Visit the Katie Davis Website at www.KatieDavis.org:
Free awakening videos and free Friends of the Heart Newsletters with articles on being now, awakening, meditation, enlightenment, Non-duality, Advaita and awake living; Katie's satsang schedule and event testimonials; photo gallery, awakening groups and how to contact Katie for a private appointment or to invite her to your area.
The Now over the Sea by Katie Davis
In attention to the here and now, you enjoy the sky over the sea of emotion. That is to say, you are free of the negative impact of your thoughts and their automatic constellation into negative emotion. When you sense the aliveness of simply being now, joy transpires. In the now, the time required for thought’s progression does not exist. Therefore, there are no thoughts to cause emotional contractions within your body. Mind can only do one thing at a time. When it is in still attention, it can not think.
This is not to say that life is then listless or lackluster. In lieu of the never-ending emotional roller coaster, you experience a changeless joy, which is gleefully energizing. Free in the sky of now, you are free of your self-created emotional reactions.
By observing, you discover that virtually all psychological suffering is due to your continued relationship with the past and the storyteller. This view is based on your psychological memory, which is the story that you are maintaining about a past incident. You can not get rid of your pain and keep your painful story. The result of psychological memory is that you live your concept of the past in the present moment.
We misconstrue the now to be a fleeting instant that is insignificantly squeezed between the past that we are trying to get over and the future that we are trying to reach. If we would examine more carefully, we would realize that the continuous now is virtually all there is. The Now is outside of time and therefore, it is the refuge of timelessness. Timelessness is eternal. There is nothing fleeting in forever.
Through self-observation, the emotional aspect of the mind can not use you. Instead, you become aware of your conditioning. This conditioning is the past alive in you. It is always earmarked by some sort of unease that surfaces as an emotional reaction. This is why it is unnecessary to process the past in order to be free of the past. A past fixation can only create more pain. Contrarily, when you are free of your conditioning in the present, you realize freedom from the past.
Releasing your conditioned behavior is not an external action. You release it through silent and still inner watching. You become conscious of your repetitive thinking and how it is linked to your emotions. Because you are observing, you no longer tend to identify with your thoughts, which source your emotional reactions. Through self-observation, you are distanced or detached from the troublesome inner dialogue. It is when you are distracted from the here and now that you identify with complicated circumstances. You are then mechanically tossed about by the waves of your past.
Of course, Now always is, whether you attend to it or not. I am saying that it does not really matter. In truth, you are always free and always Now. However, to realize this emotional freedom, you watch your inner dialogue to be present with your emotions. Instead of resisting the push and pull, you welcome the emotions as you observe and feel them. You become conscious of your mind activity and its attempt to add intensity to emotional situations. In doing so, you become aware of the internal mechanisms of perpetuation.
During self-observation, I am not asking you to change anything. I am asking you to simply watch. In Presence, you will find that you are not your mind, nor the emotional aspect of mind, your emotions. This is not to deny your emotions. In fact, by fully experiencing them consciously, you realize true freedom. Through uninvolved attention, you are liberated from the unconscious tendency to judge, label and categorize outer circumstances and inner feelings. Initially, your emotions are reduced to mere waves of sensation through your physical form. Subsequently, you notice that you are here before, during and after every emotion. While the sensations are impermanent, you realize that the one watching is absolutely still, permanent and free. In this discovery, you are joyfully unbound in the Sky of Now.
Read more at "Look Inside" Katie's Book, Awake Joy, by clicking:
AWAKE JOY
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Dear Katie,
Nice excerpt from your
book Awake Joy.
As you say suffering is possible only when we associate
and fix in the past.In the present moment there is no possibility of
suffering.If we are passionate with
uninvolved attention,just witnessing in the present moment,
we dissociate from the past because
watcher is beyond the dimension of the time where as past is time bound.So anything that is time bound leads to misery.So time is misey.
Many spiritual methods and teachings are processing of the past which perpetuates the past,so perpetuates misery.So with the ending of association with past,
i.e with the ending time there is an ending to sorrow and fixing
ourselves in the witnessing consciousness is the way for it.~Dr.Raju.
Good morning Dr Raji ~
Yes, this is so. Many psychological methods are perpetuating the misery by a past fixation such as healing the past or retelling the painful story. Just as you say,there is no way out of misery in the past. Past conditioning will always appear in the present moment as a reaction which then offers the opportunity to make it conscious through the observation. Joy can only be realized with the removal of time.
People also deal with the pain of the collective that is not associated with mind activity. Perhaps as a sense of unease or maybe dread. Through witnessing, all is transmuted and resolved.
Thank you for offering the readers this clarity.
~ Katie
Post a Comment