What is Meditation

Meditation Techniques

Spiritual Inspirators

 

Western  Mystics


CONSCIOUSNESS VERSUS AWARENESS

I. Consiousnes & Evolution

II. Defining Awareness & Consciousness
III. The Mystery of Awareness

IV. Consciousnes as Nothing
V. Consciousness as Something
VI. The Ouroboros Consciousness
VII. Ouroboric Super-Awareness


FIELDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The Super-Awake Flow
Fields of Consciousness

Group Meditation
The Glue of Love
God wants to be Human
 

 
ADVERSITY AND SPIRITUALITY
Integral Suffering and Happiness
Meditative Pixelation

Trauma and Transcendence

 
CIVILIZATION & CONSCIOUSNESS
The inner and the outer Person
 
● 
Eastern versus Western Consciousness
The liberation from or of the Body
Modern Forms of Suffering
 
Civilization and Consciousness 
Civilization and Consciousness Part II

 


This chapter goes
together with
the chapter

Meditative
Pixelation

and

Trauma and
Transcendence

 

 
INTEGRAL SUFFERING AND HAPPINESS
             The Inner Warrior's Sacred Wound

"What gives light must endure burning."
Victor Frankl

"Nobody, as long as he moves about
the chaotic currents of life,
is without trouble."
C.G. Jung


 
The cure for pain... is pain.
Rumi

This chapter is about suffering. However, my impulse to write is driven by my happiness. It is arriving like a circadian rhythm of joyful ease every morning triggered by my first and only cup of coffee. When I was younger, I wasn't particularly happy. The inner happiness gradually crept in through meditation and the self-knowledge that emerged from my life long dedicated pursuit of 'innerstanding.'
  
Already, I find myself in another contradiction. On one hand, I here state that I 'own' what I write about in the sense that I only write from personal experience. I only talk what I live. In crafting this discourse, I adhere to a principle of personal authenticity: I only share insights and experiences that are intrinsic to my own life. This commitment ensures that my words on happiness stem from genuine personal fulfillment, distinguishing this text from purely academic endeavors or the narratives of individuals like Alan Watts. Watts, while articulate in discussing meditation and spirituality, led a life marked by personal decisions that contrasted sharply with the wisdom he espoused—evidenced by his departure from his wife and kid's and his premature demise due to alcoholism.
 
At the same time, it is obvious that this happiness is not 'mine'. By nature, it cannot belong to anyone other than everyone. It grows by being shared, but actually, we do not even have to entertain the notion of sharing. Being in happiness is enough because happiness like all other mental states is infectious by nature.
    
The Cosmic Fool and the Suffering Scribe
Happiness, I believe, is our natural state. This view may seem contradictory to the conclusions drawn by many intellectuals and philosophers throughout history. I 'think' there's an inherent systemic burden for thinkers: the price of insight often comes with a sense of alienation. It could also be the other way around, in the sense that alienation creates a space for insight. I interpret the quote below from Meister Eckhart in this spirit. As I always do, I allow myself to understand the Meister's notion of God as equivalent to the most mysterious 'no-thing' in us: consciousness.

"Had I a God whom I could understand,
I would no longer consider him God."
 
"The more we can impute to Him (God) not-likeness,
 the nearer do we get to understanding Him."

Why, then, do I write as I do - with so many words and concepts? I think this urge to verbalize was a gift given to me by the suffering I went through as a younger man. The intellect was trying to find a way out of the maze of unease and confusion, and it indeed contributed to that crusade. In this sense I 'own' both suffering and happiness.

The lover's warmth, the penetrating depth of his voice,
the appeal of his words - all stem from the pain in his heart.
Hazrat Inayat Khan

Use the Intellect to Remove Barriers
I must clarify here, just as intellect can never fully comprehend the 'soul,' that I don't have the ability to 'create' happiness.
To chase happiness is like chasing the famous pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.
Rumi

Happiness isn't an achievement akin to building muscle through weight lifting. Rather, it's a byproduct of 'something' that exist beyond our direct understanding and control. That mysterious something is consciousness.

