As we open our eyes each morning, we wake up remembering our own identity and our individual circumstances.
We feel that our personality is a certain way, that we have lived a particular past, that we have contracted enclosedfamily and work occupations. In short, each morning we activate a concept of ourselves, an “I”, a “me being in the world” and with it, we face the sixteen hours ahead of us before going back to sleep the coming night.
That personal, intimate reality to which we wake up every day can be considered as “memories” since it is built on the memory of what we have lived. Each person has his or her own “memories” and individual patterns, and with them, faces the day ahead. That memory of what we believe ourselves to be (and which configures our “satchel of memories”) is always different in every person and is a non-transferable knowledge: no one really shares our daily identity, our past experiences, our concrete perception of the world. Our “sack of memories”, the one we activate when we open our eyes every morning, therefore, only resides in ourselves, only in our mind. When we die, it will disappear without leaving any trace. And yet, we always attach great importance to that intimate reality that no one really knows and that will end up being exhausted at the end of our days.
We think that we are something, that we have an identity, but the only thing that really exists is the day we have to live today. And that’s what we should concentrate on as we wake up each new day.
Every morning, in front of us, we only have the day we have to live. It’s only sixteen hours before we go back to sleep. It doesn’t matter what our circumstances are, and it doesn’t matter even more what our particular interpretation of those circumstances is. In reality, we only have the next sixteen hours to resolve what the day brings before disappearing again at night. Only during these sixteen hours before us can we do something for our lives, for our longings, for our well-being.
We think about the past and how it configures our identity, but does any of it have real validity in our immediate present? Let us go back 10 or 15 years in our lives and remember how we woke up then, what we said to ourselves, what people were in our memory, with which of them we spoke simulating during the mental chatter that is activated each morning in our mind. Let’s think about it and see how little or nothing of that currently worries us now. Nor does the future, if we continue to come out of the present, have the importance that we attach to it. Our sack of memories is an individual and ephemeral experience and, in the future, it will unravel as we will unravel. In 100 or 150 years nobody will remember us and, much less, will be aware of what we think now, just as we know nothing of the concerns, the intimate yearnings and the identity of our direct ancestors of more than a century ago.
So, let’s start the morning by down-playing the sack of memories and giving prominence to the one day when we can do something for our lives: today. Returning to that simulation present, in it we only have three things that are relevant to us: what we do, what we think and what we feel.
This conceptualization that we have in our minds of ourselvesaffects all our day-to-day living and all our activities. Whatever you are, it is the sum of the totalityof impressions contained within you.
In our course , mindfulness, meditation, and spiritual practices training , you will learn the tools to overcome those impressions.
You cannot get rid of impressions, but you can overcome the impressions. If your cup of tea is bitter, what do you do? You add a bit more sugar to make it sweeter. Right. And what is that sugar one adds, would be your meditations and spiritual practices whereby you overcome the impressions and allow the impressions to float away by themselves.
The bitterness of the impressions will automatically disappear like the bitterness of the tea without sugar.
Activating your meditations within you would naturally be followed with by good thoughts – there should never be a day in one’s life where you do not read a few pages of something which is uplifting. So here you are helped more by implanting thoughts into the mind which are uplifting thoughts,
like listening to any of our tapes, or reading a good book.
If you try by force of will to eradicate impressions, what happens would be that the impressions become more and more stabilized in the mind. They get more and more implanted in the mind. Instead of dwelling on those impressions, use go the other way, think good thoughts and use your spiritual practices which will get rid of the old impressions.
The whole idea is to still the waves. Now you can’t say to the ocean, ‘Be still’. No you can’t do that, you can’t say that to the mind but by doing the meditational practices as you will learn in this course, you will find that turbulence just calming down and you view the mind in a different way altogether because now it is still, and in that stillness, all the impressions are drowned.
Impressions, like the waves on the ocean, will keep on creating more and more turbulence. So, to get rid of these impressions, we use the methods and practices that are given to you as part of our free meditation course.
With the practices and techniques that you will learn you will quiet the mind further. And when you experience the quietening of the mind, you will realize how these practices we teach work for you. But you must allow it to work effortlessly.
There’s no effort in that quietude. You find you cannot stop thoughts. You’ll find thoughts coming up. But then because of the quietude, you become an observer of those thoughts. ln other words, there is non-involvement in the thoughts, you’re a bystander. You’re watching them. And as you watch them, they just fade away producing still greater quietude within yourself.
‘Be still and know that I am God’. That’s a quotation from the Scriptures. So what we will be providing you are tools so that you become the observer of life itself.
When you become the observer of life, then all those impressions that are implanted in your subconscious mind just dissipate themselves. And that is how you get rid of all the impressions of past experiences, past actions, past thoughts and you find the quietude.
And as impressions become less and less, you will find you become nearer and nearer to your Real Self, which is your Divine Self.
Take this unique opportunity to learn the Path of Unfoldment(PoU) protocol:do your meditations and spiritual practices regularly, consciously capture good thoughts, and your life will be transformed.
It is so simple to be happy, so difficult to be simple. With us, you will learn to live life a day at a time.
