Day #79

Today’s favourite poses: Pigeon, Dolphin, Plank!

Minutes with a relatively quiet mind: 10 or 15 (there wasn't a clock in the room)

Today’s interesting/thought provoking reading: (Taken from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle)

Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is complete, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most peoples thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind an you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.

When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence – your deeper self – behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.

When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream – a gap of “no mind”. At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. This is the beginning of your natural state of felt oneness with Being, which is usually obscured by the mind. With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will deepen. In fact, there is no end to its depth you will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of Being.

It is not a trancelike state. Not at all. There is no loss o consciousness here. The opposite is the case. If the price of peace were a lowering of your consciousness, and the price of stillness a lack of vitality and alertness, then they would not be worth having. In this state of inner connectedness, you are much more awake than in the mind-identified state. You are fully present.

As you go more deeply into this realm of no mind, as it is sometimes called in the East, you realize the state of pure consciousness. In that state you feel your own presence with such intensity and such joy that al thinking, all emotions, your physical body, as well as the whole external world become relatively insignificant in comparison to it. You yet this is not a selfish but a selfless state. It takes you beyond what your previously thought of as ”your self”. That presence is essentially you and at the same time inconceivably greater than you.

Instead of “watching the thinker”, you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.