The Voice in the Head
The single most important step in your journey toward enlightenment is to learn to dis-identify from your thinking mind.
The thinking mind is a very busy component of our consciousness. It is constantly labeling, judging, defining, conceptualizing, covering the world up with words rather than allowing you to experience the world directly through presence. The thinking mind is a chatterbox that is constantly making commentary on every little detail of our experience, robbing us of a still and receptive state of being that experiences life with an open curiosity that makes the world a living reality that is miraculous and magnificent.
When we are identified with our thinking mind, our experience of life is constricted and limited to an opaque screen of words, images, concepts and labels – second-hand representations of life that might as well be a movie on a screen.
When you create even a momentary gap in the incessant thinking and chatter taking place in your mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. The world around you becomes more vibrant and real. Your experience of life is direct and alive, you are present in your experience, and thus you are able to touch life directly. This is called direct experience. Experience without words or labels.
Make a practice to create these momentary gaps in thinking as many times a day as you can. It doesn't matter of your gap is long. One minute is good enough. It's the number of times you cease the chatter and noise of the thinking mind that matters. The more you do this, the more you dis-identify.
One day you may even find yourself smiling at this voice in your head as though it were a child misbehaving. This is good, it means you are taking the content of your mind less seriously. And you are recognizing that the content of your mind is not you. You do not depend on it for your sense of self. You are beginning to identify with something else within your consciousness, with your source and essence, with the presence of your being.
This is the state we wish to cultivate.
Dis-identifying from the voice in the head is explored in this segment, which begins with a short breathing exercise led by Eckhart.
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