The very fact that you can see the disturbance means that you are not it.
If you want to achieve peace in the face of your problems, you must understand why you percieve a particular situation as a problem.
Do not doubt your ability to remove the root cause of the disturbance inside of you. It really can go away. You can look deep within yourself, to the core of your being, and decide that you don’t want the weakest part of you running your life. You want to be free of this.
You must be willing to be present right at the place of the tightness and pain, and then relax and go even deeper.
You gain nothing by being bothered by life’s events. It doesn’t change the world; you just suffer. There’s always going to be something that can bother you, if you let it.
In truth, pain is the price of freedom. And the moment you are willing to pay that price, you will no longer be afraid. The moment you are not afraid of the pain, you’ll be able to face all of life’s situations without fear.
If with one breath all of this can change, then I want to live at the highest level while I’m alive. I’m going to stop bothering the people I love. I’m going to live life from the deepest part of my being.
And it’s not just when you try to be quiet. It has something to say about everything you look at: “I like it. I don’t like it. This is good. That’s bad.” It just talks and talks. You don’t generally notice because you don’t step back from it. You’re so close that you don’t realize that you’re actually hypnotized into listening to it.
You are not your thoughts; you are aware of your thoughts. You are not your emotions; you feel emotions. You are not your body; you look at it in the mirror and experience this world through its eyes and ears. You are the conscious being who is aware that you are aware of all these inner and outer things.
How can anyone really know anything about God? We have so many teachings, so many concepts, and so many views about God. But they’ve all been touched by people. In the end, it’s amazing how much our ideas about God conform to the different cultures from which they come.
You can live a life completely free from the fears of the psyche. You just have to know how to do it. Let’s take smoking as an example. It is not hard to understand how to stop smoking. The key word is “stop.” It really doesn’t matter what patches you use; when it is all said and done, you simply must stop.
The key is to learn to keep your mind disciplined enough so that it doesn’t trick you into thinking that this time it’s worth closing.
What if you knew that this evening would be the last time you’d get to see them? Imagine that an angel comes down and tells you, “Straighten up your affairs. You will not awake from your sleep tonight. You’re coming to me.” Then you’d know that every person you see that day, you’d be seeing for the last time. How would you feel? How would you interact with them?
It doesn’t matter what others do, unless you decide that it matters to you.
This flow has been called Shakti. This flow has been called Spirit. This is what you begin to experience if you hang out with the Self instead of hanging out with inner disturbances.
We now experience the daily need to defend our self-concepts rather than our bodies.
A cage by any other name is still a cage.
Creating thoughts, holding onto thoughts, recalling thoughts, generating emotions, controlling emotions, and disciplining powerful inner drives, all require a tremendous expenditure of energy.
The difference is that when your consciousness is not centered within, it becomes totally focused on the objects of consciousness.
You do not want this stuff inside your heart. To feel great love and freedom, to find the presence of God within you, all of this stored pain must go. It is in this inner work that spirituality becomes a reality. Spiritual growth exists in that moment when you are consciously willing to pay the price of freedom. You must be willing at all times, in all circumstances, to remain conscious in the face of pain and to work with your heart by relaxing and remaining open.