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and should not do and how things should and should not be. All of this is the mind’s attempt to first create a conceptual model of what would make you okay, and then try to get the outside world to match it.
5
The Path to Inner Peace 12 Steps to Spiritual Awakening
by Michael A. Singer S
pirituality is meant to bring about harmony and peace. But the diver- sity of our philosophies, beliefs, concepts and views about spiritual matters often leads to confusion or even conflict. The fact is that the very act of seeking spiritual freedom causes notions of success and failure, and these notions serve only to bind us to our own self-judgments: Am I grow- ing? Have I done anything wrong? Am I meditating enough? Truth is only complicated because we pass it through our habitual thought patterns. When we step back from ourselves, truth becomes simple. There are not many paths to freedom; there is only one. In the end, no matter what particular patterns of thought we have managed to build in our minds, free- dom always means transcending these personal thought patterns. So how does one go about tran- scending the personal self and awak- ening to spiritual freedom? What is needed for this journey are succinct steps that are so universal that they can echo through the halls of any religion as well as support intellectual under- standing. The following is a universal road map to Self-Realization.
1
Realize that you are in there. You must first come to realize that you are in there. From deep inside, you
34 Collier/Lee Counties
are experiencing this world. You are experiencing your physical body, your thoughts and your emotions. You are conscious and you are experiencing what it is like to be human.
2
Understand that you are not okay in there. Look to see what’s going on inside. If you want to un- derstand why you’ve done everything you have ever done, if you want to see what’s really going on, just observe your mind and emotions—just experi- ence your inner state. If you objectively look, you will see that you are never completely at peace. You will see that you are not okay in there.
3
Notice that you’re always trying to be okay. At any point when you look at the state of your inner being, you will see that something is bother- ing you. You will then notice that this causes urges, drives and impulses to do something about it. You will find yourself constantly trying to either get something or avoid something. All of this is done in an attempt to be okay.
4
Watch as your mind strives to figure out how everything needs to be for you to be okay. If you watch, you will see that your mind is always telling you what you should and should not do, what others should
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Realize that the process of defin- ing how the outside needs to be is not going to make you okay. You must seriously look at this process of trying to be okay. You’ve been at it your entire life—you’ve just tried different things at different times. While it’s true that sometimes you manage to make it better for short periods of time, you know that you’ve never even come close to reaching a state of permanent peace. Watch very closely how you react
to the things your mind has prefer- ences about. You will see that if your mind gets what it wants, you feel joy; if it doesn’t get what it wants, you feel disturbance. Likewise, when your mind experiences what it doesn’t want, you feel disturbance, and when it avoids what it doesn’t want, you feel relief. You will never be okay playing this game because the world will never match the conceptual model your mind has made up. Eventually, you will come to see that struggling to be okay does not work. At some point, you will try to find a different way to be okay in there.
6
Learn to not participate in the mind’s struggle to be okay. This step is about learning to sit in as the witness, the part of you that notices the inner urges to be okay. You must become comfortable with sitting in there and not participating in the inner energies. You learn to relax in the midst of them. You come to see that there is a habitual process in which the mo- ment you feel inner disturbance, you are drawn into doing something about it. You must learn to sit inside and not participate in this process. If you truly understand that going outside to try to be okay inside doesn’t work, then you’ll be willing to sit inside and simply allow the disturbance to pass through. It is not difficult. If you can do this, all distur- bance will cease by itself.
7
Go about your life just like ev- eryone else, except that nothing
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