Reading about role models can make you uncomfortable sometimes because they might be doing so much better than you in an area of your life that it makes you feel like you’ve failed. Try your best not to dwell on these thoughts though and let them be your inspiration rather than feeling shame or inadequacy.

I like picking role models in my life and surround myself with them. Why do you think people put up posters of Muhammad Ali or Martin Luther King? Their subconscious sees it and it becomes part of their personality. If you read enough about them and have their thoughts circulating around your head that you will become like them. As Buddha said, we are an accumulation of all we have thought. It’s impossible to have thoughts in your head over the long term and not be affected by them.

A few of my role models are :

• Eckhart Tolle - My main spiritual mentor. This is the man that truly sparked my understanding of “the self/ego” and realizing that on a level beyond physical things. I am already perfect. Before this all personal development felt selfish but now I have a clearer understanding of what my true nature is I don’t feel this anywhere near as often. His first book is easily the most influential of my life, bar none. It allowed me to feel a deep unshakable peace unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced and a knowing that all was good in the world. He inspires me to stay present and watch the craziness of the human mind.
• Lao Tzu - Although he’s dead, I feel his book the Tao Te Ching contains eternal wisdom and is one of the deepest spiritual book around today. Eckhart Tolle has been carrying around a copy of it with him for decades. He also speaks to my creativity. He uses a minimalist kind of poetry to connect with you.
• Dean Karnazes (Runner) – This man is all about persistence. He ran 100 miles in under 24 hours non stop, ran a 200 mile race on his own and his book “Ultra Marathon Man” is incredible.
• Steve Pavlina – Before reading of Steve Pavlina, I was a typically convinced Atheist (don’t worry there isn’t a Christian rant coming up!). I read some of his posts and found that he was really logical with his thinking in some areas which connected with me deeply but he also wrote on spirituality! This was a shock to my system because to me you couldn’t combine the too. I found my spiritual side through him and he is the biggest influence in my life in terms of cutting edge personal development. He’s where all my passion for personal development comes from. I thought his blog was good but his book is just on another level and helped me achieve so much in 2010 already.

You’ll often find that your role models combined will reflect a mixture of your current personality and where you’re heading.Your role models will change over time. People can only teach you so much and there is such a variety out there that you should never stop looking to learn more.

Who would you say are your top role models in your life at the moment? What does this say about where you are and where you are heading? Do you feel a deep connection with them or are you just answering the questions?!?!

Role Models Are Within Us

I once heard that reading a book is like sitting down with the greatest minds in history. I wanted to take it a little further and actually sit with them but I’m not into digging up graves. Let me explain.

I know that all other people are a projection of my mind and take that as a given. If you don’t agree with me here, show me where “other people” exists. Lao Tzu doesn’t exist anywhere in external reality. He’s dead but I still think about him so where is he alive? I have a mental concept of him from all I’ve read and thought about. All I have ever had of Eckhart Tolle is a mental concept as I’ve never met the guy. Unless you’re directly interacting with something right now you can never be 100% sure if it exists, can you?

Asking For Guidance

The next step here is in your mind to ask for guidance from them. Sit down with them in a room in your mind and ask them questions and listen for the answers. Be prepared with a blank document as this can be seriously realistic and I sometimes find myself typing 600 miles an hour from the answers that I’m receiving.

Really interact with them though. Try and experience them with as much depth as you can. Use your vision, smell, feeling etc and deepen the feeling that you’re actually there. I find it useful to make their characters seem realistic and life like. The have bodies, regular clothing, habitual tendencies and I say goodbye at the end etc.

You will create the experience of sitting with someone you truly admire and to your mind this was real. It’s like if someone tells you that you are going to die your mind will react with an immediate state of fear. If it’s one of your friends calling you playing about then there was no actual danger but you still experienced the fear. Your mind believes what it’s told.

What I love most about this technique is that I know that the answers are within me. They’re not in some external place that I have to travel to or strive for. I have all the answers and it’s just a process of finding them and using the right techniques.

Problem Solving

This is really useful when facing a problem in your life where the answer is not clear and you could do with multiple perspectives from outside of your own repetitive thoughts. You can go to all of your role models and ask each of them for their view and then go through your notes. I was amazed the first time I did this and honestly thought it was a stupid idea but the experience is eye opening. When I got up, I felt like I’d been chatting along with people who I admired and it made me feel fantastic!

Strengthen Your Connection

Maybe the person you have as your role model has a biography or autobiography and you could read that. This really helps you get into the same state of being as them. Listening to Tony Robbins motivational tapes every day will get you into a state very similar to his and the same with Eckhart Tolle for spiritual depth. You are the combination of the top 5 people you associate with. If you can’t physically meet them then this technique works wonders.

If you have no role models at the moment then that’s fine. Pick something that you’d like to become amazing at and then go and read about someone who is already where you want to be and by developing your mental concept of them you can ask them questions.

It’s really just a technique for accessing a higher self you but works really well. To be honest, it works just as well to create a totally fictitious character who has all the characteristics that you want and talk to this person. Now you can connect and recieve guidance from all these amazing people without ever moving a muscle.

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment ” - Buddha

“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

“Life is Now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be” - Eckhart Tolle

“Before Abraham was, I Am.” - Jesus (John 8:58)

You cannot really argue with that line-up can you! It is like a who is who of spiritual awakening history.

The phrase ‘I Am’ has been one of the most controversial in history. Jesus repeats it several times in the Bible including the mind bending statement “Before Abraham was, I AM”. It is also mentioned directly and indirectly through the work of Eckhart Tolle which I have gained huge wisdom from.

