The following article is written by Andrew Thompson, the founder of Inspirational Works, an organization based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, providing “Events that Inspire, Motivate and Transform Lives”. Inspirational Works has hosted Byron Katie, and is thrilled to be hosting Don Miguel Ruiz (author of The Four Agreements and other books), April 9th-11th, 2010. Andrew has been a fellow traveler with us at AYP (Advanced Yoga Practices), and is also dedicated to unveiling and sharing new ways of working with mind more effectively. Thank you Andrew for sharing your words of wisdom with us.
We go through our lives with our minds constantly active, day and night whether we are sleeping or awake. While awake, thoughts can come at a tremendous rate, often one on top of another, it happens very automatically and seemingly without control.
So much of our thinking is repetitive and when we listen closely, we can notice that our minds are often expressing our fears, frustrations, judgments and concerns. With each thought there is a corresponding emotional reaction and often a reinforcement of a limiting belief. When a thought comes along about something in our lives that isn’t going the way we want, we can feel a variety of so called “negative” emotions in reaction like anger, fear, sadness etc. So it can be observed that what we think quite clearly impacts our emotional state and hence our enjoyment or lack of it in our daily life experience.
So yes, thinking can be very automatic and can feel like something we can’t really influence, but practice would suggest otherwise. Often we don’t realize it, but we practice thinking particular thoughts all the time. How do we inadvertently practice this? Many have experienced how repetitive our minds can be, there seems to be so much energy caught up in much of our thinking. Sometimes we will become aware of how certain negative thoughts will repeat in our minds over and over again. This in itself is a form of practice even if much of it happening subconsciously and automatically. This constant repetition of negative thinking will eventually impact our emotional state and create a negative life experience of misery and unhappiness. When our thoughts are repeatedly negative or about subject matter that upsets us in some way, we can imagine how we feel at the end of a day.
The good news is that we can also choose our thoughts more consciously as well. If it is our desire, we can intentionally create a life where we live feel positive feelings like love, gratitude and peace or relaxation. Right now in this moment, we can choose to say to ourselves pretty much anything we want. We can choose a thought that describes how we feel about a loved one and when we do, there is a corresponding emotional sensation. How does it feel to think about how we love someone or something in our lives?
We can also choose a thought that describes something we are grateful for and it feels good to be grateful. We can even choose to repeat a thought about how we would like to feel in the near future. For example, we could notice we feel tense and instead repeat “I am physically relaxed and emotionally calm”. The positive emotional reactions from thinking positively like this will eventually have an impact even if it can be hard to notice at times. Thinking positively will help remove the tension from our bodies and we relax and feel better when this happens. With repeated practice, the effects of intentionally choosing positive thoughts or observations about our lives can be seen in a powerful way and we can create a wondrous emotional experience every day of love, gratitude and peace or whatever else we choose.
Of course the mind will not simply give up the old habits of thinking negatively over night. The mind has a lot of practice and repetitions of thinking negatively for many, many years so time and practice of the desired positive thoughts and corresponding emotions needs to be given in order to turn the mental and emotional “ship” around. It is all about repetitions. How many positive thoughts are you willing to intentionally practice in a day? How many times will you feel grateful or love for something in your life? It is up to you how much you want to practice, the more you practice and repeat the desired thoughts, the better you will get at it and the happier you will feel.
In addition, the way we practice will also have an impact. In other words the “technique” used to intentionally repeat the positive thought and create the corresponding emotional reactions we want is important. So use good technique and rather than simply repeating something positive in quick rapid succession without really feeling it, take your time and repeat a positive thought once, feel the emotional results and then release it into silence by being aware of the silence before repeating it again. This can be a very powerful and effective way to practice and will require fewer repetitions over the long term to create a positive thinking habit and a happy emotional body.
