A mind that learns
to let go gradually returns to its inherent wholeness, happiness, and
simplicity.
Our lives are filled
with useless battles because our minds are filled with useless thoughts. We never finish thinking about anything.
If it were possible
to summarize all mystical teachings in a single sentence, this one would come
close: Make your state of mind more important than what you are doing.
Whenever our desire
is for people to change or circumstances to go our way, we are not taking
responsibility for our state of mind.
Because now all we can do is be a victim and wait to be saved.
Problems assault us
to the degree they preoccupy us. The key
to release, rest, and inner freedom is not the elimination of external
difficulties. It is letting go of our
pattern of reactions to those difficulties.
We only need to be
as we were created -- effortless, present, and free.
Anxiety produces
chemical changes that the body grows used to, and addiction to anxiety in its
various manifestations is perhaps the most common of all addictions.
Emotions don't
arrive from nowhere. They fall and rise
on the waves of our thoughts.
As a general rule,
humans become more inflexible, fearful, and irritable the older they get.
If nothing else, age
brings experience. So why does it also
bring increased stubbornness, ill humor, impatience, and misery? Because we totally neglect our minds. We start out with sparkling new minds, and we
do absolutely nothing to keep them that way.
"Do no more
harm" is always the first step.
Question the
practicality of indulging in thoughts of guilt, remorse, and regret over the
mistakes you have made. These thoughts
are a form of self-indulgence. You are
failing to take responsibility for your state of mind, because your state of
mind is still not being used to heal damage.
Look carefully at your thoughts, and you will see that they are all
about you and not actually about the one you think you mistreated.
Guilty and
remorseful thoughts do not help, heal, or comfort the person you think you have
hurt.
Emotions have become
our new inner self, taking the place once occupied by the soul, the spirit, or
the conscience…. Look at the dilemma we have gotten ourselves into by deciding
that our emotions are our truest self.
How can we be ourself if our self if changing ever few minutes, as
emotions invariably do?
Awakening is not
dying, or going somewhere else, or attaining an exalted spiritual state. When
the presence of the Divine is more dominant in our experience than the presence
of chaos, we are awake. For most of us, this
is a gradual process. As we increasingly
think and act from the part of us that is still, gentle, and deeply connected
to all things, it is as if this part expands.
Our thoughts are more natural, our perceptions more comforting, our
actions less jolting to ourselves and others, and we feel and become
increasingly real.