All spiritual seekers and religion founders speak of the same one truth and its spiritual awakening. It is the same truth just expressed by different voices. It is similar to hearing about a football match from fans of opposing teams. Each have their own interpretation but ultimately they all saw the same game. The phrase “I am” means a breaking apart from the dimension of time. When you are in time you are subject to suffering, illness, dis-ease and on the positive side you can plan for the future and learn from the past. When you are in presence in the state of “I am” or “being” you cannot experience illness. Illness requires time. Jesus experienced timelessness and knew, as Zen Masters do today, that the mind cannot comprehend it so bypassed the mind. A great teacher will always tailor his teachings to the student.

“I am” is the state of a mind before it judges something which is the ultimate spiritual state – empty of preconceived notions. You are a human BEING remember, BEING right now. “I am X” means that something is not x which must be so it can be compared too. This is the first phrase which splits the world into two and takes away oneness. When something is described, there must be an opposite to compare it to or it could not be. This is why Lao Tzu says “Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short define each other. High and low oppose each other.” I am is totally barren of judging. I am X brings multiplicity into the world.

When Jesus uttered the mysterious and profound phrase “Before Abraham was, I AM”, he knew that people would try and understand mentally in the dimension of time what this means but there would be no answer. How could you be in this moment, before something that has already happened? In this way it is similar to a Zen poem which has the aim to awaken you because there is no logical explanation. For example, when your foot touches the ground it is the foot feeling the foot. That one was a huge awakening for me.

It does not mean that he is God as common interpretations will have you believe. Jesus was a man like us all. He had emotional times like in the garden of Gethsemane, got angry at the people selling things in the church etc. These common interpretations come from trying to logically interpret what Jesus meant when the truth is actually ridiculously simple and you will only find it when you stop looking. Jesus is consciousness, perfectly awoken. And since he “Is” that means that he is now. Jesus understood that the spirit can never die but the form, or what he calls “being of this world” can die and shift form whenever it wants to. His form died but his spirit is here.

You are essentially presence. Whenever you are not presence, you are mind. When you are in your mind you are in the past and future so the present gets put on autopilot. The only place of possible change in your life is put on autopilot.

I remember starting to search for deep truth around 14-16 years old. I read books of people like Marcus Aurelius and time management and whilst they were good they felt somewhat skin deep and superficial and I had yet to find anything truly deep.

One day during my university life I was in a book store and saw the book “The Power of Now” on a bookshelf and bought it impulsively without ever having heard of the author or book previously (scarily similar to what happened to someone that I know). After reading it for a while I realised the deep truth in it and experienced alignment with the now for the first time.

It was incredible, everything was fresh and I was aligned with it all, a huge spiritual awakening. I knew that everything was good in the universe and that nothing external could beat this knowing that all was good mixed with deep joy. I remember taking a job after that shuffling files and at dinner times I would walk around the local streets finding trees and plants and having experiences like Moses with the burning bush. You can sense their aliveness by sensing them for the first time not through labels. When you look at something without a label and are totally focused on it, you sense your inner connection and can harm nothing as you know it as yourself.

Since that day I have read the book, I pretty much every week at least once. That was years ago too as I am now 20. It has bought a dimension of depth into my life through its spiritual awakening that I never had before and I see around me many are still blind too.

It taught me that this moment TRULY is the only moment there ever has been or ever will be. Consider this. Have you ever experienced something that did not happen in this moment? Of course not. Jesus WAS before Abraham, he WAS in a physical body and he is now. Or you could say Jesus is before Abraham, Jesus is the leader of Christianity and Jesus is now. Feel free to replace Jesus with any name/label.

I cannot tell you how fulfilling it is to know the deepest truth for yourself. You have to experience it (in this moment I may add). It is so fulfilling to know that every spiritual path leads to the same truth and there is ways for humans to find this as I did.

“I am” is the deepest spiritual awakening truth there is. An idea is to sit in meditation and say as a mental mantra “I am”. Try it a few hundred times 2 times a day for a week and it will give you a spiritual awakening.It might not happen during the mantras it usually happens as you go about your daily business and the statement is allowed to seep into your deeper consciousness.

1. Bring Ego To Their Awareness

If you are like me you probably have family and friends who do not have a clue what Ego is and mentioning it would be pointless. You have to bring to their awareness the fact that their ego is coming out indirectly. You cannot just say to someone “hmm, yeah this is Ego, let it go”. A great teacher will talk in language the student will understand. Just keep saying to them “Do you really feel you have to manipulate me like this?”, “Wow, this does not sound like you at all, whats up, are you ok?” etc. Whenever the old pattern comes out bring it to the light straight away and it will vanish, this is the central concept of spiritual awakening.

Another really fun one can be to distract their mind. What is happening when Ego pops up is that people are stuck in repetitive negative thought patterns that are unconsciously running. If you interrupt that pattern enough times they will not be able to get back there. This reminds me of a Tony Robbins audio tape I listened to once where he got a woman to talk about her recent divorce and every time she got into negative thought space he would throw a glass of water over her. After enough times she just could not get back to that place. Hilarious and practical.

You could just do something like stand up and shout “Pickles do me no harm!” every time there is Ego then sit down and apologize profusely saying “I do not know what came over me”. I love doing this because it is so funny, keeps things light and gets rid of all the ego in the room. Most people forget what they were complaining about after something so silly.

it also has the side effect of stopping YOUR ego patterns from coming out as you make yourself super alert by shouting.

2. Never Give Into Their Ego Demands

People with strong egos will try and dominate you and tell you to do things (ala “The Boss”). Sit internally with your power and never let it go. You are ultimately in control of your decisions and every time you let someone else make a decision for you against your will you are losing power.

Is not this what all mass murderers and serial rapists say?

“I did not mean to do it, I just lost control, I regret it every day.”

It comes from the same mindset.

Do not care what they think as this is a lesson they have to learn and you should not lower your principles for someone, they should be continually refined. You are the author of your life and spiritual awakening. Ego will try and demand things of others because it is not ever satisfied with itself and will look for fulfilment in power over others. It scares me whenever I make a decision which is against what my intention is. When I start eating to feel full rather than to nourish me. I know I am not in control and it is horrible. Does it not scare you that your life in some areas is on autopilot? It is like this if you do anything during the day that you know you should not have, pretty much everyone.