So if we want to feel good let’s choose our thoughts carefully and redirect our minds to repeat things that empower us and make us feel good rather than bad. Daily practice of intentional positive thinking with “good technique” will yield results over the long term and can improve our enjoyment of life in powerful and meaningful way. This coupled with other proven practices that help us to create a positive life experience like meditation, self inquiry, yoga etc. will help us to change ourselves even more quickly and live the dream of life that we have always wanted.
All suffering is the result of an incorrect idea; a single incorrect idea; the idea of separation and partiality. Living Unbound is the natural state; the entire universe is an ever-oscillating dance of harmony, unity and wholeness. The entire natural universe inter-relates harmoniously and synergistically.
The only exception to this natural harmony is the misconception known as the ego; the limited I-sense; the “thought called ‘me’”. Until very recently, the vast majority of us have lived our entire lives without ever hearing of Living Unbound or the various ways to Living Unbound, which are offered via various religions and spiritual traditions. Or, if we have heard of one of the ways to Living Unbound, chances are that it was positioned as something available only through a single religion or spiritual path, or by adopting a specific lifestyle, such as becoming a priest, or monk or nun. And so, we’ve been conditioned and re-conditioned that freedom from suffering, and freedom in general, is for the select few, and in any case, apparently not for us. We’ve literally been taught from the time we could understand even the simplest words and concepts that we are separate, and therefore alone. We’ve been conditioned that the aspects of us which appear to be separate (physical body, psychological tendencies, individual traits, etc.) are the total of who we are, and that we are therefore actually separate.
Because of this disproportionate focus on appearances of all types (including internal appearances: thoughts, feelings, sense-of-self, conditioned memories, and so on), we not only spend our lives being conditioned and reconditioned that these appearances are reality, but that they’re all of reality. And, because we focus only on the forms of things (and not the space of awareness in which everything actually occurs), we literally become “awareness blind”; we neither see nor know the vast majority of our own consciousness, and so, if it is perceived at all, it is perceived as something lofty, or mystical, and quite possibly (conditioned thinking presumes) unreal.
The reality is: Living Unbound is reality; it is the original awareness within which everything else happens. This is neither lofty nor metaphysical, but simply actual: awareness, in experience, is a single field. All divisions within it are arbitrary distinctions. Everything we perceive resolves to electrical signals oscillating in our brain; the wholeness of awareness is simply the experience of this field without the perceptual distinctions. On this science and religion both agree, unequivocally. However, the vast majority of us, whether oriented toward science, religion, or neither, have never experienced this wholeness, and therefore, neither experience it, nor perceive it as possible. This is where spiritual practices come in: they remove the cloud-cover of perceptual distinction which prevents the experience of the fullness and wholeness we each and all actually are, now. Living Unbound is simply being completely, naturally, divinely human: in, with and as the wholeness of our own fulfilled consciousness.
However, most of us never experience the beauty, the purity, the utter liberation of Living Unbound. The cloud-cover of conditioned misconception is just too thick, it seems; especially since most of us don’t even know we’re mired in utter misconception, in almost every moment (prior to Living Unbound), nor do we realize that this fundamental misconception is reinforced, reviewed and thereby remembered, in almost every moment. Most of all though, it boils down to the fact that we don’t have any idea what to do to escape our lifelong sense of unfullfillment.
So how then to experience Living Unbound?
There are two primary facets to Living Unbound in reality:
Experiencing the full range of our original, fulfilled awareness. This is what Living Unbound Techniques are designed to facilitate.
Understanding the illusions of misconception by seeing through them. This is what Living Unbound Teachings are designed to facilitate.
1. Experiencing
To get the benefits of regular exercise, we simply need to do it. The same is true of the universal spiritual practices which have been proven in every spiritual tradition over the course of millennia. Not spiritual beliefs; spiritual practices. As with exercise, where spiritual practices are concerned, it’s not about what you think, it’s about what you do. When we start a daily routine of proven spiritual practices (please see Living Unbound Lessons for details), before long, tangible benefits begin to emerge. Then, within a few weeks, or months, or maybe a bit longer for some of us, we start to experience some of the things we have only heard or read about, before this point. We experience the reality of inner silence and stillness. We experience the reality of the subtle energies about which all spiritual traditions teach. Bit by bit we directly experience the reality that, as Jesus Christ said in the Bible “the kingdom of heaven is within” us.
