awakening
September 2008 
Reflections on Awakening, part 6
Posted on Jul 2nd, 2008
by 
Daroy
Daroy
How to free oneself from the constantly babbling thinking mind? How to refrain from drifting off into the stream of plans, projects, regrets, complaints, and defensive rationalization? How to achieve stillness, emptiness, awareness? Non-judgment with wide open senses? I find it so hard i feel like i'm at the foot of a sky-high mountain whose summit is in the clouds and which i'm supposed to climb.
A little help comes from a picture i discovered many years ago in a German introductory book to Buddhism by Verena Reichle. It's actually quite similar to the ocean-wave-kind of image: it shows the egos as the tips of triangles rising out of nothingness; where the triangles meet begins the collective unconscious, which merges into the universal Self. The path to freedom is downwards, away from the individual, separate me and into the unthinking stillness. So as i walk to my workplace in the morning, i try to train myself to slowly sink into the pure background stillness within me while at the same time taking in as many sense perceptions as possible. It usually works for a few minutes, and then a thought or label or judgment comes creeping in and the mind takes over again ... .
(Illustration from: Verena Reichle, Die Grundgedanken des Buddhismus, Frankfurt 1994)
A little help comes from a picture i discovered many years ago in a German introductory book to Buddhism by Verena Reichle. It's actually quite similar to the ocean-wave-kind of image: it shows the egos as the tips of triangles rising out of nothingness; where the triangles meet begins the collective unconscious, which merges into the universal Self. The path to freedom is downwards, away from the individual, separate me and into the unthinking stillness. So as i walk to my workplace in the morning, i try to train myself to slowly sink into the pure background stillness within me while at the same time taking in as many sense perceptions as possible. It usually works for a few minutes, and then a thought or label or judgment comes creeping in and the mind takes over again ... .
(Illustration from: Verena Reichle, Die Grundgedanken des Buddhismus, Frankfurt 1994)
Access: Public
Try out a week of not complaining like I did already in Oktober 2006 … gosh already 2 years ago! I invite you to read the comments of our little group … it was fun and really interesting. All this to tell you that you have to train to live more consciously so that you can stop your thoughts (in my challenge it was complaining) before they can grow!