Everything starts with a shift of consciousness
Throughout this article I will use the term of waking up and by waking up I am pointing to a shift in our consciousness where we can notice a subtle but distinct separation between the thoughts we have and ourselves. To wake up is a lovely experience but it will not guarantee a joyful ride all of the time. The process will have us moving through a lot of states, both joyful ones as well as dreadful ones.
But no matter how disrupting or difficult you experience the process of ”waking up” I can guarantee that you have taken one of the most important steps in your life.
Instead of being lost in thought you are now able to sense a presence behind your thoughts. By being lost in your thoughts I am not speaking about what happens when we are ”daydreaming” but to the state where most of us live from. In the midst of a constant stream of thoughts and ideas which are filling our minds every moment of our waking time. All of them auditioning for our attention.
When we start to feel and recognise the presence behind our thoughts they will gradually start to lose their power over us.
When we wake up we sometimes see how strange we lived before. From our new perspective it becomes so clear to us and we might see our former life as odd and peculiar. We also notice that our former way of dealing with relationships to other people as well as the environment around us had a sense of carelessness to it.
From this point of reference it might seem like our former way of being was an expression of some kind of madness. But it is also an innocent madness because when we live it, it is very hard for us to see what is mad about it. Discovering this comes with an ability to see the same way of madness around us. We can now see how the craziness is acting out everywhere around us, in our friends and in the people we meet.
We also notice that now we have more room to be graceful with the ”wrong-doing” of others as well as our own wrong-doing.
We simply stop judging
…but that is however not the entire truth.
The ego is dead, long live the ego
When vi separate ourselves from our ”old” self, which was driven by our ego (our self image) it is easy to express ourselves from a new ego. The only difference is that this new ego somewhat is of a higher order. And despite the fact that we see our old self with more kindness we find that we are not as free from judgemental thinking as we thought we were. The judgementalness lingers because we still entertain an idea that we are slightly better than others, that we understand more.
To know or understand more is one of the egos most recognised trademarks, no matter which form it might take.
In a way it is true that we understand more and that we might risen above our previous madness and that we are now able to live in more harmony but our judgemental thinking still is a part of our life. The difference and why it might remain unnoticed is that it now has a more subtle and finer costume that blends in. Our old ego has been kicked out and we are now ”driven” by our spiritual ego.
Don’t bring to much meaning into why we allowed this to happen. It doesn’t mean that we are on the wrong path, or that we fell of the wagon, or lost ourselves in anyway more than temporarily . It simply means that we have more to discover, more to learn (or unlearn depending on our preferred view point). The act of discovering and realising that our new ego is driving is everything that is necessary to remove its power. It will lose influence over us simply because we are able to see it from a place behind it. This is good news because it is impossible to really see ourselves which means that we can’t be the same thing as we see.
We are the observer and what we see is our ego, which if we look closer, we can realize is made of nothing more than thoughts. If we pay attention we see that our ego, our ability to judge other and ourselves are just thoughts in our heads. This is one of the most profound realizations we can make.
I’ll be darned, it is ”just” thoughts
From this mental position we can also see that all our feelings, emotions about things, situations and people is made of the same energy. Energy that rises in our consciousness as the stuff we call thoughts. From the position of the one that sees we can also notice something else. If we listen carefully we can sense the emptiness that surrounds our thoughts. And if we are able to remain here we can notice something really profound. It is best described as a feeling. A feeling with no content, without other feelings. Some say is like coming home, a sense of freedom and peace in a way they have never experienced before.
This state is what I sometimes call inner peace or peaceful joy and this is our most natural state of being. By natural state of being I mean the most fundamental state which means that this is what we always have with us, it is our most true expression. If our thinking and what we feel is the foreground this is the background.
This is our experience when we have moved beyond our intellect with its constant stream of thoughts that overwhelms us. In a way one can say that we are being hypnotized by our thoughts. The good news is that this experience, this feeling, this mental position if you will is always available for us.
We hear it, feel it when we reach our core, our most natural expression.
What if everything is perfect, even the very things that seems like madness
When we reach our natural state of being we are aware of how perfect everything is. From this mental position we see beauty everywhere, no matter how simple and plain it might appear. This is available for us because from our most natural state of being we are in tune with our surrounding. We are in fact in tune with ourselves simply because we have removed what was in the way. So to be in harmony with our environment we first need to be in harmony with ourselves. This is great news because we always carry our wisest teacher with us. Everything we need to be able to discover this we already have with us. The feelings we notice in ourselves are like a barometer for our inner weather.
The more peace we feel, the more in harmony we are. True peace and harmony always travels together.
On a deeper level we might sense that we are not apart from nature at all but that we are beautifully intertwined. There are just different manifestations of the same life force. This state of being also allows us to have an open mind and embrace the seemingly ruthless progression of the human race as something perfect.
Without our fears and delusions of right and wrong everything is exactly the way it should be. How could it be anything different?