When we reject spiritual information because it doesn’t make sense to us at the time, we are operating at a vast disadvantage. We don’t have the experience, the knowing, from which to make that declaration. As we continue our daily practices, we find that we don’t really need to make any declarations at all: the reality of Living Unbound, is revealed as simply and utterly obvious.
Without spiritual practices, we’ll continue to live under perpetual cloud cover, disbelieving in the existence of the sun.
With dedication to daily practices, in a relatively short period of time, we can and will enjoy Living Unbound, in reality. What is “relatively short”? For most of us, the essence of the journey to awareness of wholeness, to Living Unbound, takes a fairly small handful of years. This is a much shorter time period than it has taken historically for most. The reason for this is that the opening of the floodgates of global information have allowed more of us to have more access to highly valuable spiritual and consciousness-related information in recent years than at any other time in history. We’ve therefore been able to distill, refine and enhance existing teachings, techniques and resources. Still, for all of us, it’s a very, very individual dynamic; everyone is different prior to getting to the conscious experiencing of oneness. Some of us awaken to Living Unbound all the way instantly, but this is very, very rare. Others do so within a few short months, but this is also very rare. For most of us, a handful of years is what the process seems to take, though with ever-more-efficient refinements to practices and the resulting experiences and understanding, we may be able to help shorten these time-frames, further. It’s probably not realistic for most of us to expect to be fully Living Unbound in a few months, but on the other hand: if it takes more than a decade, there’s probably some facet of our approach that needs to be refined.
Realistically, from start-to-Living Unbound, we can expect to spend a few years in daily practices, consistently gaining greater peace, freedom and clarity, until actually Living Unbound becomes our default condition, and the pinnacle conditions taught by every spiritual tradition become the essence of our daily lives.
2. Understanding
We’ve all had the experience of believing that something is true, or feeling a certain way about something or someone, and then having that view suddenly change, based on new information. At one time, the sun’s revolution around the Earth was accepted fact; enough so that Galileo was severely punished for daring to state otherwise. Currently, it is accepted that the Earth revolves around the sun. What made the difference? The ability, and the willingness, to simply observe, to note and to see more accurately.
And so it is with Living Unbound.
When untrue concepts are no longer believed, Living Unbound is our natural condition, the harmonious flowing of living, now. Which of the concepts that we currently believe are untrue? All of them. Really. How could a concept be true? That’s the easy and utterly true answer. However, most of us not only won’t believe this answer immediately, but most of us can’t. The conditioned, conceptual reinforcement of a lifetime, related to partiality and lack, and the confusing of the conceptual with the actual, is deeply embedded in essentially all of us. Body follows mind, mind follows awareness. If awareness is blocked by the cloud-cover of conceptual conditioning, we’re attempting to complete the equation of wholeness by requiring that 2+2 = 3. Hence all the trouble.
The way to Living Unbound is actually more of an undoing than a doing; it is the releasing of all that is untrue by experiencing, understanding and creating our own way out of the dark unreality of dreaming bound, into the beautiful reality of Living Unbound.
It’s really very simple.
A couple of the fundamental toolsets used by humanity (the distinctions made by language and language-based thinking), became confused with reality, and thus became humanity’s (effective) tyrants. Language and thinking can be useful and even enjoyable creative tools; however they make terrible tyrants.
Letting language and concept rule our lives is like letting the song play us; letting the story write us; letting the clay sculpt us. We’re actually the singer, the musician, the author, the sculptor; Living Unbound is living in the conscious unity of the awareness of ourselves as wholeness enjoying the harmony of living, free from the imprisoning, fictitious concepts of partiality and lack.
When we allow conditioned conceptual ideas to use us as their plaything, how deep does their reign of terror go?
What scares us? In the depths of our private thoughts? The anxieties that arise unbidden and pull us around like an evil, unseen puppeteer? That’s how deep it goes. Is what scares us happening right now? In our immediate experience? Probably not. However, there’s still automatic, unconscious reaction to these thoughts that automatically arise. Is this what we signed up for? Many of us certainly appear to think so.
The truth, when we experience it, is both staggering and utterly liberating: ego: our misplaced sense of lack and partiality is itself an unreal thought, and so, its reality consists of misplaced thoughts, which are simply other thoughts derived from a dream universe of lack and partiality.
What are the ramifications of this? When this unfortunate, unreal and fear-filled dream dissolves, we realize:
Living Is Harmony
Knowing Is Unity
Awareness Is Wholeness
And even more importantly and applicably, we realize in experience:
We are Living Unbound as the very real Freedom Beyond conceptually-conditioned Imagination.
“Freedom Beyond Imagination” is more than a catchphrase; it’s a very real key to understanding and experiencing Living Unbound in reality.
Living Unbound is only found in the Freedom that is Beyond Imagination; in the reality that is beyond and before the distinctions of language and language-based thinking. Mind and language are cutting-instruments. They divide, decide, define and distinguish. They can therefore be useful in creating specific facets of our lives, but are not suited to be arbiters of the wholeness of reality.
How can we know this for ourselves?
By experiencing, by understanding.
How can we bring about this experiencing, this understanding?
Practices, Practices, Practices.
A little bit of time, sincerely devoted every day, results in Living Unbound; in Freedom Beyond Imagination, in reality.
So how do we dissolve these mind-shafts? Dissolving mind shafts can be practiced simply and easily as we go about our day. At the end of the day, when we find that conditioned thinking has labeled the day as a bad day or a stressful day or a depressing day, we can review the day in our mind, and make mental notes of three types of thoughts which caused that label to be applied.
Identify the actual emotions we’re feeling (i.e. sadness, anger, whatever the predominant emotion is, in the current moment). = Emotion
Note the labels that conditioned thinking has applied to the emotion (frustrated, mad, defeated).= Label
Note the story that is keeping that emotion and label in place (things should/should not be like this).= Mind Story
Identify the actual situation, independent of the label, or the mind story, or the emotional reactions to the label and mind story. =Reality
Examples:
Conditioned thinking says “today was a terrible day!”
1. We notice the actual emotion.
(Example: sadness.)
2. We notice the label, the evaluation.
(Example: Terrible day)
3. We identify the mind story.
(Example: “he should not be so harsh and judgmental”)
4. We recall the actual situation (reality), independent of the evaluation (label) and the mind story, or the emotional reactions to the evaluation.
(Example: Father spoke in a loud voice to us.)
Several important realizations can occur, every single time we make use of this technique, and it can be used effectively in any moment there is a sense of disturbance (i.e. stress, uncomfortable emotions, uncomfortable thinking, etc.)
1. We notice that conditioned thinking has globally labeled our memory of the day in a certain way (“globally” meaning: the concept of “entire day” has been evaluated and judged to have had certain qualities), and we notice that emotions have arisen, based on focus on the labels which support conditioned thinking’s conclusion (“terrible day”). There were actually many non-terrible moments during the day, but attention focuses on the thought-labels which support conditioned thinking’s conclusion.
2. We notice that the emotional reaction is always to the label; the evaluation and mind story; reaction is never to a fact. Mind-shafts are shafts made by focus on the mental and emotional reactions to the labels generated by conditioned thinking. Mind-shafts are a closed-loop of conditioned thinking which are utterly independent of the actual situation. If the facts of a given moment are labeled differently, the reaction of conditioned thinking is different, and the conclusions of conditioned thinking are different. “One person’s heaven is another person’s hell”, as the old saying goes.