3. Intense Awareness

I use this when someone is talking and I have to listen but do not care about the content too (we have all been there). What you do is become totally present and listen to every word that they say intently. Surprisingly often when you become totally present and accepting people realize that they are speaking unnecessarily anyway, stop, and apologize. They are really just repeating the thoughts inside their head verbally as their minds are so full.. When it gets past 5 minutes of this I just politely excuse myself. Intense awareness also stops your ego coming out, so you can respond from your true self.

4. Dealing With A Childs’ Ego

In one of Eckhart Tolles’ books he has the idea of naming the experience of ego to create a sense of separation from it. You can ask the child what came over them, what they would like to name it, how it feels etc. And then whenever it comes up you can say “Here comes X again”. This is a brilliant practice that will be one of the first things I plan to teach my future children when they learn to speak to help their spiritual awakening.

5. Just Remove Yourself

“Life is too short for bad wine” (as my Dads fridge magnet says) but another true statement is that “Sometimes the best way of showing your love is not not associate with a person at all”. Some people just are not ready to move past Ego yet, they may never be ready for a spiritual awakening. Do not worry though, they will move on one day or evolution will sort the problem for you. Outsourcing and delegation baby, it is the future. Just blank them out of your life.

Imagine lying on your deathbed considering all the time you spent with people you just never enjoyed. Get rid of them, let this visualization be your spiritual awakening. Maybe one day they will help themselves up. Point them to a resource that helped you and if they have the personal power they will go for it, if they do not then they are not ready and you are whittling away your hours and minutes with someone who does not want to know. Remember the Snake in the garden of Eden. This is exactly what this is all about.

6. React With Fun

When someone makes an egotistical comment do not let it get under your skin. If you do its residue will remain there for weeks, maybe years. Always react positively to an egotistical comment. Stay light-hearted and people will see that they take this thing too seriously. Even if they do not at least you kept yourself out of Ego which is of primary importance.

7. Visualization

If you are about to go out with someone who you know has a huge Ego that will annoy you then visualize it happening in detail before it does. Sit down and visualize as if you are in your own body using every sense magnifying it each time. Visualize the other person doing there thing and then you calmly responding lightly. You get to experience it before it happens.

Buddha started on breath awareness but he didn’t just remain concentrated on his breath all of his life. He transcended that teaching and moved on after it has served its purpose. If you say to a rookie spiritual seeker “yeah, just become aware of your awareness” they will just look at you blankly and try and make some kind of mental construct of concept out of it. You have to lead the mind slowly.

When you meditate upon things you are still not completely aware of the stillness and formless within but it’s at least a start. It concentrates your mind and at least severs the idea that you are body, thought or anything else. When you’ve totally focused on something your mind is still.

As you get used to this state and master it you will experience the state of inner stillness and its beauty which is beyond words. Infinitely more beautiful than any physical possession. It’s the connection with what you truly are. You see it in someone who has a child and suddenly becomes more vibrant, alive and childish looking. They’ve connected with source and experienced stillness of the mind.



Removing The Crutches

Now you have realised a still mind, you are ready to take off your crutches and allow it to become your natural state. What you do is switch the focus from external things (the object of your focus) to awareness of awareness itself. This sounds complicated but it’s you completely natural state under all the mind made noise.

My technique for doing this is that I sit in a cross-legged state in a dark room. I do this so that I can stop my mind focusing on objects and I close my eyes to gain as much focus as possible. Then I sit at the gate of my mind where things enter and leave and just become aware of the inner stillness. At the start my mind is often busy and I have to acknowledge and become aware of thoughts. Whenever you realize that a thought has took my attention elsewhere on a little journey I just watch it, forgive it until it vanishes and return to silence.

You will eventually get to the point where you are just pure timeless awareness. You are not aware of a body or thoughts. It’s blissful. You can tell how close you are by the degree of lightness and inner peace you feel. When you connect with that state the ecstasy just multiplies the longer you say there, deeper and deeper. It might scare you at first with its power, go into it in degrees.

If at any point you feel like the mind noise is all too much, just internally and silently forgive and accept your state. Then move on from there. I can’t say how long it takes to get to that place because it requires the acknowledgement of timelessness and forgetting your space in time as that is a thought form.



The Stateless State

Once you’ve learned how to access this state it will become more and more prevalent in your life. You will feel an inner peace with you wherever you go that you can amplify at any time and a knowing of being one with all (coincidentally my favourite type of pizza). If you are struggling to find an answer then to this place and silence your mind and the answer will be given to you. God speaks his truth in feelings to a silent mind.



Your Minds Resistance

Your mind will always resist going to this place, ALWAYS! You will find it making up ridiculous excuses just to stop and distract you. It does this because it is fighting for its existence. It wants control of you and at the moment it has it. Old habits die hard. If you want mind control then you will just have to see through this and put yourself into meditation. That’s the hardest part.

One night before sleep, after gaining a great amount of control back from my mind, I was visualizing that I was in my body the following morning getting out of my bed turning off my alarm and going for a shower. Simple, right? Well when I got up the following morning I lay in my bed and I was aware of my mind telling me that I’d reset my alarm for an earlier time and that I should go back to bed. This wasn’t the “close your eyes for just.. another .. second” thought. It scared me a little and I got up. This all happened after just an hour of deep meditation daily, for about 3 or 4 days in a row.

Your mind is full of illusory concepts which it believes are reality. Reality is in constant flux while concepts remain rigid. Something had to give. I’ll take this as a good sign though as I read somewhere that Buddha saw the illusion of horsemen on a chariot galloping towards him just before he reached enlightenment as his mind was trying to fool him.



