"All the ways you define yourself have no reality whatsoever."

 -Adyashanti, Being Rooted in Reality

 

If you're like most dentists you wholly identify with what your mind tells you that you are. You see the world as the mind tells you it is. Your mind attributes your struggles and disappointments to something outside of yourself - to other people, to other situations, to all sorts of external influences. Your mind tell you that your struggles and disappointments at work, relationships, health, are caused by life not going the way you want. You're dissatisfied because your mind tells you you're not the person you want to be.  You're caught by your mind. You're trapped in your mind.

 

For most, your mind makes up your total consciousness. Another consciousness, such as spiritual consciousness, is fiercely resisted by the mind. The mind's job is to not lose its job and its job is to protect the identity it's made up about you. To defend the "I, me, my."

 

For most, the mind determines how you see the world. It determines how you relate to others, yourself and the world around you. The mind holds you as separate, an individual, apart, a distinct object in a sea of objects. To do this the mind fashions you as an ego.

 

Your ego is simply a fiction of your mind.  Your ego is your sense of self, your concept of yourself, your image of yourself. You don't realize your ego is a fiction of your mind created by circular patterns of thinking, thoughts that continuously recur - a closed loop system protecting itself. One of my spiritual teachers calls it the 'egoic mind.'

 

You spend little if any time being a witness to your mind. Water to the fish, air to the bird, mind to you. The mind's continuous conversation, a constant 'talk-a-thon,' is made up of judgments, assessments, evaluations, explanations, stories, conclusions, decisions and opinions. Defining you. Defining others. Telling you what to do. Telling you what not to do. Telling you how or how not to do it.

 

In some Zen traditions you do meditative practices which train you to control the mind; breathing, labeling, focusing on objects. But when you look, this is not real meditation, it is focused concentration. It's like putting a gag on someone to have them stop talking. Soon as you take off the gag, they blather. Soon as you complete this kind of meditation, the mind comes back in 'spades.'

 

Real meditation is 'letting go.' Not trying to trick the mind, control the mind or focus the mind. But rather a way of simply letting the mind alone, letting go and noticing what else arises. And since your identity and your ego reside in the mind, what arises is what we all seek and that is spiritual consciousness, oneness, unity. But what it takes to 'let go' to where the mind does not rule is frightening and it takes real courage since it is a place you rarely if ever let yourself go before.

 

And when you let go, you are not your thoughts, you are not your beliefs, you are not your feelings. You simply are the awareness of what occurs before your thoughts, beliefs and feelings. And it's being this awareness, the awareness that precedes thinking, believing or feeling that is the revelation of meditation.