Michael Singer, the untethered soul, page 137
Before I begin... I am going to, once again, strongly encourage you to read the untethered soul. It is a book like, The Power of Now and The New Earth, that can open you up when you are at least partially ready. I am spitting out a regurgitated form of it here on the page but I can not give you what Michael Singer's words can. Or at least I cannot give all that they have given me.
Let's Recap
You
So you (as your true Self, your conscious awareness, your spirit) are a timeless, eternal Being in a vast and empty space. (What the Buddhist call Shunyata). You are whole, complete, joy, peace, light and Love. You are connected to the One Source. You are nameless, timeless, formless and infinite. You are free.
This consciousness, that is you, forms the background of what we call life. You are that background. You are the clear blue sky over which clouds pass. You are that which observes, witnesses and places attention on each cloud that passes through you.
The Clouds
The clouds are formed by all the information picked up by your five senses from the outer world. They consist of all the sights, smells, tastes, sounds and sensations coming at you all the time. They are all the perceptions of events and happenings, the people and things in that world that is unfolding before you. They are your bodily sensations, your pleasures, your aches and pains. They are your interpretations of all the relationships you encounter. They are also your memories(impressions), your emotional reactions, and your thoughts.
It is important to remember that these clouds are just wisps of mist and vapour. They are not solid nor do they have any form or matter. They are clouds that are just meant to pass by the space that is you, as you, the Being who is peacefully watching.
The Mind
The problem is, these things are constantly passing, constantly moving, constantly changing. Where on earth (or in heaven :)) do we focus our attention then?
The mind is called in. It is a tool used by this vast consciousness that we have given the job of cloud- control to. It is the thing we tell to make sense of all this input. We tell it, not only to make sense of it, but to sort it all out and file it all away with distinct categories and labels.
According to Patanjali there are different levels to the mind or Citta. There is the basic mind or ahamkara which Buddhists and Eckhart Tolle refer to as the ego or little "me". Then there is the intellect or that sorting part of the mind that has to discriminate and make distinctions between the different clouds. This is called the Buddhi. And there is mana, that part of the mind that gets attracted to certain clouds based on how close, how pretty, how noisy or desirable they are. It is the wanting part of the mind. (Satchidananda, page4)
So the mind, with its three active levels, sits in that space of our consciousness watching the clouds but it can't do so very peacefully.
Whereas the pure sense of awareness, that is us, just witnesses and watches all without judgment...the mind believes it must decide which clouds to focus on and which ones to tune out. It has to decide which ones "are good" and which ones "are bad". It must decipher which ones to "chase after" and which one to "chase away". It must make judgments, preferences and discriminations. It feels it must judge, label and name.
What makes things seem less chaotic? What offers some sense of stability or protection? What jumps in and demands to be seen? ? The mind will decide.
The Problem
The mind will try to select things that it determines as preferable in creating and making sense of this input and it will focus on that. But it will also get distracted by the noisiest and most determined to be seen clouds.
As clouds pass by, all attention will go to the selected few and we will place all our vast powers of concentration, then, on this "thing", this "feeling" or idea. Sometimes at great cost.
It is a very big job for a little mind. There is just so much coming in and going out. There is just so much the mind has to do and so much stuff to sort through.
But you keep holding onto them, as if consistency can substitute for stability. (Michael Singer).
That is where the 'problem" arises.
Clinging
This act of holding onto certain impressions is what the Buddhist refer to as "clinging". When we intensely fix our attention on things, be they actual objects or feelings, thought and impressions...we may actually narrow our concentration so much that we, who we really are, gets lost in the experience. We get lost in the clouds and forget the sky on which those clouds are floating.
We will hold onto this focus with all our might (as if we could when it really is nothing more than vapour and mist). We will see the inner things as solid...something that defines our world and us, something that we can use to create a sense of self with and we will cling.
We may mistaken the objects we are focusing on for being us. You seem to have lost your original identity and have identified with your thoughts and body. (Satchidananda, page 7) We forget that we are the One watching, not what is watched. We identify with the things, the feelings and the thoughts.
You are not your thoughts; you are aware of your thoughts.
You are not your emotions; you feel your emotions. you are not your body; you look at it in a mirror and experience this world through its eyes and ears.
You are the conscious being who is aware of all these inner and outer things.
This clinging can make our minds a little crazy. Running after objects of craving can do a lot of damage to our body and mind. (Thich Nhat Hanh, page 72).
The mind, as sick as it is, will eventually build our psyches around these objects we cling to. So how on earth can we be sane when we are building ourselves on vapour and mist ?
Building Blocks
As we move away from the calm space that is us; as we get more and more lost and disorientated in the foregrounds of our lives we may become unsettled and afraid. Everything is whirling around us so fast, it makes us dizzy.We may seek security, stability and a sense of relationship with the world outside us and the world in our minds. The psyche is built.
We will use the things we have focused on and were clinging to as building blocks. We will take our few selected clouds and we will build a protective fortress around our emerging sense of self.. We will build a world that makes some sense to our basic ego minds. From here we will create more thoughts that tie all the mismatch of selected perceptions, thoughts, feeling and impressions together. If it makes sense we will build our whole sense of self around it. Our clouds will seem to take on the form of a protective fortress, one we will defend at all costs.
This fortress we are building identifies us...every brick in it is something we cling to. And as the clouds keep passing by, the mind selects those clouds that fit in the picture we created of ourselves and it resists, struggles against or fights off the rest. Society will step in , every now and again, to admire what we built which will encourage us to go on building in the same way or it may reject what we have created, in which case we may feel a need to change the architecture.
The Walls
But in truth we are struggling with the clinging and struggling with the building. This is what 'suffering' is. It is exhausting. We also find that walls of our mental fortress still get knocked down by the outside world and we are sometimes pushed against them from the inside. To be near a wall, especially if it has already been torn down or feels like it might be, is terrifying. We want to retreat back away from it and hide in our little concept of self.
But the thing is...exactly where we feel fear and discomfort is where we must go. We put so much energy into defending these walls when what we really want is beyond them.
If we would be willing to feel a bit of pain and discomfort, some fear and lean up against those walls amazing things would happen. We would realize that they were never solid...they never protected us and they never had to. They were just mist and vapour from passing clouds we cling to. If let them go, we will be wall less ( well we already are) but we will realize we are wall less. We will fall back into that vastness, that infinite empty space that is us. We will remember that we are and always were the sky and not the clouds. They will continue to pass us by as we simply watch and we will be free.
Let's stop defending that which isn't worth defending.
All is well.
References
Michael Singer (2007) the untethered soul. New Harbinger.
Sri Swami Satchidananda (2011) The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Integral Yoga Publications
Thich Nhat Hanh (20011) peace is every breath. Harper One
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