Appreciation

I found that without any conscious effort, I just started appreciating things massively. My fear of death just started to fall to the side in the place of gratitude and deep love of all, and sleep became incredibly deep and restoring. I’d awaken extremely alert as if I’d slept for years. I started to feel and know that life was living through me rather than the other way around, I’d touched the immortality of the human spirit and it is breathtaking.

A couple of days ago, I bought myself a winter coat with matching hat and it made me feel so amazing. It was as if gratitude and love just burst through my chest and swallowed me up. and after it had died down I just had no fear and it’s aura stayed with me for days. Go to this place, it’s the most beautiful, natural restoring thing you can do for yourself and others who come into contact with you.

Anyone can learn how to reach enlightenment right now. I would say it will transform your life but apart from being a huge cliché, it is a massive understatement. It will literally change the structure of your mind and how it views reality. In this article I will try and answer questions like “Does enlightenment involve work once achieved?” and “What is the role of mind after it is realised as not your identity?”.

As with a lot of spiritual teachings, the words used are sometimes misleading. You have probably reached outside for things your whole life (money, love, power, truth etc). Reaching enlightenment is paradoxically the opposite of reaching. Reaching comes from the idea that there is you and a separate state that must be achieved.

Enlightenment is embodying what you are and realizing the mindset of more as a bottomless illusion. In a sense, you are enlightened, you were born enlightened, you just aren’t aware of it yet. You may find your mind chewing on this and trying to logically make sense of what is being said here. Silence that voice that has controlled you and wronged you in the past for a minute by becoming an observer of it and then go and experience the truth for yourself.

As you learn how to reach enlightenment, you may find your mind saying “I am enlightened”. Disregard this voice. The mind can’t understand enlightenment and is just trying to fool you. You will know it personally as an indescribable feeling and a natural lightness accompanied by inner peace. As soon as you are in the territory of thought you have entered the arena of judgement, multiplicity into one here and another there and the enlightened connection is lost.

You may find that a shift in your perceptions will occur immediately. Things will appear less serious and you will feel less alienated to the world. Your mind, just like everything else in the world is fighting to live. The beginning of this process is like a huge mental detox where lots of the bigger more obvious unconscious patterns that you were already partly aware of are flushed out. Because you have identified with your mind for most of you life, this deep pattern of unconscious habits will come up again and again and at the beginning it will be extremely intense but it cannot prevail against your focused awareness. Like a rocket breaking through the atmosphere, the initial push it the hardest part.

You must be like a man who wants to cross a river by a bridge but rain has caused the river to burst its banks and he cannot access the “other side”. He sits silently a distance away and watches intently for the furore to die down before checking the waters are still and crossing the bridge. Your mind is the river, your focus is the man, and the bridge is the spiritual path that leads to the “other side” of enlightened conscious being.

Bringing Darkness Into The Light

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
~Chinese Proverb


Light gives of itself freely, filling all available space. It does not seek anything in return; it asks not whether you are friend or foe. It gives of itself and is not thereby diminished.
~Michael Strassfeld


From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

From an external time point of view your aim is to be conscious at all times and to continually improve your consciousness by removing attachments and shining the light of focused awareness onto your unconscious habits. Your aim right now, internally? Be conscious in this moment. Sitting in a room silently for too long is great but your unconscious habits will only come to fruition as you go about your everyday experience. This is where they were created and swallowed up by your subconscious mind. If you have the tendency to judge your family as annoying you for example, then the emotion that comes with that will have to be faced in real life situations.

Go out into the world and just be intensely aware of inner physical feelings and your emotion/mind state at the moment. Have your default state to be sat at the base of your mind observing with no judgement. Kicking yourself when you mess up is just another layer of unconscious habit. This is a life long process externally and you will progress to become conscious of all that is. This will lead to heightened sense perceptions too. You will notice smells that never existed before.

What Is The Purpose Of Mind After Enlightenment?

When you split from the one consciousness into an apparent individual form, your mind is used for navigating the world of form with your individuality in comparison to other individuals – learning from the past, planning for the future etc. For most humans, mind is like a razor blade that is used constantly and no care it taken to sharpen it. Sparse use and tending to the razor keeps your mind razor sharp and ready to pounce when challenges come along as its not preoccupied with trivial things. When using your mind for future planning, go into it with full consciousness. Try and raise your consciousness to even higher than your normal state because mind is the arena of illusion and may try and get you to identify with it again.

Your mind will naturally be more silent when you start learning how to reach enlightenment. You will start to notice the link between mind stillness and the peace you feel inside. Your mind will become a tool that you can put to great use and it will become extremely focused as you become aware of its erratic patterns.

The purpose of it is now as a tool rather than you identifying with it. The mind is not an evil thing, this is a common bad perception just like having a material possession with you is supposedly evil. It’s attachment and identification that is the true evil. Honestly believing things like “I am the owner”, “This is mine” and having an energy behind it is identification as opposed to mere words to convey meaning. Some people choose Asceticism to remove all temptation but it’s not the path for me although I’m content with little. You have to keep the knowing that you are not your mind with you at all times and use it only when you need too for its purpose. Stop thinking of the future too much, you can never experience it.

Once you achieve the state of enlightenment it will be obvious to you. You will be your true self for perhaps the first time and it’s beautiful, far more beautiful than anything else you can ever experience. You become like a baby in the world. Everything seems new and you have the sense of wonder that seems to belong only to children. Fears will fall to the side. Once you are in this state you have in a sense already achieved enlightenment. You have hit the first step and become consciously aware. Hardly anyone gets this far. Then, you just keep unravelling and transmuting other unconscious layers as you go through life. Your aim being to just keep doing this and be continually aware of old patterns trying to take a hold of you again.

