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Everyone, even the most shallow people, wonder who they are. Really.
By the time you are out of high school you have a constructed identity, but it is neither you, nor it makes you happy. But it may make it bearable to be with other people who don’t know who they are, who live out a script that is either compatible with yours or not.
People are afraid to go within.
They are afraid to find out that they are bad, or evil, or stupid.
When curiosity is bigger than the fear, they start meditating. They attempt to go within. but there is nothing there. or the attempt failed and they stayed without. and then begins the biggest pretense of life: pretending to be spiritual. the practitioner of a spiritual practice.
Inside, at the core, you will find nothing. It is how it is. The inside is a channel. A vertical channel, connecting you with all of it.
When I say: develop a strong core, a strong sense of self
When I say: develop a strong core, a strong sense of self, I don’t mean a hodge podge of qualities, like personality tests. I don’t mean even an organized list of things.
A strong sense of self isn’t stuff. It is being, or beingness. Consciousness. It is awareness. It is what is in the nothing that you find when you take a glimpse to the inside.
Nothing that you can do on the outside will effect the inside. It works the other way around.
That awareness, that silence, that wordlessness, that consciousness carries outward, when it does, when it overflows.
All the beautiful words, courage, love, compassion and such are just that: words. They don’t effect your inner being, because they don’t come from there.
And no matter how many times you say them, with how much conviction, they remain outside, and the inside remains empty, and gets weaker with every outside effort to alter it. You become top-heavy…
Having a strong core is being like the Daruma doll
Having a strong core is being like the Daruma doll, being bottom heavy, so each interaction, each visit to the outside is guided by the inside.
You don’t need to know who you are in the traditional meaning of the word ‘knowing’. No words. I don’t have words, and yet I have a sense. And I have awareness. And I can tell when what I do on the outside, and how I do it is inauthentic. It didn’t come from the inside.
You probably have a concept that the inside should be like a beautiful mountain lake with mirror like surface. You say that anger, hate, sadness, despair, don’t have any room there.
But the inside is not separate, and the inside does have anger and such.
The Bible
Moses who wrote the first draft of the Old Testament was describing his own inner state, inner sanctum. and it had plenty of anger.
So he said that that was god. because how would you know?
I have connected to the idea of god, to the idea of Jesus, the idea of the prophet Muhammad.
I found men there. angry men, ambitious men, hateful men.
If you think you know and they don’t. you need to teach.
But the multitudes are not interested. So you get angry. So you get ambitious. And you get hateful.
If you are lucky hate, anger, come and go.
If you are not lucky, hate is from where you write from. and no matter what you write about, hate is your soil.
If you are not lucky, anger is giving you all the writing. and then, for millennia people nurture themselves from that poisonous well you set, and call it the word of god, or prophecy.
The hate comes through, like toxin through mother’s milk to the child. Your disciples may not be able to distinguish it, but hate will be in their hearts. Hate, while they repeat your loving, peaceful words, that are totally inauthentic.
And no one ever really contradicted them, because for an ordinary person, to go within, to the channel, one needs to overcome fear, separation, and very few people have ever been willing to do that.
It feels like death…
It feels like death. and although a sense of deathlessness is on the inside, you have to go through the experience of death to go there. So people don’t.
When I look back at the hundreds of students that have left, I find a common thread: they all left to return to be like others, to return to ordinariness, to be respectable, likable, and to fit in.
By the way, most gurus talk from memory, and not from the inside. To talk from the inside, you need to be there while you talk… Not easy.
Most have never gone all the way. So they repeat what they made up from what they read. Most likely what resonated with them the most is what was inauthentic: the description by a person who has never been there.
Interestingly, I have never heard anyone say that the within isn’t in the middle of the body… by the way.
Because Consciousness is just behind you, that is also the location of the channel. just behind you. And until you step out of the circle of body, mind, even soul, emotions, etc. you are never inside.
One student asked the other day: how do you look inside?
The question comes from the anatomy of the eye: it looks outside. Just like the hands and the legs that are tools for the outside.
You don’t look with your eyes. You step back into Consciousness and then look WITH consciousness. not your eyes, not even the back of your eyes, although it may feel like it, given that the back of the eyes feel active when you are in consciousness. Why? I don’t know. It is not necessary, says muscletest. and yet.
Your first step, once flexibility is active, is to step back into Consciousness and experience your world from there, your senses, your body, your mind, your attention, your actions, and others. Everything.
You still have your attention directed outward, and yet that is the first step to go inside.
My experience has been that without Flexibility the capacity no one can stay in Consciousness long enough for it to matter.
PS: My job, as a true empath, is to tell you stuff only an empath can tell you. Otherwise you are just left with what people say… lies, lies, lies.
Some don’t even know they are lying, because they are not aware enough to know.