In part one, we looked at a simple but effective technique to remove us from the ‘head chatter’ of the flow of verbalised thoughts in our mind. Use of the deep word ‘ONE’, although another word, itself, can act like a ‘bullet’ to stop the stream of often unconscious words that cloud our attention, affect our emotions and drain our energy.
If you’re tried this over the past week, you’ll know it not only works, but starts to reconnect us with peaceful and purposeful level of ‘belonging’ – a place and state with which we have a deep sense of identity. In other words, it feel like home.
It’s worth spending some time noting the qualities of this inner state: Alive, fresh, resilient and happy… and often described as ‘sweet’, in a literal sense.
A friend said of his experience: “It feels like the me I’ve always wanted to be”.
Do any of these things have ‘value’ in the normal, egoic-self world? They can’t be counted or have any other value placed on them; only an approximate description of how they are. But how things are can never be truly described. It exits only in your consciousness. To be more accurate, since consciousness is a much-abused term – how things are can only be the subject of your ‘awareness’. When we use this, we are doing so in a quite different way from it’s common usage. More will be said about this next week.
Mystical writers don’t mean to complicate things; they usually seek to be accurate, but in my experience, when dealing with things of the soul, we need to be direct… almost to shock…
Let’s greet it for what it is. This is the YOU. Its vibrant, sweet and resistance-less nature accompanied you to birth as an infant. It has always been you. If this is you, then what is the other, external you – the personality?
The personality is a machine of protective responses, a shell, an electronic suit of armour that you have grown around every aspect of your sense of self to protect its own preeminence from the attacks of the world.
But the real YOU is this new, inner being that has always been there. It’s not fragile. It’s just covered up and largely ignored because of the sophistication of your ‘day-self in the world’. It busies itself keeping you alive and healthy – when we let it, and waits for the time when you’ll want to meet.
To help us move further into awareness. Let’s add another Deep Word: TWO.
We can go into our ONE state in any set of conditions of the outer life. It doesn’t matter if we’re active or passive. Sitting in our favourite chair or driving the car through the horrible morning traffic, sitting on the bus or the Tube… Or meditating. let the ONE Word seize and silence the chattering Worm-Words, and, as soon as you feel that sense of sweet connection, say (mentally or physically) the word TWO.
As you do so, see the golden circle of calmed awareness created by the ONE word and visualise that it is just in front of you. Mentally reach out your hands and clasp the left and right sides; at the same time rotating this linked ‘you and it’ as though you are being spun around.
You are now on the inside… Looking out – not through the eyes of the personality – but through the eyes of this Inner YOU that contains everything you could need or want.
If thoughts persist in describing this as it’s happening, shoot them down with the ONE world spoken by the TWO consciousness.
The TWO place came before the personality – the ‘daytime you’. That is why the personality is wary of it. The personality – the egoic self – has no powers to affect it; only cloud it over with habitual patterns of what’s important.
The TWO self lives in the world of Being; a place whose nature and laws are different to the outer, material realm.
Nothing is more important than this TWO state, and the more we surrender to its loving embrace, the more we will see the outer ‘world’ in its true, non-reactive presence… and all its glorious beauty.
In the final post in this series, next Thursday, we’ll add another number to complete the series of ‘inner moves’, and come to better understand the nature of Being…
Other parts in this series:
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©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog