June 2015
Not easy but simple – pay attention! – B’Gita – Ch. 5
It is enough just to be attentive. Having never left the house you are asking for the way home. Collecting right ideas will take you nowhere. Just cease imagining.
Don’t try to understand. Enough if you do not misunderstand. Don’t rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether. This integral seeing-feeling can work miracles. It is like casting a bronze image; metal alone, or fire alone will not do, nor will the mould be of any use; you have to melt down the metal in the heat of the fire and cast it in the mould.
By choiceless attention in the now, all sin is dissolved in wisdom – B’Gita – Ch. 5
By being with yourself, the ‘I am’; by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of attentive consciousness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.
Your destiny is here and now, eternally at one – B’Gita – Ch. 4
Just give attention until a current of mutual understand is established. As a matter of fact, all realization is only sharing. Allow for a wider consciousness and share in it. Unwillingness to enter and to share is the only hindrance. Understand one thing well, and you have arrived.
What prevents you from knowing is not the lack of opportunity but the lack of will to focus in your mind what you want to understand. If you could but keep in mind what you do not know it would reveal to you its secrets. But if you are shallow and impatient, not earnest enough to look and wait you are like a child crying for the moon.
Your body and mind exist as you, just as long as you believe so. Cease to think that they are yours and attachment will just dissolve. By all means let your body and mind function, but do not let them limit you. If you notice imperfections just keep on noticing. Your very giving attention to them will set your heart and mind and body right.
All illness begins in the mind. Take cognisance of the whole of it, not only the outer symptoms. Take care of the mind first, its roots run deep. By tracing ideas deep into their roots, all wrong ideas and emotions, at their root, will be eliminated. With the removal of causes the effect is bound to depart.
Man sees himself become what he believes himself to be. Abandon all ideas about yourself and you will find yourself to be the pure witness, beyond all that can happen to the body or the mind.
It is easy to forget the high topics of mind and spirit when you return home to everyday life. It is your childishness you are returning to. You are not fully grown up; there are levels left undeveloped because unattended. Just give full attention to what in you is there to develop, altogether childish and you will ripen. It is the maturity of heart and mind that is essential. It comes effortlessly when the main obstacle is removed – inattention, unawareness. In awareness you grow.
Do not despair if you find it difficult. Just take time to be satisfied with watching the flow of your life; if your watchfulness is deep and steady, ever turned towards the source, it will gradually move upstream till suddenly it becomes the source.
Put your awareness to work, not your mind. The mind is not the right instrument for this task. The timeless can be reached only in the timeless. Your body and your mind are both subject to time; only awareness is timeless, even in the now. In awareness you are facing facts and reality is fond of facts.
You want to treat your ignorance as if it is a disease, without having seen the patient! Before you ask about ignorance, why don’t you enquire first, who is ignorant? When you say you are ignorant, you do not know that you have imposed the concept of ignorance over the actual state of your thoughts and feelings. Examine them as they occur, give them your full attention and you will find that there is nothing like ignorance, only inattention. Give attention to what worries you – that is all. After all, worry is mental pain and pain is invariably a call for attention. The moment you give attention, the call for it ceases and the question of ignorance dissolves.
Instead of waiting for an answer to your question, find out who is asking the question and what makes him ask it. You will soon find that it is the mind, goaded by fear of pain that asks the question. And in fear there is memory and anticipation, past and future. Attention brings you back to the present, the now, and the presence in the now is the state ever at hand, but rarely noticed.
Just give attention and wonder. Wonder is the dawn of wisdom. To be steadily and consistently wondering brings light of understanding. You may ask how it is done. At least you are asking! Good enough, for a start. Go on pondering, wondering; being anxious to find a way. Be conscious of yourself; watch your mind; give it your full attention. Don’t look for quick results; there may be none within your noticing.
Unknown to you, your psyche will undergo a change; there will be more clarity in your thinking, charity in your feeling, purity in your behaviour. You need not aim.
So far your life was dark and restless. Attention, alertness, awareness, clarity, liveliness, vitality are all manifestations of integrity, oneness with your true nature, infinite peace. It is in the nature of peace, the central normality to reconcile duality, and rebuild the personality in accordance with the true nature of the self. Attentive, choiceless-awareness, bliss, is the faithful servant of the self, ever attentive and obedient.
There is no possession as precious as anchored in the present, here and now, where no calamity can disturb – B’Gita – Ch. 6
Do not undervalue attention, it means interest and also love. To know, to do, to discover or to create you must give your heart to it – which means attention. All the blessings flow from it.
Being attentive, self-remembering will bring you to realisation because they are two aspects of the same state. Self-remembrance is in the mind; self-realisation is beyond the mind. The image in the mirror is of the face beyond the mirror.
NaturesDestiny 