For it is only by observing the ego dispassionately, over and over and over again, that its nature can be significantly revealed. Without direct experience of how limiting its small-mindedness can be, there is no motivation to grow beyond it.
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Just as he had not urged me to jettison my sense of self, he was neither encouraging an empty mind nor recommending meditation simply as a form of rest and repose. He was asking us to use meditation to look into our minds and examine our behavior, to listen to the way we spoke to ourselves and thought about others, and to explore the attitudes we held in our most personal and private thoughts. From his perspective, inner peace is possible only when one has made peace with one’s own mind, when one’s own inner violence has been dealt with. This requires honesty and an internal ethic that is endlessly challenging. Inner peace comes not from turning off the mind, but from deliberately confronting one’s own innermost prejudices, expectations, habits, and inclinations.
In learning to meditate, albeit from some of the best teachers I could find, I came to appreciate that once I understood the basics, I had to teach myself how to do it. I had to take what I had learned, in terms of the formal techniques, and then make it real from the inside. Only then could I begin to appreciate what meditation could and could not accomplish.
Learn how to give loving attention to your whole experience. Open yourself, even to those aspects you would rather do away with. Cultivate equanimity rather than searching for the next peak experience.
Our minds are like children, and mindfulness, like a good therapist or a good-enough parent, “holds” them so that they can grow up and come to their senses. With enough practice, and enough patience, breakthroughs occur. These take many idiosyncratic forms but they are
generally of two types.
On the one hand, there is a loosening of identification with the known self; people see their self-concepts as just concepts that have arisen and accumulated in response to the particular challenges and conditions of their lives but that have no ultimate stigmatizing reality. On the other hand, there is a return to simply “being.” This is set in motion when awareness becomes dominant, when the observing mind becomes stronger than that which is being observed. As this observational capacity develops, a change sometimes occurs. Instead of one part of the mind observing another—“me” watching “myself”—the whole thing collapses and just “is.
We are full of preconceptions about ourselves and are limited by them. The actuality of our being is not something we have an easy time making room for.