If you happen to go to a class where they teach Creative Writing, one of the exercises they will ask you to do is to hold a fruit, say an Apple in your hand , observe it for a few minutes and then ask you to write about what you have noticed and experienced with your senses of sight and smell. You will hold it in both hands and take it to your nose. Its shiny light skin with myriad shades of red, orange and yellow gives off a mild smell which makes you wonder what it would be if you were to walk amidst an orchard of apples trees laden with ripening fruits. You can’t but wonder at the infinite intelligence behind the design and the solution so befitting the purpose.
What if I now ask you to shift attention from the feeling and the emotion that holding of the apple has caused and shift the attention inwards to investigate ‘who’ is experiencing ? If the apple and the thoughts and feelings it created are the object of experience who is the subject ? What do you see there ? When the light is shone inwards, what do you find ? No wonder you cannot describe it, as it is formless void without objective qualities. Is it not the ‘You’ which you call the ‘I’.
Don’t you feel a sudden quietening of the mind and slowing down of thoughts - investigate the gaps appearing between thoughts that is so relaxing that it immediately makes breathing deeper and longer that the chest almost hurts with the expanding lungs. In a flash, you see that you are not your thoughts , but the thoughts are in you. Don't you see that the gaps between thoughts are the "I" whose nature is pure awareness. You may also experience an unwinding of the coils of the body that even wells inside the cranium , a flexing of the cells of the brain and notice a fragrance in the nostrils when air in ever deepening gusts wafts in and out --the fragrance of being. Awareness is thought what being is to the body. You are that , "Tat Tvan Asi". The super conscious that permeates all beings and non-beings- you , me and the apple.
Can you abide in that awareness, focussed only on the subtle breathe that moves up and down as the only ripple of the being ? Vasanas, rinds of scar tissue of neutrons formed on the brain, try to push through habitual thoughts. Emotions, which are but reactions of body to the mind also butt in. Try not to resist them, but just as thorn is used to remove thorn, turn the attention inwards, back Into the source in an investigation of who the experiencer is, so that they do no overpower you. You can see these thoughts subside, at least the gap between them increase; the ego-mind refuses to submit and demurs, bringing to the fore the many things that you need to ‘do’ and many desires to fulfill before the sense of lack could be assuaged-a chimera.
Say thanks, but no thanks to the ego-mind.
Flow down and down into the ever widening circles of being — Jalahuddin Mohammed Balkhi ( Rumi)
Sat Chit Ananda.
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