The Teacher Within

When you sit alone in silence, ask yourself - "How do I know anything?"  Where does the answer appear within you? Does it appear in your mind, in your heart or somewhere else. Is it a feeling or a knowing?

The knowledge we have exists within us from a variety of sources. The ones that stay with us over the long haul can be called powerful teachers. They may be friends, relatives, teachers, authors, artists or books we have read. Some of the most powerful teachers are personal experiences - experiences that are so strong they will be ingrained in us for the rest of our life.

The Teacher Within, surprisingly, may come from people and experiences we have never met and have never had in this lifetime.  The Teacher Within may arise in us from past relatives that lived thousands and even millions of years ago.  The knowing that each one of us has within us may be, in part, a melange of all kinds of different teachers past as well as present. And they may even be part of the future.

Perhaps part of the teacher within you is the training you have had as a professional. You are so proficient and knowledgeable on a subject you can move smoothly and confidently through it without hesitation. What you know is so profound it seems like the absolute truth and you know it well. The truth within you is an authority that you know so well you could talk about it for hours or even write a book about it. The teacher within you has been learned and is so deeply-rooted it has become a very deep knowing.  This is your Teacher Within.   

The Teacher Within can come out at unexpected times and feel like intuition, a sixth sense or divination. I had to visit a sick relative one time who was so weak he could barely breathe. In preparing to pack my bags I accidentally came across an old American Indian flute that someone gave me several years back. I thought that maybe the flute would be a good gift to take him.  Knowing that he liked American Indian stuff, I thought it might cheer him up. I picked the flute up and began blowing out a tune and realized it wasn't easy to play. It took more breath to blow than most of my regular flutes. And then something told me to give it to him as a gift with the instructions to learn one simple tune, one note at a time. It became a healing device for his lungs.  His lungs got stronger and he got well.

Observe the self

Everybody has their own bubbles and some people are so wrapped up in their bubbles, they can't get out.  The condition is called "bubble wrap."  They believe they are their bubbles. In other words, they think they are their feelings, thoughts, values, symptoms, behavior and body.

To go beyond this thinking and become enlightened of the fact that you are none of those things is to think nothing of thoughts. Don't take your thoughts seriously. Allowing all of that stuff to pass by and not be attached is to live in a world without worry, anxiety, desires, depression, distress, apprehension and all the other physiological and psychological phenomena that is usually accepted as part of life.  If you don't wake up from this endemic unawareness and self-absorption you can very easily end up like 99% of all the other people on this planet, blinded by your own mercurial thoughts, living your entire life not knowing the true nature of the Self. What a pity that would be.

Is there a magic pill for getting out of this horror show?  Yes there is. It's called meditation and mindfulness. Meditation is the ability to sit quietly and view one's thoughts. Just observe them without getting caught up in their antics. If you sit down to meditate and a thought comes up such as, "Oh, I better go call Mom before I forget," and you get up; you just got caught up in the antics of the thought. Thoughts are very, very tricky. Watch out for their antics.

You can do the same thing with the body. Meditate on it. Sit or lie down and simply feel the whole, entire body - its aches, pains, sounds, pulses, energy and whatever else it might exude. When you begin to notice your thoughts quieting and settling down into calming silence, begin mindful inquiry by dropping this question into the silence. . . "Who is doing the observing?"  Notice what answer comes to you. Continue to be in the silence and when you are ready, ask the question again. . . "Who is doing the observing?"  Sit in silence and continue to listen. Be in the silence and softly repeat the question two or three more times.  This is the healing power of mindfulness.

On the next post I will discuss the Teacher Within.

Bubbles

It may come as a shock but you are not your feelings or your thoughts or your values or your symptoms or your behavior or your body.  What you are is the observer of all those things. You are really much more than these physiological and psychological phenomena. You are a much higher entinty beyond the scope of imagination and speculation. One way to understand this anomaly is to picture the six phenomena (feelings, thoughts, values, symptoms, behavior, body) as expanding and contracting bubbles. Some of them are floating around by themselves while others may be clinging together and even coming together as one larger bubble, and you are simply watching them. You, in fact, are not any of them.

You are watching the bubbles float around in the spaciousness of the infinite universe - sometimes you get caught in the bubbles and sometimes you are far away from them.  Your distance from the bubbles depends on your consciousness and how aware you are of the bubbles. When you become unaware, you get closer, and when you are very conscious and aware, you get further away. When you get caught in a bubble you think you are that bubble. When you lose awareness, for example, you may merge with the feelings bubble and feel lonely because no one is around. Or you might merge with the values bubble and believe everyone should have your value of being a yogi. But when you are distant from the bubbles you can observe them and not be affected by them.  In fact, when you are pure, unmitigated awareness you might find it humorous how the bubbles float around in space without affecting you. You are unaffected by any of them and you can simply observe yourself.

This is what is meant by witnessing the self. The self is absorbed in some or all of the bubbles all of the time.  The self is so caught up in beliefs, values, judgments, etc. it doesn't have time to consider the fact that it is not any of those things. The inability to recognize these behavioral symptoms will wreak havoc on your psyche and physiology.  Over a long period of time these phenomena will produce hate, futility, pessimism, guilt, regret, and all kinds of negative thoughts. So, how do you develop the ability to observe the self and become free?  That is the discussion on my next post.

