To know that one is, is natural. To know what one is requires a diving into the depths of One’s own being. The pearl rests on the bottom.
At your core is a beautiful pearl, the shimmering, iridescent and vibrating Spirit of Love. This pearl is your birthright but it got buried under the weight of heavy, muddy thought. You were taught that thinking is good, thinking is what will make you happy, thinking is the highest conscious ability you have. And so the precious pearl got buried under the weight of thoughts, ideas and belief systems. From birth your mind has been filled with stories about who you are and what the world is. A steady drip of stories gradually turned into a tidal wave of thinking that engulfed your mind. And now it spews a constant tsunami of useless, second-hand thoughts. Under their weight the pearl has drowned. It is lying at the bottom of your psychic ocean, laid to rest for all eternity, unless you WAKE UP.
Thinking has a very important place in our psyches and is fine to use when the occasion arises. The problem is that we are thinking all the time. We don’t choose our thoughts. They choose us, we are being thunk! Being thunk, i.e. taken over by uncontrollable thoughts is the world’s number one addiction. We have been brainwashed into believing that, as Descartes famously proclaimed: “I think therefore I am”. It would be more apt to say: “I think therefore I am…screwed”. Thoughts turn into beliefs, i.e. thoughts that you keep thinking over and over. Most of these repetitive thoughts have taken refuge underground in your mind and now run the show that you call your life without your knowledge. You identify with your beliefs as if they had some kind of objective reality. They do not. They are simply the habits of an uncontrolled mind. They are NOT you!
Spend just one day being aware of your thoughts as they arise. Notice the busyness of your mind and see how it teams with unexamined thinking, stinking detritus from the outside world that you’ve allowed to flood your mind with useless ideas and left them there to rot.
Look for one single belief that is truly yours, one idea that didn’t come from the outside world, something you read or heard. You will soon discover that your mind is not your own. It has become a prison you created by listening to other peoples’ thoughts. The way out of the prison is lit by Aha moments of insight.
Aha moments arise in a quiet mind, a still mind that is not bothered by thoughts. This doesn’t have to be hours of meditation but conscious, regular gaps in thinking. People have huge Aha moments when they mind the gap, when they surrender their thoughts. They consciously impose a small opening between thoughts in which insight can emerge. If you sit in a space of “don’t know” mind you begin to clear the detritus, giving space for a wiser, more intuitive place within you to make its voice heard.
So don’t be a great thinker, be a gap-maker. Be present in the moment and connect to what is happening in your life and not in your head. You will realise that there is a much greater intelligence than your thinking mind awaiting your attention. And when you connect to this higher, interconnected wisdom, you will intuit the re-emergence of the pearl of love that you are.
A Practice Guaranteed to Shut the Mind Up
Sit in silence for a moment and ask your mind this question: “Okay, tell me something really important”.
Then observe the continued silence, haha!