Awakening the truth of you.
All the peace,
Joy and love that you could want are closer than you've ever imagined.
They are your very nature,
Merely veiled by the mist of your mind,
By what you think you know with your conditioned conceptual mind.
From our earliest infancy,
We humans begin to experience a spiritual sleep or forgetting.
The mind creates abstract interpretations of the world and who we are.
We gradually forget or lose awareness of our own beingness,
Our true self,
And each of us becomes caught up in a constructed sense of self,
An ego,
Self-concept or idea of who we are.
Through a variety of subtle yet powerful mechanisms your conditioned assumptions about yourself and life have become self-fulfilling and have created your life experience,
Your karma.
And sooner or later,
Life is inevitably felt to be unsatisfying,
If not troubling or downright unbearable,
When it has been created out of conditioned ways of seeing ourselves and life that have no ultimate reality.
We experience this as disturbing thoughts and emotions,
Stress,
Illness,
General unhappiness and discontent,
In short,
As suffering.
The three most commonly tried methods of dealing with suffering don't work more than momentarily.
Almost universally,
People try to block out troubling thoughts and the unpleasant emotions they trigger with diversions.
But whether they be general diversions like television and shopping,
Or more intense mind-body altering activities such as legal and illegal drugs,
Sooner or later they are over and thoughts flood in again.
Trying to push unwanted thoughts away or stop them doesn't work either.
It's easy to quickly discover for yourself that suppressing a thought doesn't work.
Give yourself 10 seconds right now and try to not think about a red balloon.
Ready?
Start.
How did you go?
Were you free of red balloon thoughts?
Finally,
Most people try to avoid troubling thoughts by focusing on positive thoughts.
It seems logical enough,
Doesn't it?
But there's no good without bad.
Whenever you're buying into the conditioned mind's game of labelling things good and bad,
You can't prefer one without being fearful of the other.
And that is the recipe for suffering.
What to do?
Well,
The key is to realise that it's not thoughts as such that take away your peace.
It is not thoughts that draw your attention away from the awareness self that you truly are.
It is believing your thoughts to be true,
Especially your thoughts of good and bad.
But the conditioned mind's thoughts and judgments of good and bad are not part of reality.
They're not true.
The history of philosophy,
Both modern and ancient,
Western and Eastern,
Is replete with this recognition that no conceptual idea can ever be shown to be true for certain.
But they may generally be easily shown to be false.
Let's look briefly at how you can deal with negative thoughts about yourself.
First,
Through your childhood,
Your teens,
And your adult life,
You've always felt that you were you,
That's a constant.
That sense of being me is who you truly are.
That's the formless consciousness or presence that's always been there in the background,
So to speak,
The observer or the witness of what you've been experiencing throughout your life.
But have your roles changed?
Have any beliefs about yourself changed?
Surely they have.
So none of the roles that you've had can mean anything about who you actually are because you've always been you,
Even though you've had lots of different roles in your life.
Any thought you've ever had about who you are,
Any concept,
Any definition,
Any judgment,
Has nothing to do with who you are.
You are the formless awareness that has noticed those thoughts that I'm such and such a kind of person,
Or I'm this job.
I'm an important person because I'm a doctor,
Or I'm not an important person because I'm not a doctor,
Or I'm not good enough.
All these concepts and judgments of ourselves,
They come and go,
And none of them can be true because any particular negative judgment that you've ever had about yourself,
You can also look at times when you felt the opposite or were told by somebody the opposite.
It's like three weeks ago I had this feeling that I'm a bad person,
And yet yesterday I really felt like,
Oh,
I said or did such and such,
And I feel like a good person.
So bad person can't be who you are because then you had an experience that you felt like you're a good person,
And somebody else said that you're a good person.
But good person also can't be who you are because there's been times when you felt you're a bad person.
All these mind games that the conditioned judging mind plays are nothing whatever to do with truth,
Reality or who we are.
Everything bad that you have ever believed about yourself is false.
It was just the judging play of the conditioned mind,
Just a figment of imagination.
For most of humanity,
What is getting in the way of our being awake to the peace-filled aware presence that is our true nature is that we identify with the thoughts that are continually popping into our mind.
We think they're true,
And we think that they're who we are.
When we mistakenly identify with thoughts or with the emotions that are triggered by believing our thoughts,
We are distracted from the formless awareness that is who we truly are.
Huge benefits will flow from identifying and questioning your thought patterns and discovering that you actually don't know for certain that they're true.
You will release yourself from their hold.
You will crack wide open the karmic prison,
Which is merely your conditioned assumptions.
Then what comes to the fore,
Kind of bubbles up within your consciousness,
Is this lovely sense of presence,
This reality of who you are.
Sometimes having a flavour of peacefulness,
Sometimes of playfulness,
Sometimes of lovingness,
Sometimes of intuition and creativity.
This is truly being yourself.
