Realize you are conscious but never at complete inner peace, as your mind constantly tries to figure out how things need to be for you to be okay - a process that can never lead to permanent peace. Learn to not participate in this struggle by sitting as the witness, allowing inner disturbances to pass without reacting. Go about life without trying to be okay, simply allowing things to unfold. As you let go of inner energies, you'll feel a deeper spiritual energy flowing in from behind, bringing love and joy. Fall in love with this energy and surrender fully to merge into it, overcoming the fear of losing your personal self. Realize then that your life can continue without you, leaving you immersed in infinite Spirit at peace, having transcended the world, mind, and heart.
Spirituality is meant to bring about harmony and peace. But the diversity of our philosophies, beliefs, concepts and views about spiritual matters often leads to confusion or even conflict. The fact is that the very act of seeking spiritual freedom causes notions of success and failure, and these notions serve only to bind us to our own self judgments: Am I growing? Have I done anything wrong? Am I meditating enough?
Truth is only complicated because we pass it through our habitual thought patterns. When we step back from ourselves, truth becomes simple. There are not many paths to freedom, there is only one. In the end, no matter what particular patterns of thought we have managed to build in our minds, freedom always means transcending these personal thought patterns.
But how does one go about transcending the personal self and awakening to spiritual freedom? What is needed for this journey are succinct steps that are so universal that they can echo through the halls of any religion as well as support intellectual understanding. Untethered Soul offers a road map to Self Realization.
You must first come to realize that you are in there. From deep inside, you are experiencing this world. You are experiencing your physical body, your thoughts, and your emotions. You are conscious and you are experiencing what it is like to be human.
Look to see what's going on inside. If you want to understand why you've done everything you have ever done, if you want to see what's really going on, just observe your mind and emotions--just experience your inner state. If you objectively look, you will see that you are never completely at peace. You will see that you are not okay in there.
At any point when you look at the state of your inner being, you will see that something is bothering you. You will then notice that this causes urges, drives, and impulses to do something about it. You will find yourself constantly trying to either get something or avoid something. All of this is done in an attempt to be okay.
If you watch, you will see that your mind is always telling you what you should and should not do, what others should and should not do, and how things should and should not be. All of this is the mind's attempt to first create a conceptual model of what would make you okay, and then try to get the outside world to match it.
You must seriously look at this process of trying to be okay. You've been at it your entire life--you've just tried different things at different times. While it's true that sometimes you manage to make it better for short periods of time, you know that you've never even come close to reaching a state of permanent peace. Watch very closely how you react to the things your mind has preferences about. You will see that if your mind gets what it wants, you feel joy; if it doesn't get what it wants, you feel disturbance. Likewise, when your mind experiences what it doesn't want, you feel disturbance, and when it avoids what it doesn't want, you feel relief. You will never be okay playing this game because the world will never match the conceptual model your mind has made up. Eventually, you will come to see that struggling to be okay does not work. At some point, you will try to find a different way to be okay in there.
This step is about learning to sit in the witness, the part of you that notices the inner urges to be okay. You must become comfortable with sitting in there and not participating in the inner energies. You learn to relax in the midst of them. You come to see that there is a habitual process in which the moment you feel inner disturbance, you are drawn into doing something about it. You must learn to sit inside and not participate in this process. If you truly understand that going outside to try to be okay inside doesn't work, then you'll be willing to sit inside and simply allow the disturbance to pass through. It is not difficult. If you can do this, all disturbance will cease by itself.
If you aren't so preoccupied with trying to be okay, you will be free to sit inside and quietly love, serve, and honor whatever naturally unfolds in front of you. When you reach this point, you are no longer living for yourself. You are interacting with life, but not for the purpose of being okay.
Up to this point, everything you were watching inside was in front of you. But now that you are no longer being drawn into those personal energies, you'll realize that your inner universe is actually very expansive. You will begin to feel Spirit flow in from behind. It lifts you and brings you great love and joy.
