Viewpoint – Fundamental Understandings Of Spiritual Practice
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Whatever spiritual practice we deal with, from a central and crucial importance for our progress is first and foremost to stop identifying with the personality.
In other words: to experience directly and immediately the truth that we aren’t only a body and personality, but much more; we are infinite.
Trying to explain this with words will have no value, unless if it’s experienced by the practitioner. To stop identifying doesn’t mean to deny the personality or frivolous to announce it as real or illusory but to find from first-hand experience that we aren’t only body-personality.
If we achieve this, we settle down, in a natural way, in awareness as infinite consciousness which we are. From which infinite consciousness the personality is only a tiny component particle.
If we don’t dis-identify ourselves from the personality or not part with the illusion that we’re only and exclusively personality, then whatever spiritual practice to use, whatever energies, consciousness, schools and teachers to achieve even super-knowledge and mastery, we’ll remain in the vestibule of transformation.
In the vestibule of transformation, you can be a master of energy and consummate in theories while in the meantime you’re a suffering. Strong ego, which not only isn’t declining, but growing as if in otherwise excellent ability to channel spiritual consciousness plus extensive knowledge on terminology and concepts.
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The human mind is a mental generator and consumer of negativity, which is experienced as seemingly different but fundamentally similar principle forms of suffering. Most people don’t assume that parallel with this personal noise in us, we’re constantly haunted by a quiet, inconspicuous and borderless world of Joy and Perfection – Our True Nature.
Our experience depends solely on which of the two “overlapping” levels of consciousness we’ve anchored to our attention. Being focused onto the personality, i.e. in the illusion that only the external occurrences can bring us good, sooner or later we experience suffering.
Finding the Truth in us, feels like an infinite peace, light, space and deep, gently joy, as we come out of the “scope” of the mental personal experience; we become untouchable for the so-called suffering.
If we permanently establish in the beyond personal, transcendent world of Truth Who We Are, we achieve harmony, peace, joy and fulfillment beyond the whim of temporary external occurrences or random mental assumptions.
In this sense, we, the ones who deal with spirituality, have to “do” two important things:
1. To discover the world of Truth in us
and
2. To permanently live in it.
Achieving these two conditions is tantamount to suspension of identification with the personality; we understand from first-hand experience that our personality is only a fraction of infinity; we are this infinity.
Let’s summarize it:
Ultimately, the point of practicing spirituality is in awareness of permanently being in our True Nature; a tiny fraction of which the personality is, with its tendency to mental pain.
Being in our Truth and Perfection has the power to “dissolve” and thus transform the imperfect, false, mental world of the personality. Life as joy and peace is attainable now, immediately, it’s beyond the powers of everyone and this was discovered thousands of years ago.
The lasting focus on our True Nature allows us to experience reality from the perspective of the Truth, our Whole Consciousness, instead of the limited and false perspective of the suffering mental mind, personality.
Whatever particular spiritual practice we use, it’s a veritable spiritual and transformative, if it helps being in direct, immediate experience of the Truth Who We Are.
Direct awareness and experience of the Truth is surprisingly easily reachable and accessible; in this sense, it’s not a practice, but rather a natural state. Practices are actually an approach to a permanent awareness and sooner or later are abandoned, when they’ve played their role as an assistant.
Awareness and directly experiencing the Truth Who We Are is a primary and essentially the only tenable spiritual purpose. Any assumptions or conceptual discussions regarding ascension, changing dimensions, putative centers of consciousness, geometric ratios, types of energy, etc, not playing a role to our immediate alert Presence in the Truth, are rather food for the fantasies of the mind and slow us down the road to our main goal. As important as it seems a mystical experience, a meditative practice or a special state, in the end it comes down to a phenomenon.
As phenomena, they are subject to surveillance and couldn’t possibly be more significant than the One, Who watches them, i.e. Observer, Truth, Absolute. We have an opportunity to focus in partial things and phenomena; However, we have the opportunity to immediate experience our unity with the One who is Aware of all this. Both paths are valid; but you decide for yourself which one is the shorter.
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MENTAL AND PRACTICAL MIND
For the purpose of maximum clarity of understanding, we conditionally accept humans consists of two basic and completely different layers – mental and practical.
Here, we won’t discuss the “practical mind” as for most of us it works perfectly and not only it doesn’t create any “problems”, but it’s also an excellent working “software”. The practical mind is everything in us that is practical knowledge, skills and their creative application, enrichment and more.
The practical mind backs on past experience and future projections, but they are purely practical and don’t carry the morbid character of the emotional past-future, typical of the mental mind. The practical mind is one of the many impeccable functioning “organs”, given to us by Nature.
With distinct potential, qualities and characteristics in different people, it’s a subject of development and as a rule it serves flawlessly. All the goodies around us, created by human hand are a result generations amazingly worked practical minds.
We repeat: our practical mind is functioning well and doesn’t create any problems, therefore that’s not the subject of the current writing; we mention it solely to clearly distinguish it from the mental mind.
The mental mind, personality or ego is with a completely different nature than the practical. He grows, differentiaties and separates in the first years of life, obtaining a character of an own being – a parasite, leading autonomous life, claiming authenticity and identity with a person.
Functions as ceaseless thinking, based on past or future emotional interpretations, tirelessly forming complex and clumsy intellectual structures that are the basis of false, shallow and one-sided beliefs.
Beliefs are firmly fixed systems of thoughts, images, attitudes and ideas which have the property to deeply root in our overall sense of life. All this is supported by the powerful emotional apparatus – our other mental aspect.
Our mental plan as mind-emotions is deeply rooted in the physical body and is expressed as a personality. For a number of known and unknown reasons, our mental aspect – the personality, functions, to put it mildly – badly and this is felt directly in “life” as omnifarious negativity, briefly referred here as suffering.
Through the mechanisms of the artificially generated suffering, our mind keeps us in subjection and essentially we’re his slaves and hostages. The deep, primordial basis of the mental being in us is fear of shortage, lack of completeness, satisfaction, integrity and is anything but peace, acceptance and joy.
The unhealthy thought process is always anchored in the past-future and doesn’t value the present moment. Focusing in “now” ( which is automatically achieved in a direct experience of our True Nature), mental thinking stops; both are incompatible. Fear of shortage is manifested by a wide range of non-acceptance of the current moment with a range of conflicts, desires, expectations and therefore resistances.
The sustained focus on the experiences of the mental mind, so typical of humanity, inevitably generate suffering. Experiencing any form of pain is a sure indicator that we have made an identification with the personality.
If we focus on our True Nature, suffer quickly stops and is replaced by peace, a sense of space, joy, grace. Use this as a powerful and actual spiritual tool!
Peace, the sense of space, joy and grace are unmistakable signs of Presence in Truth; one who has once experienced them, cannot mistake them for anything else.
We don’t say that life will become necessarily flawless as circumstances and events, because we’re in Awareness of Truth; Life is what it is – good and bad things come and go. We say that if we’re in permanent Awareness of Truth, we’re beyond the reach of suffering, beyond the interpretation of life as pain from our mental mind.
Yes, it will hurt, when something painful happens, but it won’t touch us deeply as who knows what suffering, drama or tragedy, we won’t get broken or left with a lasting impression and pain will not be our identity. Pains, joy, sunny days, rainy days come and go, and this is in the order of things; Nothing has such a crucial importance and weight.
Life in a state of permanent awareness of our True Nature is accompanied with a feeling of constant joy, grace, peace and inner completeness. Such vibration quickly evokes the corresponding favorable external reality, which in turn isn’t absolutized, as things ultimately aren’t important and are transient.
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