Therefore what I can share are my observations of psychological and societal barriers that prevent happiness from taking the center stage in our lives. These barriers are within our cognitive understanding and our power to overcome.

The Ouroboros of Divine Ignorance
In this endeavor to use the mind to dismantle the alienation it itself has wrought, I stumbled upon a bizarre yet utterly remarkable potential within our intellect: It can, in a feedback loop similar to a policeman handcuffing himself, devour its own tail like the ouroboros snake, paving the way for what I dub the highest understanding: divine ignorance. This miraculous self-destruction opens the gates for those parts of ourselves that we, in our intellectual arrogance, might have scorned as crude or simple.

However, the self-devoured intellect re-emerges, not as a repetitive Phoenix reborn from ashes, but as something novel and vibrant, humbly assuming the role of a counselor. Becoming its own beginning in the end, like the Ouroboros snake, the intellect deeply understands that there is fundamentally nothing to understand. In this relization, the transformed intellect serves as a humble guide to the cosmic fool that is our true essence, albeit in a radically different context and environment.
 
The cosmic fool, enigmatic in its presence, takes its place within a cathedral of elevated consciousness, a sanctuary dedicated to the highest levels of supreme awareness. This scenario reflects a supreme form of intelligence that is simultaneously enveloped in ignorance, akin to the way slime mould exhibits a form of super intelligence devoid of conscious awareness. In the state of supreme awareness, we delegate our cognitive processes in a manner similar to our utilization of artificial intelligence. Just as we neither comprehend nor need to comprehend the workings of our heartbeat or digestive processes, we also let go of the necessity to grasp the mechanisms of cognition itself. This realization champions a form of wisdom that transcends the conventional need for understanding, embracing instead the liberating embrace of divine ignorance.


For further clarification of his wonderfull and mysterious phenomenon I recommend you to read the chapter Ouroboric Super-Awareness.

The God of Small Things
The outstanding journey of innerstanding did indeed lead me to make big decisive jumps in order to change my situation. However, it also led in the opposite direction. At the other end of the scale I found the god of small things. There's a saying that 'the devil is in the details,' and I've found this to be true. By heightening my awareness of the small, everyday things in and around my body, I've gradually made each day, this moment and tomorrow, incrementally better than the yesterdays.
  
All larger things are composed of smaller ones. In my meditative journey towards heightened awareness, I often uncovered the most profound truths concealed within the simplest of things.
The microcosm of our daily lives harbors a secret: Every minor action, every fleeting thought, either distances us from ourselves or draws us closer to our true nature. It's the cumulative effect of these innumerable, minuscule events that ultimately shapes and defines our lives. To live in a state of heightened awareness is therefore like incorporating the life a child lives, a life full of small things we overlook in the more abstract world as adults.
   
Happiness - even in Suffering
Of all the wonderful things I realized on this life long journey of innerstanding, the most important take away is that that happiness and suffering are not mutually exclusive.
    
Indeed, it is feasible to find happiness amidst suffering. In fact, this form of happiness might be the only kind that can be sustained as a continuous state of being. Let me end this long intro with some wise words from the Meister.

A life of rest and peace in God is good;
a life of pain in patience is still better;
but to have peace in a life of pain is best of all.
Meister Eckhart

However, as this text progresses, it will be clear that not all kinds of suffering are beneficial. Some forms of suffering cannot coexist with happiness and I will also try to identify these forms.
 
Is there something authentic within us?
Now, is there really such a thing as genuine, authentic feelings? This question is interlinked with the question of individuality. Do we at all posses a deeper, truer individual soul? Despite the highbrow musings I think most academians and even spiritualists might offer on this topic, stating that individuality is an illusion, I'm going out on a limb here to assert that, even though achieving 100% authenticity might be a pipe dream, we can edge closer to a version of truth. It's a bit like chasing the horizon—knowing full well we can't ever fully grasp it ('ding an sich'), yet striving to approach it as closely as we can from our limited perspective ('für uns'). Yet, out of personal experience I can assert that every step we take on this never ending journey at the same time is a plateu with both deeper and higher states of peace and happiness.
   
