Steps to awakening-Part 5
Making Space Around Thoughts and Feelings
We are not trying to get rid of our ego - it is enough to see through it with its games and tricks. Developing genuine empathy, humility, love, gratitude, peace and a sense of unity with all of mankind is a much more effective way of dealing with any ego, because then the binding identifications naturally fade away.
As we become more spacious and expansive, our tightly held ideas about ‘me’ and the need to protect and defend this concept will naturally melt like snow in the sunshine.
Yoga sees most suffering as a creation of the impermanent part of the mind. In other words, there is no external reason to be distressed, although it appears otherwise. Awareness of our thoughts and feelings helps us to discriminate between the seer from the seen and is the beginning of unlinking from our suffering. For this type of honest self-scrutiny, we need a stable pure mind.
If I am not the Ego, Who Am I?
The reality is that the true “I” is always here. In making this investigation, as you slowly see through the identities and understand them as temporary, you may come to the realisation that who you really are is the deep stillness and silence which is ever present, action-less, quite ordinary and which never changes.
It is your very Presence; the background to your thoughts and experience. It is the unmanifest space upon which you touch when you are being creative. From this stillness, something arises which is authentic and genuine.
Actually, the sense of who you really are can’t be described so these words are just an attempt to point towards this. This is the process of true awakening. No bells and whistles, no spirit guides and angels – even psychic abilities which may increase as you make this inquiry can distraction and are not the Truth. Awakening is to know who you are and to see through the illusion and noise of the ever-changing stuff that seems to happen ‘out there’ but is actually perceived ‘in here.’
If your thoughts and feelings are like the changing weather systems, then your real identity is like the sky - the unchanging backdrop to those climate fluctuations as they pass through.
If, for example, you remember your last meal, you will agree that the experience of that situation, although it happened, has now passed and is no more. Therefore, its only reality is as a memory. How real or reliable is that?
Likewise, if you contemplate tomorrow, or even the next hour – you will also agree that this is just an idea or a thought. It hasn’t happened yet.
Then, if you consider what you were thinking or feeling a week ago, a year ago or ten years ago, you may also agree that all of your thoughts and feelings have changed and are always changing.
You probably have forgotten most of them. Situations come and go. Even health and energy is always changing. But you haven’t changed – there is something permanent about you...some is-ness which was present both then and now. It has been there for the whole of your life and even before that.
This simple recognition is the portal to the understanding of your true nature. Yoga calls this the Self, Ātman, Purusha, Brahman, cit awareness or consciousness. Close your eyes now, be still and see if you can sense into this. Drop into the silence. Watch the spaces between your thoughts. See how thoughts come from the silence but then disappear again. Take some time.