Yesterday’s reading asked us to:
Focus on the frequency that is God.
That is perfect guidance. According to Ramana Maharshi’s disciple, Paul Brunton, focusing on the Self is the “short path” to Self-realization. However, the fearful mind can distort that guidance into a corrupted mental message that goes something like this:
If I feel anything but peace, joy and love, I am bad.
That’s an untrue statement.
NTI 2 Timothy teaches us how to be with any feeling that is different than truth. It asks us to explore the feeling, see that it is just a feeling—an experience—and nothing more than that. In order to do that, we need to look at our feelings with pure awareness.
Thoughts are not pure awareness. Thoughts are judgments. Thoughts tell us what our feelings are, what they mean about us, others and the world, and what caused the feelings. Pure awareness doesn’t have any of these stories in it.
As you know, my dog, Jamie, was recently euthanized. That experience came with feelings. There was acceptance, joy and a strong experience of life. There was also sadness and a feeling of missing Jamie. The latter feelings came in short waves, and then passed. Each time they came, I gave myself to the feelings.
In my case, there were no stories about how things should have been different, so I did not need to focus on letting go of untrue stories, but I did explore the feelings as 2 Timothy recommends. I noticed what “sadness” felt like, especially in the heart. I noticed it wasn’t unpleasant (which is what the mind would have said about it). The sensation in the heart, which some people might call “a broken heart,” wasn’t there before Jamie’s passing. It was certainly related to her passing, but it was just a feeling. As I looked at it, I realized I did not know what it was. The mind wanted to understand why the feeling was there, but awareness was able to simply be with the feeling in gratitude for a present experience.
The same thing was true of tears. Every now and then, tears came. A couple of times there were a few seconds of hard crying, but none of that felt “bad” when looked at with awareness. It was just part of the experience of loving a pet and then losing that pet. If I label the experience based on how it looked through the eyes of awareness, I would say it was an intimate human experience. I felt what it feels like to be human.
This is what today’s reading teaches. We have the experience of being human because we want experience. Beauty and healing come when we allow the pure, unadulterated experience of experience. Stories, however, pollute experience with a particular spin or interpretation. When we are engrossed in stories, we still have experience, but our attention is more in the head than in the experience. In that way, intimacy with the experience is lost.
Love and intimacy are one.
By allowing ourselves to be intimate with an experience without becoming lost in stories, we love the experience. We are open to it and empty for it. When we love an experience, it moves through us. When it leaves us, we feel free. In the beginning, that freedom may be experienced as healing. However, openness, emptiness and freedom are our true nature. We come to know our Self by loving experience as it is.
Let me say that again.
We come to know our Self by intimately experiencing experience, because we intimately experience experience by being open, empty and free.
We be our Self, and so we know our Self.
Note: The next tip will be available tomorrow morning after 3:50am ET at this link.
