One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.
What it doesn’t say – but only points to – is more important than what it says.
The ego could be defined simply in this way: a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment.
When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love – even the most simple action.
So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action – just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, nonattachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of “consecrated action.
When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself. Once you have given that up, all your other relationships will be love relationships.
In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer.
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep you inner space clear.
When you accept what is, every moment is the best moment. That is enlightenment.
It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have?
What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn’t work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more and keep buying and consuming.
Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence.
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly – you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense. The light or sound does not care about what you or anybody else thinks. You are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of yourself, the mind-made substitute.
A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking.
The mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional.
Nobody’s life is entirely free of pain and sorrow. Isn’t it a question of learning to live with them rather than trying to avoid them?
Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life – to allow life to live through you.
Coming from Being, you will perceive another person’s body and mind as just a screen, as it were, behind which you can feel their true reality, as you feel yours. So, when confronted with someone else’s suffering or unconscious behavior, you stay present and in touch with Being and are thus able to look beyond the form and feel the other person’s radiant and pure Being through your own.
When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.