Realizations I’ve Had

Since I started the path towards enlightened being I have realized many deep truths. Some of them are:

• Every judgement we make is basically saying to the Universe/God “You’re not good enough, I can make better of this than you”. You bring in a separation of “you” and “the universe” which alienates you and you have also cut yourself off from the formless state that is you. A recipe for catastrophe. How can you live the natural life if you don’t know what you are? The one thing that you only need to know is the thing that you don’t have.
• All actions will flow out of your increased consciousness. Just do what feels natural to you. Realise though that all these questions about whether I’m doing the right thing are coming from your mind and this is what we’re trying to bypass. Feel its power. Where do you feel it physically. Concentrate on that and observe it dissipate. Then the natural solution will come to you.
• My thoughts continually manifest into reality at a quickening rate. This is what Jesus did when he performed miracles. Extreme mind control changes external reality.
• The matrix idea isn’t as stupid as first though . You will start to see people as all plugging into collective mindsets and it is seriously freaky at first. They have a glazed over look in their eyes and you will see that they are basically sleeping through their life. Find highly conscious people and socialize with them as the unconsciousness can take you under as quickly as you escaped from it.
• The journey never really ends. You will always be bringing the light to new unconscious patterns. You will experience deeper and deeper peace throughout your life if you follow this path and all of your actions will be your own.
• You realize yourself as formless. You are not a form. You can view your mind, body and thoughts so what are you? Something beyond them. How can something with no form die? It was never born. Yes, your apparent physical body will dissolve one day but this becomes less and less important in place of serving. Your body feels less dense and in spiritual mastery, you have no body.
• You find that life is living through you and that there really is no life and you as separation. Instead of a mental understanding of this, you will come to experience and know it as daily existence.
• You become like someone who plays with the forms of the world. You do things just because you are curious about the outcome and will come across as not serious to many. This all stems from the realization that you’re not your body

I leave you with this quote which sums up what I’ve found nicely.

Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer – Eckhart Tolle

If you are a very logical person who excels at things like Maths then you may find it hard to find your spiritual side. How often do you see a Maths Genius who is also deeply spiritual? I am writing this article to help you help others find their spiritual side but many of you reading this may find something of use in it too. You use logical arguments which is the level they are on now and so they can relate to it. Those who are ready to awaken will do so.

Where are the answers?

Most logical people think that the answers are all in their mind. This is why you have to engage them with mind related arguments at first like …

Do you think you will find the answer to the meaning of life in your mind then why haven’t you yet, why should the meaning of life be so hard to find, it should be readily available right now. It’d be unfair that only those who are highly intelligent in terms of knowledge can have meaning in life.

Is their more information to digest and analyze before you find out your purpose and understand your nature? Do you honestly believe this will happen?

How could what we are be understood by a mind when even science understands that Humans have not always had minds when you look back at our far ancestry. We were something before mind arisen, weren’t we? How did we live with purpose then?There is something that gave us purpose and a process that ran the world before mind arisen so we can’t find it there.

Your minds natural purpose is resistance. Whenever you propose something to your mind it resists it by coming up with alternatives, it’s what it’s there for.

You say to yourself “Should I watch the Lost Season finale tonight?”

It says “No, that show had run its course by the end of season 2″

This is extremely useful as a tool.

Recognise this is what it is ALWAYS going to do. This is why you are finding this hard to digest.

Obviously these don’t all need to be used, and are only relevant points to bring up if the situation warrants it.

Here are some arguments and open questions to use to discuss with them before they commit to challenging themselves.

• Why are so many knowledgeable people so unhappy and what allows for people with no knowledge or possessions to find extreme happiness? Is it possible that happiness is not to be found in the mind and is beyond mind circumstances?
• Why do people who are highly knowledgeable about things struggle to take action when paradoxically they know more than 99% of others? Commonly known as ‘Paralysis Analysis’. They are stuck in their mind and an everlasting train of thought. They’ve imagined every possible way something could turn out but have put nothing into action.
• Give them some Zen Koans - These are statements that are designed to bypass your mind and give you a glimpse of enlightenment. One time, I read the Koan “When the foot touches the floor, it is the foot feeling the foot”. My mind went silent and I saw with complete clarity and I was astonished by this simple truth for about an hour.
• Bypass their mind – Many famous teachers of Zen realise that you cannot help someone to enlightenment by working with their mind. You have to help them see beyond it. If they ask too many questions, remind them the best you can without trying to provoke further questions inside their head that the words are only fingers pointing towards the truth. The reason I’ve decided it is a good idea to use logical arguments here is that when I came out of my Atheist daze, it was these logical arguments that started rocking my current beliefs and it’s been a total turnaround since then.
• I think it will work for others too. I’m sure I know that there’s loads of people in the position I was who are at about my age. They’ve got their time managed, their bonus satisfied and a comfortable little house in the suburbs but there is a deep yearning for more. Not on a physical of mental level but a jump to another plane entirely. Ask people if they feel this. They don’t even have to admit it verbally to you. It’s their change that matters.
• Ask them who their idols are – This is more for people who are on the lower levels of consciousness or children. If they idolize someone and want to be like them then try and relate how these people have a spiritual side. I’ve been into the personal development / self discovery thing for years now. I used to be a militant atheist and kept running into people who had reached an apex in personal development. A level where it took something huge to get up to the next one. They then introduced a spiritual side. I ignored it at the start but it kept on appearing. It couldn’t be a coincidence and I gradually allowed it into my life.
• Your Story – Explain to them the personal transformation in your life and try to relate without patronizing.
• Sizzle, not steak – Tell them the outer benefits of getting in touch with your spiritual side. The serene feeling of peace in all circumstances, the deep connection of love that goes far deeper than what we know of as love which is just surface level attachment. The feeling that everything is just as it should be.
• Explain the difference between religion and spirituality – Spirituality is connecting with source and is a personal experience whilst Religion tends to be a bunch of rules based on what humans have interpreted as correctly spiritual from religious texts. Sometimes religion and spirituality get tarred with the same brush and it’s unfair, some people have such bad experiences when they’re younger that they shut off any spiritual area in their life. Christianity is not something you should follow. You should follow Jesus Christs example. That’s a massively important distinction.
• Religion can be useful and is commonly a beginners tool for bringing spirituality into your life. Reaching spiritual maturity comes from taking it into your own hands and following what YOU know is right. Just look at how Buddha left the rich life to find truth and Jesus lost his life to be resurrected. You get taught loving your neighbour and compassion but the problem is these things come out of you naturally as a result of connection with source and should not be pursued on their own. you don’t love others because you THINK it’s right, You do it because you’ve been enlightened to the fact that it is truth.

