The Now over the Sea ~ Part II Excerpt Awake Joy by Katie Davis

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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.

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True Forgiveness by Katie Davis - Katie Davis Blog - Awake by Katie Davis

Love does not exist within the mind and its time. Trying to heal the past is a past fixation, so we are not present for the unconditional Love that we are. The mind-made self, the ego, has a lifetime of past experience. Those that are most troublesome seem to be the ones that we meet within our intimate relationships. All of the ego's rules, expectations, intentions, and lack of trust are based on past experience. The ego acquires knowledge from the past and applies the known to present experience.

With each encounter, when others fall short of expectations, it suffers and then closes down even more. After enough negative experiences, the ego may even generalize its experience with a few individuals to an entire class, such as "men." Now, it not only has a few individual enemies in the life experience, it also has an entire imaginary army, somewhere in the future that certainly will create more of the same.

While fixated on the ego and its time, we seem to recreate the very thing that we want to escape. The ego projects into the future, its experience of the past, as present moment experience. Playing by the ego's rules of the game involves a never-ending loss of innocence. Of course, Innocence can never really be touched, since it is absolutely indestructible and perfectly within you right now. We just are not yet conscious of this Field, since the ego is mentally involved in the every day push and pull of the mind and its conditions for living each moment.

True forgiveness has nothing to do with any other. One could say that you are the forgiveness for which the ego strives. When you of free of time, that is, free of the past, free of "me" and therefore free of some "other," truthfully when is forgiveness required? We are simply free in our refuge of timelessness.

Other than perceived events that appear solely as mental images in the head on a chronological dateline, are you free right now? Are you truly available to offer True Compassion for all that appears, regardless of the face that it seems to be wearing? Do we live in constant forgiveness for all that appears? Do people truly accept this moment just as it is?

Let your heart crack open, face fear, and see if it is as the mind thinks.

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