has no opposites. This Love is the Peace that passes all understanding. It is the Peace that pervades the whole universe. It was there before you were. Now it permeates your mind. When your body passes away, it will remain. This is the Peace and fulfillment that people struggle to obtain their whole life.
Some people try to concentrate their mind to find this Peace. However this Peace cannot be manufactured. It cannot be captured by a thought or a state of mind. Whether your attention is riveted on this deep Love or not, you can know it directly. Do you know where this Love is hidden? It is your true identity; it is just who you are. So let the mind put full attention on the tasks at hand; as for you, remain at Peace.
And as far as concentration, you are the light that illumines the mind, Awareness. Remain as that and let the mind be. Giving up your attempts to control thoughts will allow the mind to return to its natural state where it is your friend.
In the next chapter we are going to talk about the thought, “I can’t.” I love this thought because it was one of my teachers. It taught me that thoughts do not have intrinsic power. We give them our power, and that’s what makes them seem real. Then we complain about our limitation. More in the next chapter.
I Can’t
Now, as promised, I will give an example from my own life to illustrate the workings of this meditation. How can I see through the thought patterns that just seem to be me? In this first example, I just took my thoughts to be true. On the first day of math class my teacher was going over many theorems and proofs and my first thought was, “How can I ever understand what she is talking about? I can’t do math.”
Then in an instant I noticed that ‘I can’t’ was just a thought. I still didn’t know if I could do math or not. So without believing in the thought, ‘I can’t,’ and without trying to counter it, I just left an open space to find out. “I’ll see,” I said to myself.
If I attempted to replace ‘I can’t,’ with the thought ‘I can,’ I would just have created an internal battle that would take lots of energy. Who knows if the ‘I can’t,’ or, ‘I can,’ would have won. As it turned out I studied the theorems closely and was able to understand them.
But I know even good students who suffer through school because of this little idea, ‘I can’t.’ And even worse I have known people who failed in their attempts to meditate just because of this one thought pattern.
So, in order to step free of the thought, ‘I can’t,’ you just recognize that when you see this thought you are intrinsically free of it. That means that you are the one who sees the thought, not the one bound by its contents. I didn’t do anything else. I didn’t replace it with better thoughts, or attempt to breathe or chant to get rid of it. That is the beauty of the path of Self-Knowledge.
Now lets look at the guises: ‘I can’t’ is a definition of myself; this is just the way I am, the one who can’t do it. And what is my definition of the world? The world is a tough place, and specifically math is too tough for me. And finally the definition of a mind that can’t do math.
In this case I saw the thought and how it had the potential to control my life. Then I saw the guises that surrounded the thought. Sometimes, as in the next section, I see the guises first and then the patterns became clear.
If you ever have the thought, “Because I think it, it must be true,” now is the time to notice that your thoughts may or may not be true. In either case though, one thing is certain: your thoughts don’t define you. That’s because you are the awareness that sees the thoughts. Later you will see that as awareness you are much greater than anything that your thoughts can define.
So without fighting with your thoughts, you can tear out the root of the thought, ‘I can’t.’ Just see that it doesn’t apply to you, to the nature of the world, or to your mind. That will knockout its support. Then you won’t care about this thought at all. The thought, ‘I can’t,’ can come and go as it wants. That’s because it lost its power to bind you in limitation, and to therefore cause suffering. When you recognize a thought as just a thought you take away its power.
My View of the World
At some point in my own spiritual practice I was always very nice. Nice to the point where it didn’t feel genuine. It had the feeling of being sickly sweet. I felt very uncomfortable around people. Knowing that suffering was not part of life, I decided to take a look and see what was going on behind this feeling of being too nice.
I first saw my view of the world: the world was a tough place where people were out to get me. I always had to be on guard. “Was it any wonder,” I thought, “that I studied martial arts including Kung Fu and Aikido.” It fit right into my view of the world.
Then why was I so nice to everyone? It became very clear. This was my self-defense. If I could get the people who were ‘intrinsically bad’ to like me, then I could protect myself. I spotted where I picked up these thoughts and exactly how they worked in my life.
At that point I just looked afresh at my view of the world to see if it was really bad, if people were really out to get me. First, I noticed the beauty of nature around me from the trees and tall grass to the reflection of the sun and the hills in an icy stream. At that moment I noticed a harmony that was vast and joyful. It was the same harmony as that I had eyes and ears and there were things to see and hear, that I needed to breathe and there was air.
I saw that people were a part of this amazing harmony, that at their core they had the same feeling of bliss and love that I have. They loved their children and their pets and I saw how most people just wished me the best.
To my amazement, the cold, distant, harsh world, which I thought was out there, came right inside me, and on the inside it wasn’t cold or harsh at all. My heart opened up and I discovered that on the inside everything is connected by a vast unseen harmony. That even though it is unseen, it is my direct experience.
I wanted to develop a more genuine behavior pattern and ended up discovering how the whole universe was inside me. More on this later, but for now hold your hat, you never know how vast and how amazing your meditation practice can get when you strive for self-discovery. Clear out these little conceptual frameworks that seem to rule your life, and then without replacing them with anything, let it rip.
I think you will discover that life is more than just not being depressed or angry. Life is vast; life is beautiful; life is beyond our imagination. If you feel that ‘life’ is anything less than that, peel off the limitations that you think belong to you. You will start to have experiences that you could never have anticipated. What you thought was separate and distant will come right inside, in oneness.
Later on in this book we will talk more about the emotions in, “When our Emotions Get Out of Balance,” and “Freedom Fom the Grip of Anger.” But for now we will talk about another aspect of the mind: “The Memory.”
The Memory
There is one last function of the mind that we should look at. That’s the memory. Many people feel that it’s their memory that provides the sense of continuity for their life. It is because of what they remember that they know who they are.
But if you examine your memory closely, you will discover some astonishing facts. First of all, you forget a lot more than you remember. If you don’t believe me, what did you have for lunch 27 days ago? For all of the things that you do in the course of a single day, you only remember a very small portion of them, and that’s what you call your life.
Secondly, even the things that you remember, you remember imperfectly. Over time the facts and the details get lost. Generally the details in your memory favor you, and not the other people in the memory. If you need proof of this, try getting several people to describe an event that they just experienced like a crime scene. Everyone will have a different version of what happened. Which one is correct? That’s why when someone writes a memoir, I wonder if they are just writing another form of a novel.
Now thirdly, when you experience your memory,