We're beginning the journey of Michael Singer’s beautiful book The Untethered Soul together. We'll do five weeks and there will also be an online study group in order to go deeper with these questions and these teachings. The first part is called Awakening Consciousness, so let's begin with the question “Who are you?” Ask that of yourself every now and then. You're not your name. You're not your job. You're not your role in life. You're not your gender. But who are you at your core? That's our question. So the author invites us to examine the nature of Consciousness by recognizing the fundamental truth that you are not your thoughts, your emotions, or your experiences. You are the one who observes them. You are the witness to what's happening. There is an evolutionary impulse that is happening to us. It is seeking to know itself through you. This is consciousness trying to become conscious of itself, and this is you as a spiritual being at the point of awareness of waking up.
I invite you to imagine sitting at a river and watching the leaves that are floating on the river. Some are bright and some are dark. These leaves represent the thoughts and feelings that you're experiencing. You're not the leaves. You're the one sitting on the riverbank watching them float by. You're observing them. You're not the voice in your mind that narrates everything and has an opinion about everything - it's what the author calls “the worst roommate ever.”
And so part of our work is to become aware of the voice in our heads, what it is saying, and who it is. If it's not who and what I am, then what is it? Unity teaches us this same principle – that I'm not my circumstances, I'm not my thoughts. I'm a spiritual being having a human experience.
There are so many examples in the book about the way that the voice talks. The voice might say that you're driving in a car and having a conversation such as the following:
“Wasn't I supposed to call Fred? I should have. Oh my God I can't believe I forgot to call Fred. He's going to be so mad. He may never talk to me again. Maybe I should stop and call him right now. No I don't want to stop the car.”
On and on and on this conversation goes, and then you go past your stop because you're lost in this conversation that's not serving you. There's no presence in this conversation. It's just a rant, so you’re learning how to be gentle with yourself and laugh. I need to laugh more and not take it so seriously.
That's the goal – to listen to the voice and just be curious about what's going on and to be honest with yourself. If a friend spoke to you the way your mind does, would you stay friends? That's a good question. Just how kind is this mind? The key is that this voice is not you. We could call it the ego, the psyche or whatever. It is just responding to the million different impulses and thoughts that go randomly through our minds. Our work is to pull back, and that's where meditation comes into play – to get still so we can see the mind, but as we begin to observe the mind, we begin to sit behind it and become a witness to it, and then we no longer identify ourselves as the voice in the head. The more we just listen and don’t believe that this voice is who we are, the more we become a witnessing presence – something like the sky. It's vast, and thoughts and emotions are like the clouds that are just passing through. They're not the sky and the sky is not even affected by these clouds. The sky is fine just the way it is, whether there are clouds or no clouds. Similarly, our true self – our Essence – is untouched by the fluctuations in life.
When we get in touch with consciousness, we get in touch with our I am. In The Untethered Soul Singer writes, “you are behind everything, just watching.” This is your true home. You are the witness to life. You are the consciousness aware of itself so your inner voice is constantly narrating your experience. Just notice it. Even when you're driving, you're looking and the voice in your head is commenting – “Oh look, there's a dog.” “Oh look there's a tree.” It's pretty crazy. I traveled with a woman once whose inside voice was her outside voice, and there was a constant narration of everything that was happening. It was like a little puppy just bouncing around.
I remember a moment that I was listening to so much chatter in my mind. I was walking in a forest. I love walking and I was by myself, and I I remember hearing a sound, and the story I made up was there was a giant bear and this bear was going to eat me and that was the truth because I believed it. With every step I began to tremble. I began to want to turn the other way and I thought, “Well maybe that's even longer than the other way, and so rather than just sitting and praying, I yelled the Prayer of Protection – “The light of God surrounds me”– hoping that I would scare this bear away. So a part of me felt I was being spiritual because I said the Prayer of Protection. What I'm saying is that we can really believe the voice in our heads and so we need to have practices in place to help us have a better realization.
I invite you to take a moment to affirm a new way of being. You could do this silently or out loud. “I am not my thoughts or emotions I am the awareness that lovingly observes them. I choose freedom by letting go and allowing life to flow.” Just take that in. How does that feel in your body? Can you sense a shift in Awareness as you affirm that truth? That's how affirmations can help us shift in awareness and Consciousness.