IGNORE YOURSELF IN FULL AWARENESS
The first step on the ladder of inner happiness is navigating a path that meanders between the poles of emotion and reason, between surrender and control. Take, for example the combination of winter bathing, sauna sessions, and breathing exercises. This down to earth practice, popularized by the Dutch 'Iceman' Wim Hof, has blossomed into a broad spectrum of self-disciplinary techniques encompassing yoga and meditation.
  
I've carved out my own approach to these self-disciplinary routines and so can you if you like to do so. The important thing here is to fully experience one's emotions while simultaneously detaching from them, ensuring they don't dictate one's actions. How does one remain in command when engulfed by intense emotions under keen awareness?
  
What can we learn from such a simple act as a cold shower? Here we definitely feel and sense our body while a the same time not listening to and obeying old instinctual habits. Not listening to old unconscious impulses is the first step towards not listening to the story telling mind.
    
The key lies in abstaining from weaving narratives around our feelings. Instead ignore them in full awareness of their precense. One could call it a state of ignorance in awareness.
  
PIXELLATION MEDITATION
The Zen-buddhist have a saying: Take no notize. We humans, fundamentally bound to storytelling, often narrate our lives, especially our emotional experiences. Yet, in the practice I've cultivated, I advocate for a departure from narrating our feelings. Instead, I propose a process where emotions are observed in their raw form, devoid of attached stories. In this practice, feelings are broken down into manageable 'pixels' of sensation, inviting us to experience and contain them in full-blown awareness. In the pixel- state, feelings and sensations are so decomposed that the thinking mind cannot brew stories out of them, but awarenes on the other hand is fully capable of awaring them.
This approach encourages ignoring emotions not through dismissal but through full, undivided attention, allowing us to politely resist and control them while being fully present with the sensations metaphorically perceived as 'energy.'
 
For further understanding, the chapter, "meditative pixellation" delves deeper into actual techniques, offering personal insights into the transformative potential of cultivating interoceptive awareness with patience and kindness but also a bit of self-discipline.
 
This transformative journey calls for a radically new form of super-aware consciousness, one that transcends the limitations of our previous, problem-inducing state of thought-mind. However, meditation isn't a direct solution crafted after a hard-fought battle with our issues. Instead, it often emerges as an unpredictable and unexpected intuitive response amidst life's chaos when we cease our attempts at resolution, recognizing the futility of our endeavors.
 
Embracing pixellative meditation means accepting, even loving life's inherent chaos—a task that demands a gradual approach. It's about learning to live with pixellated suffering and navigating the delicate balance between exerting control by kindly turning away from the incessant chatter of the mind and embracing the loss of control that such detachment inevitably brings.
 
This process leads to the rebirth of Nietzsche's dancing star, symbolizing the emergence of new insights and order from the acceptance of chaos. Meditation, in this context, is an act of surrender to the fractal-mathematical intricacies of existence, where a new intelligent order is born spontaneously but only after the inner turmoil aligns with the "vertical line in the quadratic equation" of our being.

Thus, to engage in pixellation in meditation is to undertake a journey of accepting chaos step by step, finding a way to live life surfed on the fine line between controlling our response to the mind's narratives and the liberation that comes from letting go of this control.

Pixellation in meditation can be seen as a Darwinian act of survival. When traditional mental solutions fail to alleviate the pain of a narrative-saturated life, evolving our consciousness becomes essential. This evolution isn't just about improvement; it's about survival—adapting our consciousness to overcome challenges created by our old thought-mind survival system.

Historically, we haven't been coded to look inward, as it hasn't offered evolutionary advantages. Our energy has been focused on survival tasks like procuring food. However, this internal ignorance is now endangering our species. Richard Dawkins' view of a soulless human archetype will doom us unless we gain insight into our own conduct.
 

