Learn to go about your life just like everyone else, except that nothing you do is for the purpose of trying to be okay. If you can do this, all disturbance will cease by itself.ħ.
If you truly understand that going outside to try to be okay inside doesn't work, then you'll be willing to sit inside and simply allow the disturbance to pass through. You must learn to sit inside and not participate in this process. You come to see that there is a habitual process in which the moment you feel inner disturbance, you are drawn into doing something about it. You must become comfortable with sitting in there and not participating in the inner energies. This step is about learning to sit in the witness, the part of you that notices the inner urges to be okay. Learn to not participate in the mind's struggle to be okay. At some point, you will try to find a different way to be okay in there.Ħ.
Eventually, you will come to see that struggling to be okay does not work. You will never be okay playing this game because the world will never match the conceptual model your mind has made up. Likewise, when your mind experiences what it doesn't want, you feel disturbance, and when it avoids what it doesn't want, you feel relief. You will see that if your mind gets what it wants, you feel joy if it doesn't get what it wants, you feel disturbance. Watch very closely how you react to the things your mind has preferences about. While it's true that sometimes you manage to make it better for short periods of time, you know that you've never even come close to reaching a state of permanent peace. You've been at it your entire life-you've just tried different things at different times. You must seriously look at this process of trying to be okay. Realize that the process of defining how the outside needs to be is not going to make you okay. All of this is the mind's attempt to first create a conceptual model of what would make you okay, and then try to get the outside world to match it.ĥ. If you watch, you will see that your mind is always telling you what you should and should not do, what others should and should not do, and how things should and should not be. Realize that your mind has taken on the job of figuring out how everything needs to be for you to be okay. All of this is done in an attempt to be okay.Ĥ. You will find yourself constantly trying to either get something or avoid something. You will then notice that this causes urges, drives and impulses to do something about it. At any point when you look at the state of your inner being, you will see that something is bothering you. Realize that you're always trying to be okay. You will see that you are not okay in there.ģ. If you objectively look, you will see that you are never completely at peace. If you want to understand why you've done everything you have ever done, if you want to see what's really going on, just observe your mind and emotions-just experience your inner state. You are conscious and you are experiencing what it is like to be human.Ģ. You are experiencing your physical body, your thoughts and your emotions. From deep inside, you are experiencing this world. You must first come to realize that you are in there. Michael Singer, author of The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, offers the following universal road map to Self Realization.ġ. In the end, no matter what particular patterns of thought we have managed to build in our minds, freedom always means transcending these personal thought patterns.īut how does one go about transcending the personal self and awakening to spiritual freedom? What is needed for this journey are succinct steps that are so universal that they can echo through the halls of any religion as well as support intellectual understanding.
There are not many paths to freedom, there is only one. When we step back from ourselves, truth becomes simple.
Truth is only complicated because we pass it through our habitual thought patterns. The fact is that the very act of seeking spiritual freedom causes notions of success and failure, and these notions serve only to bind us to our own self judgments: Am I growing? Have I done anything wrong? Am I meditating enough? But the diversity of our philosophies, beliefs, concepts and views about spiritual matters often leads to confusion or even conflict. Spirituality is meant to bring about harmony and peace.