Balance



The Way of Balanced Life. True balanced inner work includes:
STRUGGLE, ACCEPTANCE and SEPARATION.
Struggle (will, effort, aspiration) produces change in the sense of evolution.
Acceptance (tolerance, equanimity, submission) partially removes the desire to change from the effort to change.
Separation (awareness, consciousness, non-attachment) partially removes the sense of self from the effort to change.



The True Self is beyond consciousness and time. A recurring mistake of modern self appointed teachers, not themselves deeply trained by a true teacher, is to overvalue the quiet state that arises when thoughts are stopped.
Whole systems are then devised from the subconscious thoughts, feelings and actions that arise in this state. This mistake is signaled when people talk endlessly of 'consciousness' and the 'present', of 'witnessing' and of 'being present'. This sense of over viewing separation is a relatively passive brain state, hiding within it the ego itself. The ego does not die and reappear when thought is stopped or resumed. Neither does the Deep Mind (Real Self) manifest or disappear with the cessation of thought or its resumption. In the same way neither body stillness nor emotional inactivity can cause the ego to fade and the Deep Mind to arise.
No old wise teacher I have ever met has seen the state of no thought, no movement or no emotion, as more than an elementary stage through which we must quickly pass. These are partial methods that have a place in a larger scheme of training, best directed by those who have themselves been transformed over many decades by this same deep process.

Ramana Maharshi: "You are realised even now, but you mistake your present consciousness for the Real Self."


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