After discussing with them say their beliefs will have took a little rocking so lay down the challenge to them. Say “OK, If you are so confident in your beliefs that all answers can be found in your mind then I invite you to be the big person and put aside those beliefs for just one month so that you may try out another set of beliefs. If you’re so sure, you can always come back to them. They’ll still be there. The only thing that could possibly hold you back is a fear of what you might find, I lay down a challenge to you … “.

The Challenge

“I commit for 30 days only to put aside my beliefs on spirituality and see what else is there. If I am not satisfied by the end of these 30 days, I will take up my old beliefs and carry on as if nothing has happened. I will go into this with an open mind, no prejudging. I will spend 1 hour each day consuming alternative material on spirituality that I’ve not considered before.”.

Remind then that their mind will say to them “don’t do this, this guy hasn’t got your best wishes at heart, he probably wants to sell you a church membership or something, bloody Mormons…” Invite them to sit back and watch their mind making noise impartially. It is fighting for its life as being in total control of your life and it’s pretty damn smart … it’s a mind! Do you really want your entire life ran by your mind? Common responses and replies you can use:

• I’ve not got the time *whine* - What about all that time you spend doing (enter hobby / type of book)? Wouldn’t that be put to good use reading something against what you currently believe in. How could you be so confident in what you believe if you’ve never even read and tried to apply anything by the alternative. It’s like saying I don’t exist just because your eyes are closed. You’re not scared are you? Didn’t Einstein say “Genius is the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head without agreeing with either one?”. I dunno, it was someone brainy anyway!
• It’s not for me - Are you actually just going to give in? I thought we’d made some progress here? Are you honestly so happy in your life right now at this moment that you can afford to NOT give this a chance? Or is your mind just making you restless again. Be warned: This answer is likely to stir up some deep emotions and put the mind on super defense mode. Don’t do this unless you’re prepared to lose that friend.

[PS. This post was wrote for you ]

This is the start of a dysfunction that affects almost all of the human race barring the few who have woken up from its trance. When you go from being a baby, then to adolescence and adulthood you start to identify with thoughts. This happens at a very early age so affects your mind at its most susceptible. You are called by your name from birth and it will probably be one of the first words you can say, either that or the name of one of your parents.  This starts the process of thought identification. You identify with the basic thought that you are your name. “I’m Richard” pretty much equals “I’m a thought”, the thought of Richard. Take a moment to digest that.

Then later in life comes identification with jobs, social positions, financial strength, music preference etc. Thoughts are on the level of form. This it the level which all “things” are that we can perceive. The only thing we cannot perceive is what we are because we ARE it. If you could perceive what you are then what would be perceiving it? It’s impossible. You are everything that exists that is not a thing yet we are taught that we are things. This is obviously unnatural and leads to great disruption.

When you identify with thought you will then start to identify with beliefs which are collections of similar thoughts and physical objects which starts off as your body but this extends to your work place, home, possessions etc. You identify with your body because, like more than 99% of the human race, you are completely unaware of the formless dimension within yourself. You are only aware of the form. So the form aspect of you (your body) is what you think your true nature is. Does this sound familiar? It should do. It’s the story of the human race so far.

Consider this. Isn’t it silly and childish how something like your losing your job can get you upset? You are completely unaffected physically yet you feel inside that this could somehow mean your physical end. Something that you ultimately don’t have full control over has just changed form. This is not to say that you should passively accept it. Accept that it has happened, have no inner resistance and then go to work on changing the things that upset you.

You must have come to the realization in your life that all form things eventually won’t exist. Your first love probably didn’t last forever, your happiness at your first paycheck gave way to the fact that you paid so much in tax.  These things are subject to time whereas you are timeless consciousness temporarily embodying a human body. When you put yourself in the time dimension you become victim to the vigor of time. You will get anxious about death and this will affect every area of your life as your purpose becomes to preserve your form body and identifications. You will cling to money, family and other things you perceive as possessions as if when they die you too will die. This is because you think you are form and a form death would mean your death.

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever had a thought that lasted a year? Or even 1 month? 1 day? Thoughts are transient objects and tend to be much more transient than physical things. If you think you are a thought like “I’m Richard”, “I’m a banker”, “I’m a spiritual person”. Then when these things appear to you to not be true you will feel like you have died or death is imminent. This causes immense suffering for a person. To feel like you have no control and you are dying a little each day. It’s not normal.

This suffering has a purpose though. The suffering will break the false self that has been created. When you have suffered enough you will be so motivated to get out of this state that you will find a way. Your spiritual mother will force you to wake up just like my birth mother did all the way through school.

The universe will give you the teacher you need when you are truly ready. When the student is ready, the master appears. You will find the resources flowing into your life as if from nowhere. The universe wants you to do well and have what you want. Maybe you’re not ready to start to awaken yet and that’s fine. When you’re ready you’ll find a teacher.

Truth vs. Ego

If you find yourself looking for inner stillness to become something more in the eyes of your mind then you will 100% definitely NOT succeed. It has become another form label that you are going to add to yourself. “Look at me, I’m a spiritual person. I’m much more developed and therefore a better person than you.”. Go into it because your intuition tells you too and you are at the point of awakening. How do you know if you are ready to awaken? You will just know, you will feel the absolute urgency for change.

