The greater part of most people’s thinking is involuntary, automatic and repetitive. It fulfills no purpose. Strictly speaking, you don’t think: Thinking happens to you. “I think” is just as false a statement as “I digest” or “I circulate my blood”.

The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are possessed by thought, by the mind. For thousands of years, humanity has been increasingly mind-possessed. Through complete identification with the mind, a false sense of self – the ego – came into existence. The degree of identification with the mind differs from person to person. Some people enjoy periods of freedom from it, however brief, and others are constantly trapped in the egoic state. Most of their attention is absorbed by thinking, and so they don’t really see you, and they are not really listening to you.

What is the relation between the ego and the pain-body?

It is part of the ego. It is the emotional part of the ego.

The Birth Of Emotion
There are two dimensions to the ego: thought and emotion.
This doesn’t mean that all thoughts or emotions are of the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you over completely.
Emotion is the body’s reaction to your mind. It is the body’s response to a thought.
Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as if it were a reality. It doesn’t know it is just a thought.

Emotions and the Ego
So the ego is not only the unobserved mind but also the unobserved emotions that are the body’s reaction to what the voice in the head is saying.

Almost every human body is under a great deal of strain and stress, not because it is threatened by some external factor but from within the mind.

What is a negative emotion? An emotion that is toxic to the body and interferes with its balance and harmonious functioning. Fear, anxiety, anger, bearing a grudge, sadness, hatred or intense dislike, jealousy, envy…and so so. There is a generic term for all negative emotions: unhappiness. Do positive emotions then have the opposite effect on the physical body? Yes they do, but we have to differentiate between positive emotions that are ego-generated and deeper emotions that emanate from your natural state of connectedness with Being. Positive emotions generated by the ego already contain within themselves their opposite into which they can quickly turn.
Here are some examples:
What the ego calls love is possessiveness and addictive clinging that can turn into hate within seconds.
Anticipation of an upcoming event, which is the ego’s overvaluation of future, easily turns into its opposite when the event is over or doesn’t fulfill the ego’s expectations.

Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind’s identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment. The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all but states of Being.

Carrying the past
We can stop adding to the pain-body that we already have.We can learn to refrain from mentally dwelling on the past, regardless of whether something happened yesterday or thirty years ago. We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental movie-making.

Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?

How the pain-body renews itself
Like all life-forms, it periodically needs to feed – to take in new energy – and the food it requires to replenish itself consists of energy that is compatible with its own, energy that vibrates at a similar frequency. Any emotionally painful experience can be used as food by the pain body. It thrives on negative thinking, drama in relationships and is an addiction to unhappiness.
In most people the pain-body has an dormant and an active stage. It can lie in hibernation for weeks and even years before it gets triggered by some event.

How the pain-body feeds on your thoughts
The vibrational frequency of the pain-body resonates with that of negative thoughts, which is why only those thoughts can feed the pain-body. Emotion from the pain-body quickly gains control of your thinking, and once your mind has been taken over by the pain-body, your thinking becomes negative. It is not so much that you cannot stop your train of negative thoughts, but that you don’t want to. This is because the pain-body at that time is living through you, pretending to be you. To the pain-body, pain is pleasure.

How the pain-body feeds on drama
If there are other people around, the pain-body will attempt to provoke them so it can feed on the ensuing drama. The other person’s pain-body wants to awaken yours so that both pain-bodies can mutually energize each other.
In intimate relationships, pain-bodies are often clever enough to lie low until you start living together. It’s easy to sustain the roles when you are not living together.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are the best times for the pain-bodies with all the family gatherings.

How to deal with very heavy pain-bodies
Its important not to buy into the drama. You have to be in a different state of consciousness. Be there as a very compassionate presence. Recognize the pain body without the need to react to the drama. Allow the person to be in the pain body. Do not feed the other pain-body. Do not underestimate it, they are very clever. They can make you react and be unconscious again by pressing your buttons. It requires great alertness not to be drawn in.

Don’t resist the void when something is gone. Something else will shine through. Accept your emotions is the first important step. Don’t hold on the way it was.

How not to be obsessed by certain thoughts
Thoughts pretend to be necessary. They have the ability to win your attention. They fulfill no useful purpose. Don’t try to get rid of these thoughts..that wouldn’t work. What you resist persists. But see that they are futile. They are just part of the structure of the conditioned egoic mind. That’s why a change of your situation(=content) won’t solve the problem. You would still be obsessed by something else. For example if you have money you are obsessed by loosing it and if you don’t have money you are obsessed by how to make money. See the futility in the moment these thoughts happen. This has to be trained.

