t have to do anything except not interfere with the process. Shakti will do her job of pushing up—you have to do your job of letting go.
To remember to do this in the moment, establish the practice of recalling your intention every morning: “The purpose of my day is letting go of my blockages and evolving spiritually.” Then every evening, remember: “The purpose of my day was to let go of my blockages and evolve spiritually.” Never complain about what happened—just inwardly release the events of the day so they don’t leave samskaras. Don’t let anything remain stuck in there. Once you get good at this, you will learn to do it throughout the day. Do your best with each interaction, then let it go.
Letting go like this is not a struggle or an act of control. It is much subtler than that. Perhaps this analogy will help. Imagine you’re in a game of tug-of-war. You are alone on one end of the rope, and an entire NFL football team is on the other end. You’re in big trouble. The force pulling you in the team’s direction is very strong. You’ve studied all the latest techniques for how to dig in your heels, how to best use your bodyweight, and anything else the experts could teach about standing your ground in a tug-of-war. You’re doing all the techniques, but they’re not working. Suddenly, Yoda, the great sage from Star Wars shows up to help (he thinks everyone’s name is Luke). Yoda: Luke, you know not how to do this. Let go. Let go, Luke. Luke: What do you mean, let go? If I let go, they will pull me through the mud, headfirst. Yoda: Let go, you must. Luke: I don’t get it. How do I just let go when this great force is pulling on me? Yoda: Relax hands, Luke. Relax your hands. Luke: No, not hands—feet, legs, and body position. That’s how to end this tug-of-war. Yoda: Over it will be, Luke, if you relax your hands.
Just relax and let go, and the whole struggle will be over. That’s exactly what it’s like to surrender. You’re in there, and the energy is pulling you into it. Please don’t fight it. Just relax your inner hands and let go.
You don’t need to be strong; you need to be wise. The blocked energy can’t take you anywhere if you simply relax and let go.
Over time, you will find there is a place inside you that is behind the commotion of the storm. You can simply relax and fall back into that place. This is the place from which you are noticing the inner commotion, and this place is still, quiet, and there are never any storms. That is the seat of Self. You don’t find your way back to Self—you simply cease to leave. If you work on this, you will come to a beautiful state within that is always there for you. It is a place of refuge, and all you ever need to do is keep letting go. That is the life of surrender.
Imagine you’re feeling depressed and not doing well. Suddenly, something happens. Perhaps you receive a phone call that gets you talking and smiling—it makes your energy flow. The energy was always there, but you opened up because the phone call matched something you liked. A blockage temporarily got out of the way, and all this energy flowed up. Truth is, if that blockage had not been in the way, you would not have needed the phone call to open you. This is why you do the inner work of releasing blockages.
Most people don’t believe life can be like this. They feel they must find the perfect job in order to be enthused to go to work. How are you defining “the perfect job”? You define it as the one that opens you. In other words, the one that fits your blockages just right so your energy can flow. Problem is, if the same job ever hits your blockages the wrong way, you will close. You are still letting your samskaras run your life. It’s not a matter of finding the right job; it’s a matter of releasing the blockages so you can be enthused about the job you have.