So much of our life is about striving, planning, goal setting and the like. Silly as it may sound, the process of waking up involves none of that. Nothing of achieving, trying, taking steps, hoping, pursuing, etc. is necessary, and actually can get in the way. <\/p>\n
Rather, it\u2019s more like UN-doing, releasing, surrender, unlearning, giving up, ending, or letting go (not that you should DO any of these). This is so because a wakeful state is simply all that\u2019s left when \u201cme\u201d stops running the show. It is what\u2019s going on when \u201cme\u201d is quiet. And \u201cme\u201d is what tries to attain, to get, to achieve. It grasps at, reaches for, tries hard, and hopes for results, all in our own name. This implies that even \u2018trying\u2019 to stop \u201cme\u201d is useless. So, is it hopeless? <\/p>\n
Fortunately, an intense (warm and curious) attention to this \u201cme\u201d is all that\u2019s necessary, as that \u201cme\u201d mechanism (and it is <\/em>mechanistic) with its incessant activity is what\u2019s in our way. The most difficult part of paying such attention to this is that we are so identified with \u201cme\u201d (duh). Really, we are just not used to paying much attention to ourselves without any motive – motives to improve, to gain, or to pursue happiness or avoid pain. Can we watch the movement of ourselves inwardly just to see what\u2019s going on? *(see Introduction post for a full description of \u201cme\u201d as the \u2018old default\u2019)<\/p>\n And what is this incessant chattering, grasping \u201cme\u201d made of? Thinking. Particularly thinking about ME (geeze, there\u2019s an awful lot of that!). So can we simply pay attention to thinking? Not necessarily to the content of thinking, but to the process itself as it arises. What we think about is interesting to us, but there is something far more interesting we can learn just in watching, with no motive but to understand. Then it\u2019s possible to catch sight of how thinking arises, how it is endlessly seeking, and how it requires time, past and future, in order to exist at all. I am only pointing at thinking that is not the ordinary and necessary thinking needed to run our daily lives and take care of business – this causes no distress.<\/p>\n If you are very lucky, you might even notice that in such a state of watchfulness, you are actually outside of time, just a warm curious being, attending to what\u2019s there to see within yourself, thus learning and discovering. That’s who you truly are. Now that <\/em>accentuates the negative\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So much of our life is about striving, planning, goal setting and the like. Silly as it may sound, the process of waking up involves none of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussions","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erniethayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erniethayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erniethayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erniethayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erniethayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/erniethayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erniethayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erniethayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erniethayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTo watch with such a quality of warm curiosity is highly intelligent, and leads to intelligent responses, like ending \u201cme\u201d as the operating system of your life. Whoa! <\/p>\n