The ego thrives on others’ attention, which is after all a form of psychic energy.
Any conceptual sense of self – seeing myself as this or that – is ego, whether predominately positive (I am the greatest) or negative (I am no good). Many people fluctuate between feelings of inferiority and superiority, depending on situations or the people they come into contact with. All you have to know is: Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that’s the ego in you.

Villain, Victim, Lover
If some egos can not get positiv attention, they may seek negative attention instead, for example, by provoking a negative reaction in someone else.
A very common role is the one of the victim. It seeks sympathy or pity in “me and my story”. The ego does not want an end to its “problems” because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head, over and over and feel sorry for myself.

However role-playing is hard work and so those roles cannot be sustained indefinitely, especially once you start living together. What is commonly called “falling in love” is in the most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.

True Freedom
Imagine a Lake. The surface of the lake changes every time. Sometimes it is rough, sometimes its still. But even if the surface is rough the depth of the lake remains undisturbed. You are the lake in its depth. Your external life is the surface of things, your ego, the world of form and also your thoughts. The Presence is the bottom of the lake. It´s wonderfull when you recognize that your inner state is no longer dependent on and determined by what happens on the surface. That is true freedom. Freedom of external conditions.

Letting go of self-definitions
In the modern world, more and more people are confused as to where they fit in, what their purpose is, and even who they are. But if they say “I don’t know who I am” is not confusion. Confusion is: “I don’t know but I should know” or “I don’t know but I need to know”. Is it possible to let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are? In other words, can you cease looking to conceptual definitions to give you a sense of self? When you fully accept that you don’t know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.

Pre-established Roles and temporary roles
When you are completely identified with a role you confuse a pattern of behavior with who you are, and you take yourself very seriously. You also assign roles to others.

When you are identified with a role you are not interacting with an human being but with a conceptual mental image of this human being. So YOU are not relating with that person at all, but who you think you are is relating to who you think the other person is and vice versa. So every egoic interaction between two people is in reality the interaction between four conceptual mind-made identities that are ultimately fictions. It is therefore not surprising there is so much conflict in relationships.

Happiness as a role vs. true happiness
In many cases, happiness is role people play, and behind the smiling facade there is a great deal of pain.
If there is unhappiness in you, first you need to acknowledge that it is there. But don’t say, “I’m unhappy” becuase unhappiness has nothing to you with who you are. Say: “There is unhappiness in me.” Then investigate it. Maybe it is a situation you are in. Then action is required to change the situation or remove yourself from it. If there is nothing you can do face what is and say: “Well, right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or make myself miserable.”

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Seperate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it.

Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel. See the link between your thinking and your emotions. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.

Don’t seek happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is. Unhappiness covers up your natural state of well-being and inner peace, the source of true happiness.

Parenthood: Role of Function ?
The all important question is: Are you able to fulfill the function of being a parent and fulfill it well, without identifying with that function, that is, without it becoming a role?

Awareness is the greatest agent of change.

Sometimes children think that they can’t feel happy and comfortable with who they are unless they have their parents approval and understanding. Really? What difference does their approval or understanding truly make to who they are?

Conscious Suffering
Without suffering human beings would not evolve, they would remain shallow, identified with external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper. The paradox is that suffering is caused by identification with form and erodes identification with form. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it.

Conscious Parenting
The child has a deep longing for the parent to be there as a human being, not as a role. You may be doing all the right things and the best you can for your child, but even doing the best you can is not enough. In fact, doing is never enough if you neglect Being.
If you are in the grip of the ego, you believe that by doing more and more you will eventually accumulate enough “doings” to make yourself feel complete at some point in the future. You won’t. You will only lose yourself in doing. The entire civilization is losing itself in doing that is not rooted in Being and thus becomes futile.

As you look at, listen to, touch, or help your child with this or that, you are alert, still, completely present, not wanting anything other than that moment as it is. In this way, you make room for Being.

Recognizing your Child
Mastery of life is not a question of control, but of finding a balance between human and Being. Mother, father, husband, wife, young, old, the roles you play, the functions you fullfill, whatever you do – all that belongs to the human dimension. It needs to be honored, but it is not enough for a truly meaningful relationship of life. Human alone is never enough, no matter how hard you try or what you achieve. Then there is Being. Human in form. Being is formless. Human and Being are not separate but interwoven.