To one person, “father speaking loudly” might be an everyday event; an event they are used to experiencing; and therefore, an event their conditioned thinking doesn’t evaluate in a way that sadness is the reaction.
To another person, “father speaking loudly” might not be considered harsh or judgmental, just his style of speaking.
To yet another person, anger could be the emotional reaction instead of sadness.
To another, momentary disturbance might be felt, based on specific conditioned thinking, but the evaluation about the conversation isn’t connected with any label about the nature of the entire day.
And so, realizing this, we can notice: reaction is never to a fact, but only to evaluation about facts.
Now, if it was a bad day or a “feeling down day”, we can consciously remember the moments in the day when we felt happy. This is the gap which breaks up, or dissolves, our sense of having had an otherwise bad day.
For instance, maybe we enjoyed some morning tea; or maybe we smiled at someone or someone smiled at us. Maybe we laughed at a joke, or saw something that made us smile. Maybe we enjoyed a favorite song, or show, even for a few minutes, and so on. Remembering these pleasant or enjoyable moments, we can realize that these moments break up the imagined “continuous shaft” of unpleasant memories of each day.
We can identify these moments that don’t fit into the labels/mind stories creating a sense of “low day”, and then break the day up into bite-sized memories of happiness and bite-sized memories of sadness or other “low” or “down” feelings. Doing this, we can thereby realize that the lows aren’t all connected, and that it wasn’t really a “low day”, after all. Rather, it was a day comprised, as all days are, of a fairly full spectrum of thoughts and feelings, both pleasant and unpleasant.
We use up a lot of physical, emotional and mental energy (hence the physical, emotional and mental fatigue, which we call depression) in connecting the conditioned evaluations which create the sense of lows. Conditioned thinking then takes these mind-shafts and connects them, in order to make an imaginary mind-shaft of “one big low.” This isn’t to say, by the way, that depression isn’t an actual medical condition; it certainly is, as many of us know. Our purpose here is to uncover some of the dynamics which magnify depression, and artificially hold it in place. Depression is not a natural condition; it results from a combination of mental habits, and/or related biochemistry. When the causes of the mental habits are seen through, they dissolve. When these conditioned mental habits dissolve, they no longer increase any depression-related biochemistry.
And so, dissolving depression-related mental habits, while doing things that dissolve depression-related biochemistry (such as exercise, engaging in spiritual practices, connecting with people, medication and so on), combined with the genuine, honest desire to be free from depression, can and does free one from depression. Realizing this, we can come to see a fundamental, empowering fact: stepping free from depression is within our power, and the means to do so is freely available.
We start out with small things,; simply observing that the day is made up of moment by moment by moment, and that each moment is free of the previous (memory) and next (imagination), and that reaction is never to a fact, only to evaluation, will help us in dissolving these mind-shafts. And, amazingly, we’ll find that when all this artificially constricted energy is freed and allowed to flow naturally, that thinking mind naturally rests.
At first the shaft may be imagined to be years long.
For instance, conditioned thinking displays the thought:
“I have been suffering from depression for 10 years.”
Well, with some simple observation, we can see that the depression we felt 10 years ago, and the one we felt 5 years ago, and the one we experienced 6 months ago and the one we experienced a week ago, are not the same. We connect these and make it one long imaginary mind-shaft. In fact, if we are willing to remember any such time-frame honestly and accurately, we can see that any given time period had almost as many, or in some cases, more moments which were experienced as happy, or at least acceptable, in comparison with depressing moments.
And, so to dissolve these shafts, we can go back and identify the moments when we were not depressed. We can remember how we enjoyed a party or a movie or a vacation or a night out or a book or a trip or a job, and thereby see how these happier moments broke up the imagined “10 depressed years”. And so, the single shaft of 10-year-long depression is now broken into smaller “bite-sized” memory-shafts of depression. It no longer is a huge monster, but rather, a series of manageable “little monsters” that bothered us, over the course of 10 years, a time period that was happily interspersed with “little angels” of happiness, peace and enjoyment at times, too.