It will become completely clear to you that there is an absolute trade-off between your personal energies and the amount of Spirit that you feel. The more you get drawn into your personal energies, the less Spirit you feel. The more you don't participate in your personal energies, the more Spirit you feel. You now have a direct relationship with the spiritual energy, and you will find yourself constantly longing to experience it.
Will is no longer needed. Now your path is strictly about releasing yourself into the pull of the higher energy. You must surrender deeply enough to be able to overcome the fear of losing your connection to the personal self. You must be willing to die to be reborn.
This is the greatest miracle: You've surrendered and your entire life is about Spirit, yet people, places, and things continue to interact with you. The difference is that these interactions require any energy. They happen naturally, by themselves, leaving you at peace and absorbed in Spirit.
Because you are now completely okay, you don't need anything. Things just are what they are. At this point, you know yourself as Self. The world, mind, and heart cannot disturb you. You've transcended them all. What is more, instead of feeling drawn into Spirit, you now actually experience yourself as Spirit. You have no boundaries in time or space. You have always existed and you will always exist. You have no form, shape, gender, or body. You simply are, have always been, and will always be – Infinite Spirit.
I am an untethered soul. I possess the free will to be a free spirit. I am the observer of a reality I create in my mind, that exists in space & time. My natural state is one of unconditional happiness to the extent that I stay open to it. I trust in the perfection of the moment and accept that there is a predetermined limited time in this lifetime outside my control (my view is that our start & end time in this lifetime are predefined). We cannot change our fate, but we can change our perception of it.
I see that my parents shaped my thinking, but that I'm not limited to those thoughts. The thinking that got my parents to where they are isn't always going to serve me today. In truth, they adopted the thinking of their parents which was passed on to me. How to break the cycle? Challenge your thoughts are look at the data.
My only purpose is to live free - to create, love, and play. To live a life without regret and fully experience every moment. To never take anyone, any opportunity, or any experience for granted. There are lessons to be learned when things appear difficult... but difficult is subjective and I recognize my ability to shift my perspective and turn the difficult into ease.
To never settle for less than what I want, but to want what I have by trusting that I am exactly where I am supposed to be with exactly what I need at this moment. To stay open, I recognize when I begin to close and have strategies to let go whenever resistance arises.
I am fully aware that my thoughts determine my reality, and while I cannot change outside forces, I can change the thoughts I have towards them. I'm thankful for the lessons I've had in life, for I know there are no mistakes, only lessons to be learned. Even the actions of others can be valuable lessons to reach my true potential and self-actualized self.
I posses the knowledge I need to be fully present at this moment, and I learn from every new experience, which I carry into the next moment. I am constantly evolving and becoming self-actualized. As my soul & spirit are already fully self-actualized, the game I choose to play is aligning my current reality to the same level as my higher (internal) self.
My higher self desires:
Dominant thoughts share my world and are fully within my own control. Lucid living is an extension of lucid dreaming. To play a role my higher self wants to play, I begin by existing as that person in my thoughts. I act consistently with those thoughts, and other begin to see me this way.
My biggest barrier to overcome is the drive I have to make sure everyone is happy. I feel somehow ‘responsible’ for their happiness. I try to accommodate their ‘model’ of the world by sacrificing my own. I falsely believe I have the ability to impact their model, to fix their model, to bring them whole somehow. But this is impossible. Truly impossible because only they can define their model. It’s their own fault if they have a model that depends on other people (including me).
Stress occurs when you resist. When you experience. Disturbance occurs when we cling to a model of how life ‘should be.’ Tension occurs when there is resistance to what is. And when we resist what is, we create unnecessary tension. The key to a high energy life is to minimize the unnecessary ‘drains’ on our life force. This is the key to extending life as well... we need not create unnecessary stress - which is simply the outcome of tension created by resisting reality.
You can minimize wasteful energy because tension is unnecessary. When you close to what is happening, you create tension. When you create tension, you are expend extra energy by resisting whatever it is. There's a loose circuit. They key is to let it pass through you. We can control our levels of tension by recognizing that the source of tension is simply a mismatch between our model of the world and how the world is showing up.