Giving up Role-Playing
To do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living that each one of us is here to learn.
You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.
If the egoic earth drama has any purpose at all, it is an indirect one: It creates more and more suffering on the planet, and suffering, although largely ego-created, is in the end also ego-destructive. It is the fire in which the ego burns itself up.

Give up defining yourself – to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life. And don’t be concerned with how others define you. Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as a field of conscious Presence.

Why does the ego play roles? Because of one unexamined assumption, one fundamental error, one unconscious thought. That thought is: I am not enough. Other unconscious thoughts follow: I need to play a role in order to get what I need to be fully myself.; I need to get more so that I can be more. In form, you are and will always be inferior to some, superior to others. In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization.

The pathological Ego
Unhappiness is a ego-created mental-emotional disease that has reached epidemic proportions. Negative states such as anger, anxiety, hatred, resentment, discontent, envy, jealousy, and so on, are not recognized as negative but as totally justified and are further misperceived not as self-created but as caused by someone else or some external factor.
The ego can not distinguish between a situation and its interpretation of and reaction to that situation. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Whenever you are in a negative state, there is something in you that wants the negativity, that perceives it as pleasure or that believes it will get you what you want. Otherwise, who would want to hang on negativity? If in the midst of negativity you are able to realize ” At this moment I am creating suffering for myself” it will be enough to raise you above the limitations of conditioned egoic states and reactions. You will be free to let go of your unhappiness the moment you recognize it as unintelligent. Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego. The ego may be clever , but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connencted. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.

The background unhappiness
Apart from the obvious forms of negativity like anger, hatred, and so on are also more subtle forms which create a sense of a background unhappiness. You need to be extremely alert and absolutely present to be able to detect them. One of the most common negative states which is easily overlooked, precisely because it is so common is: Do you often experience a feeling of discontent that could best be described as a kind of background resentment? It may be either specific or nonspecific. Underlying that feeling are certain unconsciously held beliefs, that is to say thoughts. The structure of these thoughts can be like :

There is something that needs to happen in my life before I can be at peace (happy, fulfilled, etc.). And I resent that it hasn’t happend yet. Maybe my resentment will finally make it happen.

Something happened in the past that should not have happened, and I resent that. If that hadn’t happened, I would be at peace now.

Something is happening now that should not be happening, and it preventing me from being at peace now.

Often the unconscious beliefs are directed toward a person and so “happening” becomes “doing”:

You should do this or that so that I can be at peace. And I resent that you haven’t done it yet. Maybe my resentment will make you do it.

Something you (or I) did, said, of failed to do in the past is preventing me from being at peace now.

What you are doing or failing to do now is preventing me from being at peace.

The Secret of Happiness
The ego says: ” Maybe at some point in the future, I can be at peace – if this, that, or the other happens, or I obtain this or become that. Or it says: I can never be at peace because of something that happened in the past. Listen to people’s stories and they could all be entitled “Why I cannot be at peace Now”. The ego doesn’t know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now. Or maybe it does know, ant it is afraid that you may find this out. Peace, after all, is the end of the ego.
But how to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. The are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being One with Life is being One with Now. You then realize that you don’t live your life, but life lives you.

What is reality? Whatever is.

Take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment. Ask yourself: “Is there negativity in me at this moment?” Then become alert to your thoughts as well as your emotions. Watch out for thoughts that appear to justify or explain this unhappiness but in reality cause it.

Aim for the shift from thinking to awareness, then an intelligence far greater than the ego’s cleverness begins to operate in your life. Emotions and even thoughts become depersonalized through awareness. There is no longer a self in them. It no longer forms the basis for your sense of identity.

Pathological Forms of the Ego
The stronger the ego in you, the more likely it is that in your perception other people are the main source of problems in your life.
During conflicts each person is so identified with the thoughts that make up their opinion, that those thoughts harden into mental positions which are invested with a sense of self. In other words: Identity and thought merge. Once this has happend, when I defend my opinions (thoughts), I feel and act as if I were fighting for survival and so my emotions will reflect this unconscious belief. In Zen they say: “Don’t seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.”

Work – With and Without Ego
When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.
The ego’s unconscious core feeling of “not enough” causes it to react to someone else’s success as if that success had taken something away from “me”. The ego doesn’t know that your resentment of another person’s success curtails your own chances of success. In order to attract success, you need to welcome it wherever you see it.

