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December 11th, 2009 by Gary
Hipworth
Unless you discover inner peace that has no
cause, you will try to find your peace through doing good works or forcing your mind to be quiet, or by trying to
be the peacemaker. These ways will only cause more pain and suffering in the world and in yourself because the ego
is in charge and it is always causing mischief and is never satisfied for very long.
Keep a 'to do' list at all times so that your mind can stop worrying about its
unfinished business, and attend to this list before negative consequences occur! A constantly chattering, busy mind
uses up a lot of precious energy and wears you out, makes you world-weary. Thought has produced the thinker in
every one of us and the thinker is the greatest control freak that ever lived.
However thought is best when it is helping us adjust creatively to living so it needs
to know when it is out of its depth and be quiet naturally. When thought tries control everything it cannot
let anyone or anything be what they are, and so there must inevitably be conflict and disorder in human
relationships.
Don't compare yourself with anyone else or make anyone else a hero. A healthy ego is
necessary to live in this world, but it does not need fame or awards or position whereas an unhealthy ego needs all
these things and more, always comparing.
Your consciousness is its content of knowledge, ideas, values, rules, beliefs,
memories and personal pleasures and sufferings. The more you can minimise this content by ridding your memory of
too much useless, trivial information and replacing it instead with essential, wisdom the more peaceful you will
become. After all, you can always look on the Internet for the detailed stuff!
Finally, I have saved the best for last!
Would you take inner peace with its
related blissful feeling if it was free, without drugs or alcohol or any harmful substance?
Sounds too good to be true? It works for me...it may also work for
you!
Here is what you do:
Become passively aware of your surroundings (do it NOW) and of your thought processes without wanting anything, i.e. just observe both realities at the one time (outer and inner worlds) - which is as easy as falling off a log - notice what happens, if only for a second - does your thinking stop dead in its tracks? Try it and let me know what you discover.
You could also experiment with this process by going into the country away from noise and human activity and simply observe nature. This is what I have discovered after spending many months living in the country by myself and taking frequent walks in the bush away from all the noise and bustle of civilization:
**PASSIVE AWARENESS AND THOUGHT CANNOT HAPPEN
AT THE SAME TIME**
The amazing beauty of this process is that it is free for anyone to have, it has no
harmful side effects, and because it is moment-to-moment it cannot be sold in the market place and is therefore
incorruptible and available to everyone, just like the sun and the moon and bird songs!
My understanding of why thought cannot compete with pure awareness is that this state is our pre-thinking consciousness and we needed it to survive when surrounded by potential killers of all kinds.
When you are thinking you easily loose awareness of your immediate environment. In many ways 'thought' is a luxury for an animal in the wild and could only have taken hold in us when we settled in cities and had our food supply within walls and early warning signals to keep out the beasts!
Let me be clear that there are many other people who claim to have experienced 'pure consciousness' or some variation.(long Eastern tradition including Krishnamurti's 'choiceless awareness', Douglas Harding's 'headlessness or 'two-way looking', Buddhist 'mindfulness', and Gurdjieff's 'self-remembering').
There is definitely something going on here!
Check it out for yourself, or should I say, despite yourself?