AUTHENTIC FEELINGS AND INTEGRAL SUFFERING IN HAPPINESS

"The basis for all mental illness
is created in the avoidance of legitimate suffering."
C.G. Jung

Legitimate Suffering
What does Jung mean by legitimate suffering? As I understand it, it's the suffering that life's natural adversities serve us: a perfect sweet-sour mix of joy and sorrow.
C.G. Jung's insightful observation highlights a fundamental truth about the human condition: the essence of our being, or our soul, is not discovered without enduring pain. This brings us to a critical distinction—what Jung refers to as legitimate suffering, which I interpret as pain experienced directly, unamplified and untainted by the endless cycle of narrative reinforcement.
 
I propose that the flourishing of the inner human soul is hindered by excessive indulgence in a one-dimensional pursuit of positive emotions. Such identifications risks leaving no room for the existential discomfort necessary for genuine personal growth. C.G. Jung's ideal of individuation comes close to such an odysse. In the state of constant one-sided emotional satiation, the pendulum of our mental well-being swings persistently towards an artificial brightness or the opposite, neglecting the necessary dual blend of darkness and light that gives depth and substance to our lives.

The Danish poet Otto Gelsted speaks in the poem below, The Common, about what he calls clean pain. Allowing it to hurt, in Gelsted's wonderful poem, is a prerequisite for health and further: the possibility of finding the common great find.

The Common
All alone, just myself
I'm happy anyway

Let it just hurt!
Clean pain, it's healthy!

Lie still like a stone,
become hard and become one -
 
....

Just go down into loneliness,
maybe you will come - who knows -

through the loneliness portal
out to something free and great,

and the common great find!
lay on the loneliness bottom
Otto Gelsted - 1920

How can we like the Meister suggest, have peace in a life of pain? We contain the pain in peace by pixellating it. Meditation is attentively, passively, and as far as possible, storylessly resting in the suffering that naturally comes to us on life's road - the road that resembles a platitude in the same way as us who walk on it, but still contains something we all agree is the most important thing in the world: namely 'me'.

Here in this natural state, the Soul gains a holographic depth, which it cannot achieve alone through positive experiences alone.

Accept the pain allotted to you and you will discover in pain a joy which pleasure cannot yield, for the simple reason that acceptance of pain takes you much deeper than pleasure does.... Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage, and endurance open deep and perennial sources of real happiness. Nisargadatta Maharaj

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. Rumi

I said what about my heart
God said: Tell me what you hold inside it
I said pain and sorrow
He said: Stay with it.
Rumi

Let me here again assert that I am not talking about the pain we artificially inflict on ourselves through thought spin, where we weave ourselves into endless stories of self-pity, but only the sensed pain that naturally arises in front of our noses on life's not always nicely paved roads.

What is, IS!

The suffering created by our worried and constantly planning mind is thus not 'legitimate'. Legitimate emotions are in this sense the emotions that arise in the first split second in the present, when we openly meet the world. Meditation is to rest and spontaneously and powerfully act in and upon these fresh emotions rather than being thrown back and forth like a ball in the ping pong machine of thoughts. Note here that if you fully embrace the first fresh emotion, there will subsequently not be so many thoughts to create an extended drama out of the situation.
 
In this exploration, I delve into the nature of what I term 'fresh emotions.' Fundamentally, our cognitive processes were honed as a survival mechanism, a response crafted by the amygdala to navigate through perceived threats and discomforts. Thoughts, in this context, act as emergency responders rushing to the scene of an accident. Their objective is clear and necessary: to manage and rectify the crisis at hand, a function they have proficiently performed since the inception of our amygdala. The issue arises not from their initial response, but when these cognitive processes begin to conjure hypothetical disasters, trapping us in a loop of imagined crises that our primordial emotional body struggles to distinguish from actual threats. This blurring of lines between real and imagined dangers triggers a cyclical escalation of thoughts and emotions, a vortex that invariably spirals downward, retraumatizing the psyche.