Incontrovertible Proof of Immortality
There is no such thing as “my life”. If there is such a thing as “my life”, it follows that I and life are two separate things, and so I can also lose my life, my imaginary treasured possession.Words and concepts split life into separate segments that have no reality in themselves. I don’t have a life. I am life. I and life are one. So how could I lose my life? How can I lose something that I don’t have in the first place? How can I lose something that I am? It is impossible.

The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego the same structure operates. Egos only differ on the surface. They live on identification and seperation. Every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself.

The complete egoic functioning is part of the unconsciousness.

Complaining and Resentment
Complaining is one of the egos favorite strategies for strengthening itself. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don´t know what you are doing. Complaining serves non purpose if it brings no change to the situation! But stating the facts without negativity is ok.
Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone’s behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. Your greatest protection is being conscious.
What you can do to persons, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy. This should not be happening; I don’t want to be here; I don’t want to be doing this; I’m being treated unfairly. And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.

Hurt Feelings and the Ego
The Ego feels hurt. Simply accept what you are feeling. It’s only a mental image that got hurt.

Reactivity and Grievances
Through reacting against this or that they assert and strengthen the feeling of self. A grievance will also contaminate other areas of your life. Don’t try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the go in place. The seeing is freeing.
The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion.

In Defense of an Illusion
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position. But facts undoubtedly exist.You can state that light travels faster than sound. There is no ego involved in this. But at soon as you say “Believe me, I know” or “Why do you never believe me” the ego has contaminated the statement.
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth in any case, needs no defense. You are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of yourself, the mind-made substitute.

Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through awareness – not through thinking – can you differentiate between fact and opinion. Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or person instead of adopting one limited perspective.

Truth: Relative or Absolute?
Beyond the realm of simple and verifiable facts, the certainity that “I am right and you are wrong” is a dangerous thing in personal relationships as well as in interactions between nations, tribes and religions.
The history of Christianity is, of course, a prime example of how the belief that you are in sole possession of the truth, that is to say, right, can corrupt your actions and behavior to the point of insanity.

The Ego is not personal
What is is that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego. Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you. But it is no more than a form of ego, and as such, it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to do with who that person is.

War is a mind-set
Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it. Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists. War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated. There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality.
Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that’s all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.

There is an addiction to unhappiness. The ego loves this energy and doesn’t want to get out. It doesn’t want you to get out. The Now is the hidden exit.

Beyond Ego: Your true identity
All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world. And this is also why becoming free of the ego cannot be made into a goal to be attained at some point in the future. Only Presence can free you of the ego, and you can only be present Now, not yesterday or tomorrow. The only thing that ultimately matters ist this: Can I sense my essential Beingness, the I Am, in the background of my life at all times?

Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away. You are the space for all those things. You are the awareness in which all those things appear.

All Structures are unstable
The underlying emotion that governs all the activity of the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its actitivities are ultimately designed to eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up temporarily with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning at this or that. Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free. Why fear ? Because the ego arises by identification with form, and deep down it knows that no forms are permanent. Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you.

A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever.

What does it mean to worry? It has no purpose. Worry pretends to be necessary. You have to see that it serves no useful purpose. Simply be a conscious space of presence for another person.

Words

When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.
Don’t say this is an oaktree but say this is called an oaktree for example if you are speaking with children. They should learn that nature is more than just a label we put on. The word is just an abstraction and has nothing to do with the thing itself.

Content and Structure of the Ego

The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning is twofold: It consists of content and structure. The content you identify with is conditioned by your environment, your upbringing, and surrounding culture. It’s different for everybody.
The unconscious compulsion to enhance one’s identity through association with an object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind. One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into existence is identification. One of the most basic levels of identification is with things.

Identification with things

“The people in the advertising industry know very well that in order to sell things that people don’t really need, they must convince them that those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen by others;in other words, add something to their sense of self. They do this, for example, by telling you that you will stand out from the crowd by using this product and so by implication be more fully yourself. And so in many cases you are not buying a product but an “identity enhancer”.”
What you identify with is all content; whereas, the unconscious compulsion to identify is structural. Paradoxically, what keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn’t work: The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.
When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.
You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them you will know it is the ego. Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on them.

The Illusion of Ownership

The Ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself.