It can’t be an adding of form because this is an ego level thing and this is exactly what we are trying to transcend. Enlightenment is not the adding of more to you. It is the stripping away of all form identification and suffering until you are just left with what you are which is unity with all that is. Don’t try and mentally understand this. That’s the ego trying to come in again with duality. It wants to create the thing to understand and the thing trying to understand it which are illusions within unity.  If there is something within you that knows this is right even a little bit, listen to it.

The Plan

Here are some techniques that I and others have used successfully to undergo a spiritual awakening. Feel free to teach these to others too.

Logical Questioning – If you want to change a belief you have to rock it a little so it becomes unstable. Ask yourself questions that are designed to change your belief. Some that I used include things like:

• “If my pancreas was removed and I was my body then would I still be Richard? How much of my body has to be removed before I cease to be Richard if I’m still alive and responding?
• “If I died and then came back to life during illness was I my body during that time? What if people told me my body was still there? Are they lying?”
• “When I say my body, who is the me who has the body? What is the distinction here?”

It’s a good idea to put yourself in a meditative state through 20 minutes of relaxation meditation before doing this as you can concentrate and communicate with your subconscious much easier.

Good beliefs to question include:

• Am I my body?
• Where was I before I was born?
• What differentiates me from someone else?

Eventually the belief will become unstable then questionable and then downright silly.

This operates on the mind level so I would recommend this for beginners. Pure awareness meditation is more advanced.

Pure Awareness Meditation

One meditation I enjoy is to become pure awareness which is your true identity at the deepest of levels. I sit in meditation and after relaxing myself for 10 minutes I simply sit at the gate of my mind and become totally aware. If this sound impractical at all to you then simply sit, eyes closed in silence and listen to the silence which is the background to all things. Don’t struggle whatever you do. Just be. Let all things pass you by and become aware of them. You will see a thought come up. acknowledge it and sit at the gate of your mind. Whenever anything is bought to your awareness bring the light of consciousness to it without thinking. Just look at it like a man who’s mind is silenced by the beauty of a sun set. There is no mental chattering. The aim is to become concentrated in the state of no thought. Don’t be thinking “Oh man, I’m struggling, he told me not to struggle”. Just be. It’s tough at first but it is the most rewarding experience the universe has to offer bar none.

I’ve achieved pure awareness recently a few times for a couple of minutes or so and to be totally honest I was scared. The absolute unlimited feeling of power, the feeling that God is running through your veins right their and then and communicating with every fiber of what you are is pure ecstasy. You become transparent to light and embody it, you become timeless and infinite and then return to your physical body. It’s infinitely better than an orgasm or achieving your life’s dreams in the physical world. And it’s all free! But seriously, no words can explain it and when you experience it you will know exactly what I mean. Why else do you think the Buddha spent weeks contemplating whether his insights were worthy of teaching. They’re so subtle and hard to verbalize and much of it is a personal story.

How To Find Others who Have Awakened

There will come a point on your spiritual path when the people you used to socialize with seem dull and lifeless and you’ll feel totally disconnected from them because they are disconnected from their spiritual dimension and have yet to have a spiritual awakening. Reach out and connect with people who have found their way though suffering or others on the same journey as yourself. Here are some resources.

• The Internet – Humanity has never had so much information at its fingertips. It,s a vast resource of free information. Things are at the stroke of a few keys and 5 seconds now that just 20 years ago would have taken at least a trip to the library and 200 years ago you’d never get to read. Just Google things
• Meetup.com (Free) – This site helps you find or create a group of like minded people and has meetings worldwide. There is lots of spiritual groups on there.
• Books – Reading a great book is like sitting down and conversing with the greatest minds in history. Plenty have awakened to a new way of life. I recommend Eckhart Tolle, Lao Tzu, Buddha and Jesus. With Jesus though, try to be like him, don’t try to be a good Christian. Big distinction there and I’m sure you know what I mean.

Eckhart Tolles beautiful book ‘ Stillness Speaks has “a collection of “200 concise and beautifully illuminating entries arranged into 12 reflective themes”. These are perfect snippets for meditation. The 12 themes, in order, are:

• Silence & stillness
• Beyond the thinking mind
• The egoic self, the now
• Who you truly are
• Acceptance and surrender,
• Nature, relationships,
• Death and the eternal,
• Suffering and the end of suffering.
• Meditations

Oh before I forget, here’s the best resource to find anything online, enjoy!

When you next feel suffering, instead of internally running away from it, confront it head on. Just observe it without judgment and you will become separate to it instead of identifying with its highs and lows. If you continue to identify with your body you will feel suffering when it has pain. It’s as simple as that.

I am not saying that you will never have pain in your body. I am saying that you suffering it is akin to somebody else on the other side of the world being ill and you deciding that you will suffer for them. It’s completely ridiculous when you consider it.

The pain is there to alert you to something that needs to be taken care of.

Let’s say you have toothache or even worse … manflu. Instead of complaining and resisting it inside just let it be. You can take medicine etc and see a doctor but there rest of the time what is the point of resisting it? Just observe the feeling around your nose and eyes or tooth. Stay observing that feeling for as long as you can and you will gain a sense of power over it as you are shining the light of your consciousness onto the area and anything bought into the conscious light vanishes. The longer you can sit internally with it without thought coming in to judge it and cause separation, the less you will suffer.

If you don’t accept it and shine conscious light on it then you will allow it to remain unconscious and it will gain power. It’s kind of like when you have unresolved emotional issues from a past relationship. If you keep ignoring the little signs to look at it then it will just get worse and worse because it had to be dealt with . Your emotional physical body is a very intelligent being. It only brings your attention to things that need attention bringing to them.
Think about it. If you were aware of every single thing around you consciously right now you would go insane. The computer monitor, the sound of the keyboard, the pulsing in your right index finger.