The intricate and often downward spiralled dance between thought and emotion, while evolutionarily advantageous for our mammalian ancestors, beckons us now to transcend the biological constructs that have been our survival scaffolds for millennia. The longer we dwell within these thought spirals, the further we stray from resolution, and the more we entrench ourselves in destructive patterns. The freshness of our emotional response becomes diluted, contaminated by the "ifs, buts, and whens" that clutter our mental space.
 
The challenge lies not in the act of thinking itself but in the clutter of incessant, often unproductive chatter that we superimpose upon our foundational cognitive layer. This acknowledgment is not a call for the abandonment of thought but an invitation to sift through the mental noise, to return to the immediacy and purity of our initial emotional responses. In doing so, we pave the way for a more harmonious integration of thought and feeling, where each serves its purpose without encumbering the other.

It's crucial to acknowledge the value of a reflective mind. There can be a tremendeous benefit in translating our inner emotional state into fresh words. However, there is a hair fine balance to be obtained in this process. If these first thoughts entertain into a spiral where thoughts begin to paint felling patterns on the body-canvas and then new thought try to solve these new scenarios, then we have entered the vicious circle of retraumatization. That is why the Meister emphazises peace in the pain. As long as there is peace in this process, natural healing occours spontaneously.
 
To be able to feel oneself uncompromisingly and almost storylessly acceptant in all life situations creates spontaneous meditation... One becomes meditated in and by one's acceptance of oneself and others, an acceptance that connects the inner and outer person in emotional dialogue. In this sense, one could call Meditation sensed self-honesty, an inner emotional honesty, where the one who is oneself effortlessly becomes meditated by and in oneself.
 

THE WOUND OF PRESENCE
The incredible miracle here is that the divine mystery touches and penetrates me precisely where I am most vulnerable, traumatized, and complicated.

The wound is the place where the Light enters you
Rumi

To contain oneself is tantamount to exposing the inner person in the outer. This makes it possible for the soul, our felt essence, to breathe through the cracks in the armor of the outer person. To be emotionally honest, first with oneself, then with others, is tantamount to vulnerability.

The inner person thus exposes itself in the outer in what one might call a wound of presence.

When inward tenderness finds the secret hurt,
pain itself will crack the rock and Ah!
Let the soul emerge.
-Rumi-

To expose this wound of presence in the fresh air is the highest form of courage. This form of passive sensing requires courage and patience because our biological nature has programmed us to think and then act ourselves out of uncomfortable situations.

The great Whole or God or whatever you want to call the unfathomable mystery touches me precisely where I am most hurt. I have spent an inordinate amount of my life on such scenes to reap the precious experiences that only mistakes and suffering could give.

To keep that wound open requires a lot of courage and above all honesty. We have first of all to be as honest to ourselves. This honesty cannot be learned on universities obtaining all kinds of degrees. It is all about our character. Most important is the nobility of our character.

THE INNER WARRIOR'S SACRED WOUND
A shamanic archetype is the wounded healer. On the contemporary scene of healers, therapist and psychologist most are helpless helpers. A few of these helpless helpers evolve into being true wounded healers.
 
The one who passively can contain his inner interoceptive body is for me a spiritual warrior. For this inner wounded warrior, performing outer strength is the highest degree of cowardice. The spiritual warrior passively contains his own inner war with a smile, while in his inner exploration he treads new behavioral paths in the network of neurons.
 
In meeting the wound, it is important not to depersonalize oneself. This is the Eastern meditation survival strategy: that in case of a painful and catastrophic situation one lets go of one's humanity and becomes pure spirit.

We are so often told not to take ourselves too seriously, that it is narcissistic to circle around our own little sore navel.

I will say the opposite: take everything in the world personally to the highest degree! Especially take your inner wound seriously. The more secret your wound is, the more important it is to expose it - for the wound itself is the opening into the inner side of life. However, at the same time: ignore your wound in the sense of endless story-telling.
 
Just like sleep and meditative wakefulness, the fool and the wise man are only separated by a hair's breadth, so taking oneself emotionally seriously is close to self-importance. The difference lies in the very sensing. The narcissist looks at himself from a distance, alienated, while story-telling himself. Meditative self-celebration, on the other hand, is created in almost thought-free
meditative wakefulness.

