Practicing inner peace: presence, meditation, self-inquiry
What is presence?
Presence arises when your essential nature, Consciousness, awakens itself in this moment. Consciousness is beyond space and time, beyond life and death. It is omnipresent, everywhere and nowhere, it is the shapeless dimension from which all things arise. When you are present, you let go of the past and the future. You surrender at the moment. There is no resistance to what is. Being present is not just about being aware of what is happening on the level of form, it is being aware of the very space in which all forms come and go.
Most people have had moments when they recognized the Presence, even if they didn’t call it that. Have you ever had the experience of watching the sunset? The world became still and all thoughts disappeared as you sat in awe of the beauty that was unfolded before you. Or maybe you’ve had the experience of running a race, skiing or riding a bike and suddenly you entered “The Zone” where you were one with everything, and your movements were effortless. Or when looking into the eyes of a newborn baby or your loved one, did you ever feel yourself merging with them until all sense of separation dissolved and you experienced Oneness? In all of these situations, the Presence emerged when you freed yourself from identification with the thinking mind and surrendered to the direct experience of Now.
For most people, presence is rare and fleeting. Instead of living in the Now, they listen to the ceaseless barrage of thoughts from the “thinking mind.” Constantly create a story: judge, evaluate, and label as you fixate on a remembered past or an imagined future. The cost of living in thoughts of the past and the future is missing one of the only thing that is truly real – Life Itself, the Present Moment. How can you wake up from this delusional dream of identification with the mind and discover the clarity and peace of awareness of the present moment?
True meditation
There are many forms of meditation that involve controlling the mind, trying to force it to be still. If you have ever tried to meditate, you may have experienced that the mind resists this control agenda. Adyashanti, a self-realized teacher, observed during his 15 years of Zen meditation that he, too, was often at war with his mind. When he recognized the futility of fighting with the mind, he developed a powerful new approach that he calls “True Meditation.”
True meditation is based on the understanding that presence is your natural state. In essence, you are the spacious Consciousness. Consciousness resists nothing and accepts everything: thoughts, emotions, sensory perceptions, events, as they arise. True meditation honors this open receptivity. You learn to accept everything that happens around you and within you exactly as it is right now. You don’t reject anything that arises because the mind has a different idea of how meditation should look or feel. Nor does he use any technique to create some kind of preconceived meditative state. No manipulation is necessary. By aligning yourself with your essential nature through unconditional acceptance of what is, you naturally come to spiritual wakefulness.
Another aspect of true meditation is meditative self-inquiry. Meditative self-inquiry is the introduction of a powerful spiritual question that resonates within you in such a way that it “points” to the Truth of who you are. It is not a question that serves to stimulate the mind, but draws attention to an area beyond thought, where the mind is bypassed and you, as Pure Consciousness, contemplate the Ultimate Truth. A couple of powerful questions to start with are: “What am I?” or “Who is the meditator?”
3 steps to inner peace
Presence is your true nature. However, today, most people live lost in the mental history of a separate “me” defined by the past and the future; both are unreal and exist. only in the head. These 3 steps can be very helpful in moving from mind identification to present moment awareness.
FirstNotice when you are caught in a mental stream of incessant thoughts, creating a story about the past and the future, and losing touch with what is real: the Present Moment.
Second, remain open and allow a relaxed and unconditional acceptance of who is, both internally and externally, in each moment.
Third, use self-inquiry to deepen the emerging Presence. Possible questions include: “What am I?”, “What never changes?”, “Who or what tells me that I am not free?”
As you glimpse your “True Self” during meditation sessions and recognize that you are not separate from the world “out there”, you will begin to notice that this awareness extends to your life as a whole. You begin to realize that the world of forms: physical forms, thought forms, energy forms, emotional forms, is ultimately an elaborate dream dreamed of by the eternal One Consciousness that you are. Suddenly, the world loses the terrifying and heavy quality it had when it was understood to be an absolute reality. You start living from a place of inner peace and tranquility.