There are practical steps to awaken consciousness. The first step could be to start paying attention to your inner dialogue. Just notice what the mind is saying. Notice what the body is feeling. Notice the sensations. Second is to practice detachment. Detach from those thoughts. Detach from the emotion. If you’re having an experience of sadness, say “I am not sadness. I'm having an experience of sadness because of some thought or experience I had in the world.” In this way we can help ourselves to not identify as the life experience, the thought or even the feeling and just say, “I'm not this feeling. I'm not this emotion. I am the one observing this.”
I can either sit in the seat of disturbance when I'm upset, frustrated or angry, or I can sit in the seat of awareness and become the observer of all that is showing up. That's the question, “Am I sitting in the seat of disturbance allowing the world to dictate how I am, or am I sitting in the seat of awareness? That's our work.
I invite you to meditate for five minutes. I know many of you may do much more than that and many of us go in and out of meditation practice. I'm just inviting you into bringing that back in, even if it is five minutes sitting quietly watching your breath, connecting with being the witness to self, and just noticing – not beating yourself up if your mind wanders. "There it is. There's a thought." And as soon as you do that, you remember you are sitting behind it and you're no longer attached. You become the observer and the witness to what's going on. So our definition of “desirable” and “undesirable” or “good” or “bad” is all there because we think we need to define how things are if we want to be okay, so we label them “good” and “bad,” “my preference” or “not my preference,” but who said that the way life naturally unfolds is not all right?
Krishnamurti, the beautiful non-dual teacher, said, “Do you want to know what my secret is? I don't mind what happens.” He didn't say, “I don't care what happens” but rather “I don't mind” – I don't become attached to the thought that this shouldn't be happening. Byron Katie says, “The only time I suffer is when I argue with reality and think this shouldn't be happening.” When the mind chatters, you can make up something about what the mind says, but the real you knows that everything works out for you. The mind says what it says, but all will be well in the end – whatever would work best for you. So “Who am I?” is a wonderful question that all of the sages have asked. In the Oneness tradition and practice we say “I am awareness, existence, consciousness. I am not my life experiences.” Ramana Maharshi, the great teacher and Yogi, said that to attain inner freedom, one must continuously ask, “Who Am I? Who sees when I see and who hears when I hear and who knows when I am aware? I am awareness, existence, consciousness and bliss.”
The way we talk about ourselves, our lives and our stories has a lot to do with our world view, how we see the world. As Einstein said, “Do you believe the world is a friendly place?” Do you believe there's one presence and one power, an infinite living loving presence we call God? Our thoughts create the filters through which we see and experience and view our lives. If you think yourself to be a sufferer, then you filter everything that happens to you through the lens of the sufferer and identify as the one who suffers and you will find plenty of evidence to prove that.
I had a a belief that I was a misfit, and I didn't know this till I got into my Quantum Living practice. A misfit is someone who doesn't belong, and I would create stories around how that would be until I finally figured out that I was creating the absolute opposite of what I really wanted. What I really wanted was to belong, to connect, to be part of. But there's a belief system in many of us that we're unaware of, so this inquiry is essential for our spiritual awakening. We want to adopt an orientation to life that there is one Presence and one Power, and if you think about it, the ego is nothing more than a thought of being separate from God. The ego is just a sense of separation.
In Unity we often affirm “I am the light of God. I am the love of God. I am the power of God.” and these affirmations remind us our true nature. We become co-creators with the One. We move away from victimhood by claiming our good. Awakening conscious is the key to Freedom. The Untethered Soul is about the truth that when you live as the observer, life becomes less about control and more about flow, about living in the flow of life, living in the goodness of life, trusting that life is bringing you exactly what it needs for you to awaken. Then you simply realize that who you are is not something that's happening to you but who you are is the awareness of life, the awareness of your Oneness with All That Is.
I invite you to affirm: “I am not my thoughts. I am the one who observes my thoughts. I am the light of God witnessing the flow of life. I awaken to the truth of my being and live in peace.”
Comments