Here's my proposal for the most important of all meditations:
Every second, from now and for the rest of your life, whenever you remember, return to the innocent close sensing of the body's inner space. Remember yourself in the form of your sensed body. The mystic Gurdjieff called this act "constant self remembrance." I would term this with the word 'awarance.

Be in a state of constant pixel awarance of the inner body canvas of emotions.

The Good Mother's Attention
To allow meditation into the wound of presence requires taking full responsibility for even the smallest and perhaps most ridiculous or unreasonable vulnerabilities. Nothing is too insignificant or small, for the devil is always in the detail.

Let me repeat the lesson: Let's not meditate ourselves away here.
Instead, allow everything, even the smallest sensed things, to enter the warming center of attention. Give it the greatest gift you can give to both yourself and the world: simple, undifferentiated, and non-cognitive attention.

It's like being the good mother. When her child cries, she picks it up and gives it attention by cudlling it. She doesn't first ask why the child is crying. Nor does she judge it. She just picks it up and nurses it with her attention.

By doing the same with your often unreasonable inner children, you allow even the most sensitive aspects of your nervous system to become a serving part of you. Cuddle your inner child. It is still there - believe me!

To stop and feel yourself as a raw, sensed body is not easy. For our biological software is outdated and actually programmed for a life in the Stone Age, where all sensations are divided into survival-friendly and survival-hostile. Therefore, my dear friend Rumi must remind us again and again how important it is not to run away:

"Don't run away from grief, oh soul
Look for the remedy inside the pain.
Because the rose came from the thorn
and the ruby came from a stone."
Rumi

THE HEALING DISCOMFORT

"If you can face it - God can fix it.
If you can feel it - God can heal it."

"Think of suffering as being washed."
Hafez

Beyond the existential necessity of resting in the body's sensed duality, there is another, more practical reason to take the bull of life's pain by the horns.
I will now reveal a secret hidden in the self-evident: that both the body and mind can actually heal themselves through pain and discomfort.

For the one who seeks out the pain is not pursued by it.

How do I know this? I know it from my own experience. The best way to validate my claim is through your own personal experiences in your own inner body laboratory.
 
When I call it a secret, it's because this innate ability for self-healing is so simple and so close to us that we often overlook or underestimate its wonderful possibilities.

Many years ago, I read in a scientific magazine that some French researchers had observed the amount of white blood cells in a finger with an infection. According to them the number of white blood cells fighting the infection increased when the test person was keeping his attention on the finger through looking at it and feeling it from inside at the same time.

Where the Attention Goes, the Prana Flows
Self-healing, both psychological and physical depends on the quality and intensity of our attention. The more our supreme awareness is intensified in meditation, the greater the ability for self-healing, when this attention is brought into the body's sensory universe. A tired attention is not of much use.
 
Attention is anchored in the sense of sensing and feeling. We notice our feelings. The sense of feeling is the most important of our close senses. This wonderful sense has a double job. It functions as the 'body community's border guard' in the form of the skin's outward sensations and also has an inward task, patrolling the almost hidden universe of the inner body.

One of the most important sections on Meditation.dk is devoted to an investigation of the hidden world of attention. Meditative healing requires that attention make direct contact with the wound of presence, to allow full and innocently wordless attention to feel bodily discomfort without fleeing.
 
Attention understood as the process of ignorant awarance must be cleansed of understanding and then in its pure a-ha innocence get close contact with the sensations in the body. The wound of presence must not be understood but felt. Any attempt at understanding creates a kind of filter where words, concepts, and narratives lay like a film between attention and the attended. When understanding has clamped the pure sensation, we will, for example, in our constant inner monologue tell ourselves that we feel sorrow and are sad. The next thing will be a bigger story where the inner self tells itself that it is a pity for me. Crying is therefore often, but not always, an expression of being stuck in a narrative and not having met the sensations of the body unadulterated by words. As long as one self-narrates one's feelings, one will be stuck in the mire.
 