I like to sit with my pain when it becomes intense and just see its movements with my inner eye. When you have a feeling of stress, tension and being blocked  in your whole body after a hard day of work or something like that, you need to just sit and look inside and let your body tell you where needs the attention. Consciously relax the area by becoming aware of the tension. This is a great gift that we are all born with.

This doesn’t mean that when you become ill you should just not go to the doctors. Still go about your normal illness routine but this is a route out of the suffering caused by illness to the body. Paradoxically, by realizing yourself as not your body you connect with oneness and come out of suffering. All deep spiritual truth is paradoxical to the mind.

Who is that ‘me’ that suffers? A collection of empty atoms? Your beliefs? You are the background consciousness that plays with form like a puppet. You might be able to feel a little truth in this statement but not fully understand it yet. That’s fine. Don’t try to understand it and you will understand it (another paradox). This is why they have the statement “Those who speak do not know and those who know do not speak”. Not always true but it is very often.

All things are mental phenomenon. When you enter the state of no-mind you actually see things as they are. They all appear to be vibrant, new and beautiful and this is the paradise on earth that we hear about in the Bible and is a state of being, not a physical place we used to live in. That’s a huge misinterpretation. Their is the totality/oneness and the mind who’s job it is to separate things into two so they can be compared. You have to know the difference. This includes time. It is not evil but it has to be transcended.

Next time you feel suffering from pain. Observe your minds habitual tendency to suffer. As you being light to a habit it dissolves because habits are things that are unconscious by definition.  As you observe without judgment you will begin to separate from all suffering.

When people see things as beautiful,
ugliness is created.
When people see things as good,
evil is created.

Being and non-being produce each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low oppose each other.
Fore and aft follow each other.

Therefore the Master
can act without doing anything
and teach without saying a word.
Things come her way and she does not stop them;
things leave and she lets them go.
She has without possessing,
and acts without any expectations.
When her work is done, she take no credit.
That is why it will last forever.

-Chapter 2

—————————————————-

When people see things as beautiful,
ugliness is created.
When people see things as good,
evil is created.

Being and non-being produce each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low oppose each other.
Fore and aft follow each other.

BY judging something, you create duality (yin/yang). Everything simply is. If you say something is something, then you also give rise to its opposite where something is either good or bad. Your definition of tall maybe short to somebody else. It is your perception of an event, rather than the actual event that counts. This reminds me of the famous Double Split Experiment

Therefore the Master
can act without doing anything
and teach without saying a word.

The master is devoted to letting the natural higher order live through him. He uses nature as his rules to live by. The sage is made to sound like nature in the text, “teaches without saying a word”.

Things come her way and she does not stop them;
things leave and she lets them go.
She has without possessing,
and acts without any expectations.

The concept of non-action (wu wei) is bought up, a common theme throguhout the book and a state I have experienced. It can only be described as when you feel as if some higher power is living through you and you willingly do its work. It can not even be called work because it feels so effortless and far away from what we recognize as normal life. This verse also tries to get you to go beyond your mind with the use of paradoxes that make no sense logically, so you have to look deeper.
This whole section is exactly what the Buddha said when he described non-attachment. If you are attached to events, thoughts, beliefs then you will eventually suffer because all events and beliefs are temporary by nature.

When her work is done, she take no credit.
That is why it will last forever.

This paragraph also hints at the refusal of desire/ego. “she takes no credit”. Taking credit is the ego wanting to be noticed and recognised. By taking no credit the ego is rid of and the Tao is working through the individual for greater good, leading to accomplishment that is pure and lasts forever.

The tao that can be described
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be spoken
is not the eternal Name.

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of creation.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.
By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

Yet mystery and reality
emerge from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness born from darkness.
The beginning of all understanding.

-Chapter 1

————————————————–

The tao that can be described
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be spoken
is not the eternal Name.

Tao is something that you cannot put a name upon, it is the birth of everything and the formless dimension which opposes the dimension of form. Even by calling it Tao, we are limiting it. But for the sake of communicating and language, we must give it a name.  After all, all names are human creations Is a tree really a tree more than it is just a dance of vibrating molecules which move all the time, hardly any of them continuing for much time within what we would call the tree?

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.

By giving something a name, we limit it. A “criminal” or a “table” is our minds attempts to box and understand reality but they are not those actual things. We need our minds to do this for communicating with reality.  This also links in with the first line “The Tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao”. It shows that by calling Tao by the name Tao, you are putting yourself back inside your pre conceived thoughts and feelings about it. You might think “Oh Tao, it is just one of those stupid spiritual things etc.”.

Heaven is a formless area where there are no physical things, a spiritual dimension. Earth is a physical dimension where our physical bodies live. So how is is that the nameless is the boundary of these?

Maybe the nameless is what we are. We can enter heaven, which is a formless dimension within ourselves and we appear physically on Earth also. So we could be the boundary? If heaven is an inner realm and earth is an outer realm then it follows that we are the middle part experiencing both.

The named is the mother of creation.

When you name something, it has been created as a mental concept for you. Or, this phrase could mean that “naming” is the actual process of going from formlessness to form, or if you prefer, coming into manifestation. You could interpret it as you have “created a concept which is separate from the oneness.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.

When you are free from desire, you have stepped out of your conditioned mind patterns and can see what truly is rather than your ‘I’ centred view of the world. You can perceive the mystery unfolding that we are in. You realize that is is our reaction to situations that makes them seem good or bad, all situations are actually neutral and are made good or bad based on our desires of  wanting to take control.

By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

When you are desiring, you have stepped back into, and identified with your mind patterns again. A box is just a box and the mystery isnt available to you. Insanity is being identified with your mind, being indeitified with anything infact.

Yet mystery and reality
emerge from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness born from darkness.
The beginning of all understanding.

All things come from the same source, the one, infinite source. I feel like the last phrase refers to the attachment to mind and how you lose your sense of perspective.  It says that the beginning of all understanding comes from knowing of attachment to mind within yourself.