Spirituality is about reconnecting with your true self, which remains obscured, as long as you identify with your thoughts. When you identify with your thoughts, you believe them to be WHO YOU ARE, rather than realising they are just thoughts.
Think about this for a minute. How do we experience life?
We experience life through…
- Sense perceptions – see, hear, smell, taste, touch,
- Bodily awareness – awareness of breathing, pains, cramps, twitches,
- Thoughts – rational as well as emotional thought
- Emotions – which come from thought. We can use the intensity of positive and negative emotion to help drive us towards a goal, but often emotions are the very thing that hold us back with strong sensations of fear and inner conflict.
And what else…
- Consciousness – true consciousness is awareness and freedom from thought, and can only be found by living IN THE MOMENT. Consciousness allows you to find your true self, your spiritual self, free of identification with thought (otherwise known as the Ego).
THOUGHT
Thought is good as long as you don’t lose self in it. After all where would we be without..
- Reasoning
- Critical thinking
- Decision making
- Problem solving
- Memory
- The ability to learn, comprehend and recall.
Thought is an invaluable servant, there’s no disputing that, but equally it can be a destructive master.
When trapped in identification with thought (Ego), you lose yourself in thinking. You take your thoughts to be who you are. You are unknowingly possessed by them. It becomes part of your sense of identity, part of your sense of self, but it is a false self.
Thoughts directly feed emotions and can make your life a misery.
Thoughts also colour your sense perceptions and Bodily awareness. They give meaning to them. Thoughts interpret your perceptions, they make stories of them, often based on what? Social conditioning, fragmented and limited life experiences, which you believe and value either positively or negatively. Beliefs and values are themselves, thoughts.
When lost in thought you live in fear of pain and suffering. Thought is consumed with the preservation of self, and always bases decisions on avoiding pain and suffering and the desire for pleasure.
It is competitive for what it believes are scarce resources, and tries to separate self from others, to make self more in comparison, by lower others or increasing self.
It attaches to the thought of possessions, relationships, mental positions, ideas, beliefs and values to make more of self. They are pulled into the false sense of self.
It judges and labels to better understand, pigeon holing and stereotyping as it goes, but in doing so. grossly reduces the ultimately unknowable down to a simplified version, which it better understands. It also does this to make itself bigger and better.
You become lost in thought rather than experience the world around you as it is. Life loses its sense of wonder.
Thought can only exist in a state of psychological time (past and future). Using the present moment only as a stepping-stone to the future. Or using it to relive the past, and using the past to predict the future. In reality there is only ever this moment, the present.
CONSCIOUSNESS
Awakening is the separation of awareness and thought. It is space around thought.
You become an observer of thought, and see thought as just thought. A very useful tool to use as you navigate through life, but a very destructive master. You no longer identify with it, or mistake it to be you. Awareness and thought are separated.
Consciousness is accessed through the present moment, the only point we can interact with life from. Past is memory, future is anticipation, both are thoughts.
If you’re in the present fully, thought cannot exist. It cannot diminish, or reduce life to something you can judge, label, attach to, resist, separate from, you are too present, within consciousness.
Joy flows into what you do, not from it, and any doing should have a full sense of consciousness within it. Bring BEING into any DOING.
You understand that you are part of the whole, life and consciousness, So much more than the confines of your skin. Consciousness becoming conscious of itself through you. Formless around form. Part of and one with the whole. “Life is the dance, you’re are the dancer” as Eckhart Tolle says.
For more about spirituality check out our guide here.