Inner Work

For the week of July 11, 2005

Non-Thinking

Our deeply ingrained propensity to identify with our thoughts may well be the single greatest hurdle to progress on the spiritual path, preventing us from fully entering the present moment. We passively allow our focus to bounce along with our thought stream, which is sometimes dull and ordinary, sometimes chaotic and bizarre, but always pretending to be the real me. In truth our thoughts only form a small and relatively insignificant fraction of who we really are.

We do not attempt to stop thoughts. We cannot ban them from our minds. Rather, we follow two approaches that offer us a way to shift beyond thought: laterally beside or vertically above the meandering thought stream. The lateral approach entails moving our attention, our center of gravity into another part of ourselves on the same level as thought: emotion or physical sensation. Since emotions do not readily offer a stable platform for presence, we work to center ourselves in our bodily experience, in the sensitive energy in the body. We relax into our body, resting in the direct and ongoing awareness of arms and legs, torso and head, and in the sensitive energy that powers that direct awareness, that forms its substance.

The second approach to releasing the grip of our thoughts is to shift vertically into the context of our life: pure awareness, consciousness. All thoughts, as well as emotions and physical sensations, take place within the context of consciousness. Opening our being into the spaciousness between and beneath thoughts, the subtle energy of consciousness carries us into a world of peace and stillness, a world not buffeted by the whims of our self-propelled, associative thought processes. For this we need to relax thoroughly, base our presence in physical sensation, and then let go into the silent realm of consciousness.

For this week work to shift your center out of the continuing stream of automatically generated, associative thinking.

About Inner Frontier                                    Send us email 

Copyright © 2001-2024 Joseph Naft. All rights reserved.