Wanting: The Need for More

No ego can last for long without the need for more. Therefore, wanting keeps the ego alive more than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting. Wanting is structural, so no amount of content can provide lasting fulfillment as long as that mental structure remains in place.

Identification with the body

In the west the physical appearance of the body contributes greatly to the sense of who you think you are. For many people their sense of self-worth is intimately bound up with their physical strength, fitness etc. And because their identity is based on their good looks they will suffer when it begins to fade. Physical form shares the destiny of all forms – impermanence and ultimately decay.
But it is not just the people with good looking bodies who are likely to equate it with who they are. You can just as easily identify with a “problematic” body and make a illness or disability into your identity. You may than think or speak of yourself as a “sufferer”.
If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn’t even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn’t know he is dreaming. So there must be more: a new dimension of consciousness.

The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am. If for example a person lost everything so there is nothing left to identify with, the ego is looking for something new to identify with. Sometimes this situation results in complete freedom if there is no new identification. The spirit is released from it’s imprisonment in matter.

Waiting means you don’t like this moment. Whenever you are “waiting” why not practice being instead of waiting.

The Flowering of Human Consciousness

Tolle writes in the introduction about flowers and their evolution. “Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature”. Flowers were one of the first things which had value to us although they had “no purpose” for humans at this time. Flowers grow very beautiful and are not anxious about tomorrow. They present themselves fully and to see that, you should not name it, should not put a label on it but just be present with them. Tolle calls this limiting labeling compulsive naming.

The Voice in your head

The reason why this labeling is so limiting is, that your mind is run by mental abstractions and concepts, its not life. The human condition is Lost in Thought . That’s the voice in the head. It is your conditioned thinking , conditioned by your past, your culture, your surroundings etc. Key is to recognize these thoughts and not to be identified with them. Just allow them to be, be there as the witness. There has to be space between you and your thoughts.

“What liberation to realize that the ” voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.” Or in other words: You are the space in which thoughts and all emotional and sense perceptions happen.

“Undergoing enlightenment” is a extremely rare occurrence since it is more than an evolutionary progression: It also implies a discontinuity in its development, a leap to an entirely different level of Being, most important, a lessening of materiality. This transformation is similar to the transformation of reptilians to birds. Birds didn´t just become better in crawling or walking, but transcended crawling and walking entirely.

For humans this transformation means to rise above identification with form.  (p3)

Essential things only happen if there is a need for them to happen. If there is a certain crisis point reached.

Religion and Spirituality

Underneath the surface differences of many religions are two core insights that most of them agree on. The first is that the normal state of mind of most human beings has a mental defect or even madness. Of course each religion describes this state differently but they all point into the same direction. (p8) The second one is the good part: A radical transformation of the human consciousness is possible.

Most religions are belief systems, a set of thoughts that they regard as the absolute truth, but it can be dangerous if people derive their identity from these thoughts. Other people who don’t think like them become enemies. Because they were identified with these thoughts they felt that their identity is threatened and in the distant past this even justified the killing of others. So religion can be a closed door or an open door to spirituality. It depends how deep you go.

“How spiritual you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness.” The arising of this new consciousness is not another belief system. In fact it is the end of all belief systems, it goes deeper than thought.

State of Consciousness

“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.” Lasting change has to go with a change in your state of consciousness.

Most people think for example that if they go on vacation they could be more happy and everything would be fine. They think a new place is the solution to their misery. Sometimes a new environment can help but it is only short-lived. But the truth is that unless they change their state of consciousness before traveling they will be the same unhappy person, independent from the place they are.

The Ego is no more than identification with form, primarily thought forms.

What does life want from me rather than looking for what I want from life is the more powerful question.

We need to learn how to find in our daily life as often as possible this point of power of the present moment. A very simple thing to access this point is to ask yourself  ”Are you still breathing?”.  Or another thing is to do simple things like washing hands or going up the stairs very conscious. That means to be fully present while doing these things. To the mind of course these things are completely meaningless. With these things you can train your mind. Unfortunately most people do simple things just as an means to an end. They always think about the next moment and not the present moment. For example while we making the cup of coffee we already want to drink it. Become friendly with the present moment.

Ask yourself as often as possible: “What is my relationship with the present moment?”

What you resist persists.

Things can’t provide ultimate satisfaction. Or general speaking the world of form cant satisfy you. Maybe for a short time but not ultimately. But we can enjoy forms.

Don’t be defined by things.