Meditation is to go deeper than words and tears.
 
To accept discomfort and psychological pain in the body is a prerequisite for our simple non-analytical attention to make direct contact with feelings as pure sensations, that is, before they are interpreted by the mind as discomfort or pain. To feel your inner body without words allows nature to take care of the rest: If you can feel it - God can heal it.
To notice suffering without doing anything about it

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer

To feel suffering, as the wonderful new age shaman in the above quote says, without doing anything about it, without removing it, moving it, or hiding it, goes against everything we have learned and instinctively feel. In the same way as animals, we try to avoid pain.
 
Let us abandon the older survival systems we created to survive
Ideas of wellness and that it is spiritual to practice positive thinking are rooted in the ancient biological struggle for survival, where we divide the world into what promotes our survival and what does not. First we divide the world into evil and good, and then we do something about the evil and try to achieve the good. In this context, thoughts are nothing more than survival strategies. This polarization of the world is like the axis mundi in our old ego-operating system, an obstacle to a radical upgrade of consciousness into the state I call the super-awake state.

For the new fluid operating system of awarance to be installed, it is above all important to do nothing. By doing nothing, by not acting out of life's numerous traps, by not following self-development courses, yes, by not understanding, by not clinging to the comfort of religions, there is a good chance that the old self-system will collapse, and only in this collapse can the new consciousness' dancing star be born.

"Stop everything...
Then you will realize you are the freedom
you have always been searching for."

Or maybe even better: Realize your inner freedom that was always hiding in the wast darkness of the inner dark cathedral of your body, and then everything will stop.
 
The Art of Non-Doing in 'Awarance'
My warm advocacy for non-doing arises from our ego-reality's overemphasis on recognizing and acting our way out of uncomfortable situations.

However, turning non-doing into a new truth would be equally erroneous. As soon as we accept something as true, in this context, it becomes untrue.

This era's pursuit of an ostensibly perfect and perpetually happy existence leads, paradoxically, to a profound superficiality. By narrating away our primordial pain, we not only distance ourselves from the immediate experience of that pain but also from the very essence of our soul. The act of fleeing from the discomfort inherent in life's challenges through stories and narratives serves to distance us further from the authentic self, creating a barrier to true understanding and acceptance of the human experience. It is easy to see how one can flee from pain by being artificially social media happy. However, on can also flee from legitimate pain by identifying as a victim.
 
What is the soul? For me, the soul is the living hologram of simple beauty that appears when human consciousness coherently observes and senses the world's incomprehensible interference patterns with a light akin to laser light. The more synced our consciousness becomes, the more synced the world around us will be.
  
For our consciousness to achieve sufficient coherence to find or rather be the multi-dimensional answer to the contradictions that have no solution on the four-dimensional space-time plane they were created and formulated in, suffering and darkness must be the equal partner of light and joy. Meditation therefore starts and ends in the simple thing that we day in and day out make ourselves as good friends with negative emotions as we are with positive emotions.
 
How can I now be sure that life is perfect and not unfair to me? In my case, I must say that I was not able to intellectually see through whether the world's total sum of dynamic infinite interaction in its flow through me was evil or good.
Therefore, I chose to see it as perfect - or rather perfectly imperfect.

Yes.. everything is chosen so well and every time I lose, I win a bodily life experience and thus a precious depth in my soul, which people who have not suffered are not so lucky to get. With this choice, most of my suffering disappeared; namely the suffering all my thoughts about what should have been different had caused. Resting in natural life pain is for me the very foundation of a healthy life in Meditation. Meditation is in this sense the amor fati of pain.

Without darkness in life, spiritual development is not possible. In this sense, pain and discomfort are our best friends - for unlike joy, which puts us to sleep, suffering keeps us awake if we are able to be with it.

As the yin yang symbol, happiness always have a dot of sorrow in it and suffering always a smile.

Further reading: Meditative Pixelation


With warm regards,
Gunnar Mühlmann
gunnars@mail.com