Negative Thoughts, Emotions, and Reactions

It seems that the future of the human condition is to be inevitably stuck in a quagmire of rambling thoughts. That is a thought I had today while sitting with a group of like-minded people.  It was our Sunday morning meditation group and although we are like-minded (we like to meditate), we were arguing, and I use the term loosely, about Patajali's yoga sutra 2.22 which has to do with the perceiver and the existence of objects. The original premise of the topic was that happiness and misery are largely dependent on one's perception of the world.  The conversation started with talking about how some people interpret this particular sutra to mean that the world is full of pain and misery and the best one can do is hope for a better life after death.  Others thought that the real meaning of the sutra is that this world is a beautiful place and it just takes realizing that fact.  One person said that he agreed with the interpretation of beauty and then another person said she didn't.  And then another person said he didn't agree with it either and then another person said it all has to do with judgment. The conversation went from  yoga sutra 2.22 to how people from India perceive Westerners. And around and around it went.

Even among like-minded people there will be disagreements. But the truth of matter is, we can all agree to disagree and still be friends. It is absolutely ridiculous to get angry at one another just because we don't agree on something.  But disagreements turning to war is what we see happening between nations all the time.

My point in all this has to do with how we humans like to talk about our beliefs and what we think is true. Our thoughts govern what comes out of our mouths and the more we profess to know what is true, the more we believe it to be true. Random thoughts can become contagious and contagious thoughts can become poignant and absolute. Everybody wants to change everybody except themselves. Everybody, without exception, has an ego.  There is no denying that. I think there is a problem, however, when the ego gets stuck in believing that there is only one truth and everybody must believe it to be so.  The ego can get out of control and become dangerous.

If you are open minded and aware when the ego gets stuck you can back off, take a deep breath and say that there may be another way - just maybe.  By simply recognizing this larger than life ego will dissolve its power and allow positive energy to flow through you.  Love is the purest form of positive energy. In order to allow that positive energy of love to flow all you have to do is stop thinking for awhile, open your heart, relax, and feel it. It is like magic. It will come to you immediately.

The self and ego are intertwined - part 2

In the last post I talked about how the ego can be projected outwardly and harm others.  But the ego can also be projected inwardly and do harm not only to the one with the ego but to other people as well.  A very good friend of mine who I went through grade school and high school with, killed himself.  He left behind a wife and two children.  He was in graduate school working on his Ph.D..  He had all of his course work done and was trying to finish up his dissertation - the worst part of getting a doctorate. His manuscript for the dissertation had been turned down several times by his committee and he was very distraught. His goal was to get his doctorate come hell or high water. His wife found him slumped over his desk at home one evening with a suicide note.  He had shot himself in the head. He couldn't take it any longer and didn't see life worth living. He was so attached to achieving his Ph.D. that he completely lost sight of everything that really meant the world to him - his family and friends.  It was a tragedy for everyone concerned.

We can see the ego in our selves and how it can harm if we take the time to observe. For example, if you are in a relationship and one of your values is intimacy but your partner's value is acceptance, you could do great harm to yourself as well as your partner if you aren't aware of your thoughts and actions.  The desire to share personal feelings may be so strong in you you lose sight of your actions and your partner's desire for being left alone for the time being.  The desire for intimate sharing could well up in you like a pressure cooker to the point where you could become very ill.  High blood pressure, anxiety, depression, head ache, joint pain, sore back could all be symptoms of lack of fulfilling your desire; in this case the desire for sharing personal feelings.

The ability to observe your thoughts is an important part of awareness.  It is sometimes called mindfulness - mindful of one's own thoughts. Being able to observe your thoughts as though you are an observer watching thoughts occur from your own head is an invaluable tool.  The ability to observe your own thoughts gives you distance from those thoughts and the realization that you are not the thoughts.  In fact, it is quite amazing, sometimes, the way thoughts appear and disappear as though they are coming and going without any effort. It is also interesting to observe how they can produce emotions and reactions. When you can observe your thoughts you have won half the battle of surviving your negative thoughts. The other half is the ability to see how those negative thoughts create emotions and reactions.

On the next post I'll talk about those negative thoughts, emotions and reactions. 

The self and ego are intertwined

The self is the way you are in life. It is your perceptions, desires, memories, judgments, and intellectual functioning (reasoning). The self is who you think you are; your name, thoughts of the past and future, likes and dislikes, the person you call "Me," "Mine," "My," and "I".  The self is not the same thing as the ego.

The ego is when you believe that your self is better, or even worse, than someone else. The ego suddenly appears when you believe your self is separate from the outside world (objective world). For most people this is most of the time. But I need to stress that it is not necessarily bad. The belief of duality is simply what has evolved over millions of years as discussed in the last post. It is a way of surviving in a world of critters and situations that could kill or do you harm.

However, a problem arises when you become attached to the ego, become identified with it, and someone gets hurt in the process.  For example, let's say Sally's number one value is intimacy when it comes to relationships.  She believes that intimacy is the only way two people can stay together in a loving relationship. According to Sally, anything else is purely artificial and could never last.  Tom and Mary, on the other hand, value acceptance and take separate vacations every year. He like to do his thing and she likes to do her thing. Sally can't understand how Tom and Mary can stand to be apart for two whole weeks unless, of course, they are mad at one another. Sally's attachment to her value of intimacy is being projected outward to Tom and Mary. She expects other people to have the same value she has. "Surely something must be wrong with their marriage," she thinks. She begins telling other people about Tom and Mary and how their marriage is on the rocks. This begins a vicious rumor within the community and before long, everybody is talking about how Tom and Mary can't get along.

This is just one little example of how someones attachment to their value, which is part of their ego, can become harmful. The self has a thought about how other people are different - the ego appears. The ego has a thought about how the difference is wrong - a judgment. The ego expects other people to have the same value - expectation. The expectation can feed on itself and become a very strong desire to make other people adhere to its desire. That is when an ego can become dangerous.

In the next post I will show how the ego can be projected inwardly and do harm to the person with the ego.  In other words, the ego becomes detrimental to the self. This is something we all need to watch out for.