Then, we’ll try to break up the current day; maybe break it down to half a day. Then as we keep identifying these breaks in the day, moments when you are not feeling low, a miraculous thing will begin to happen. Half-days will refine to hours, hours to minutes, minutes to seconds, and we’ll experience the reality that each moment of life, perhaps a second or two in duration, apparently, is utterly independent of the previous moment and the next moment. Ten seconds ago is every bit as dissolved as ten years ago. Ten seconds from now “hasn’t happened yet” as much as ten years from now “hasn’t happened yet”. It is all happening now, in reality.
The second technique is actually finding the gap (which is experienced as silence) and living from this gap. This is a more advanced technique and worth trying, if however it seems impossible to do, let it go for now.
Living Unbound and the way to Living Unbound have always been here; the misunderstandings of ego-mind simply distorted the original teachings.
Ego is confused about love because ego feels partial and unwhole; love isn’t about filling gaps; love is about radiating the wholeness we each and all actually are now.
Living Unbound
The way to Living Unbound is less like climbing a mountain and more like melting.
When you’re drowning, you can’t save others from drowning; waking up is really the only option.
Love
When in doubt, love.
When not in doubt, love.
Love isn’t the greatest power; Love is the only power.
Love isn’t an emotion; Love is the reality of the freedom of loving all as unbound awareness.
Love is very simple, really; love is that which is uplifting for all involved, in any moment.
Love is reality; only the mistaken ideas called ego are confused about love.
Ego is confused about love because ego feels partial and incomplete; love isn’t about completing our misplaced ideas of our self; love is about radiating the unity that is reality, about loving our neighbor as our self.
Presence is loving, loving is creating; creating is living unbound.
Stop thinking, start loving.
So many of us have it exactly backwards; Love is found by giving it, not by getting and keeping our ideas of it.
Mind
Mind is a sense, not a self.
Thinking mind is a cutting instrument; it cuts, divides, decides.
Thinking is not conscious; thinking is a reaction.
Drop all ideas.
Just jump in.
Judging you lose; loving, we all win.
God is bigger than your ideas.
God is infinitely bigger than someone else’s ideas.
You can’t be bound, you can only think bound.
All evaluation is obscuring inherent liberation; we can’t get freedom; Living Unbound is not an object; we are Living, Unbound.
Ideas are the problem, they have nothing to do with the solution.
Isolation is a state of mind; connection is reality.
There’s nothing to figure out; there’s only living-releasing.
Thinking doesn’t make time real; every moment is a new universe.
Reacting to limited thoughts about limited life is letting the song play you.
Reality
Living Unbound is real; Living Unbound is all that’s real.
Living Unbound is this that we each and all always actually are, now.
You can’t be bound, you can only think bound.
There is only this happening; all else is an artificial concept obscuring the undistorted experiencing of this happening.
This is all.
In reality, there’s only Living Unbound.
Religion
Everything defined as major sin, by any religion, has one basic component: it reinforces the fictitious idea of a separate self.
There is no conflict between science and religion; there is only conflict between misunderstanding about science and misunderstanding about religion.
Living Unbound and the way to Living Unbound have always been here; the misunderstanding of ego-mind simply distorted the original teachings.
Like the middle piece of a jigsaw puzzle uniting two other pieces that don’t inherently fit together, the Unity of Knowing is the bridge uniting Unbound Awareness with the forms of Living Harmony.
God is bigger than your ideas.
God is infinitely bigger than someone else’s ideas.
Time
There is only now; anything else is a form held actively or latently in mind, now.
The term “now” is a limitation of language; there is only the actuality, flowing.
Sages of every discipline have recognized hints of Living Unbound; every scientific and spiritual discipline has those unique few who are willing to dive into the depths of experience and the replicable results of experimentation for all answers, no matter what the cost.
Thinking doesn’t make time real; every moment is a new universe.
