You will notice a repetitive theme throughout this book. This is no secret although it might be to some. If I gave you the answer you would say I “got it” then move on then forget again and again. There is nothing to “get” from this book. If anything it is to “forget”. So if you are chasing an answer and hoping to get something from it you are reading the wrong book. If you wanna study the history of yoga, then read books on yoga history. I’m less interested in the history of yoga and I’m more interested in the embodiment of yoga. Through embodiment it becomes practical and relative to anything I involve myself in. It becomes fundamental in me, not superficial. I don’t have to talk about it, I am it. (*unless of course you are teaching it, yet it still can become superficial and hypocritical if not embodied in teaching.) By studying history it fills my mind with jargon. Then I end up repeating jargon that I have little understanding of. I become a clone of something else to give me the illusion of smart. I am not diminishing history, I believe it’s very important and a great road map. But I want to emphasize what I believe lacks emphasis. Freedom from thought offers capacity to become independent thinkers and actors. Freedom from thought is an act of faith. I will get cheap here and use a quote from Einstein to reiterate my point. “I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me. We think of silence as a passive pursuit. I am not indicating to take a nap. Or daydreaming, which is a form of thinking or imagining. Inevitably your mind will drift into the dream state when it has “nothing” to be with. But can our minds get to utter stillness or silence? The dream state or thinking state is a superficial form of silence. You can go sit in a quiet room by yourself and have superficial silence. And you can in a room full of loud people and have fundamental silence. The former is a change in your external environment. The ladder is a change in your internal environment. I’m interested in what is totally 100% in my control. Everything else is nonsense. To develop the capacity for silence fundamentally and internally gives me complete control of no matter where I am or who I am with. All this requires is my forgiveness of my thoughts, ideas, images, rational, etc… I am aware that I have my ego, which consists of all that, yet I am totally comfortable without it. I can be completely with what is. I have developed the capacity to surrender and in that I’ve created mental space. Something new, fresh, and spontaneous may develop from this space. People panic because they are scared of death. Death to their ego. So they never live freely.
We are so task orientated, that we are always seeking something to get something from it. It starts in school. I do this and get that grade. The incentive that others create for us is the reason we end up working. We chase the incentive. I will work hard all week then reward myself on the weekend. We are chasing the weekend, we are chasing vacation, we are chasing $. This leads to a monotonous, robotic, scripted way of living. We are living towards the outcome. We are working to get to the end. Because this is what we were told. It’s now in our mental programming, it’s all we know. So we just do what we know. We are lost “not knowing”. My mission in this book is for you to become familiar and confident in that area of not knowing. This doesn’t mean throw your hands up in the air and say “ah screw it.” This means to be okay not knowing, but interested in finding out what is true. Creating that room in your head, or mental space, in my experience has improved my understanding of abstract and big overused terms such as LOVE, GOD, HIGHER POWER, UNIVERSE or whatever silly language you wanna use. I’m diminishing the name only because I’m less interested in the words, opinion, and imaginations and I’m more interested in the sensation that those words are attempting to describe. The word cannot possibly describe it. Yet we use these words so fecklessly and with no integrity. Our attempts to use simple words become lazy and without integrity. To be able to sense or feel something, without a quick interruption of a word, image, or memory is to develop one’s intuition. Your authenticity doesn’t come from your memory. It develops from your intuition. Memory is a condition that has been created from your past. This development of mind just like any other muscle, and easily the most important muscle we have, has to constantly be worked. And worked in a balanced and functional manner. Thought is only a component of our mind. It is a material component. We lack the awareness to exercise the other area of our mind that has no thought. This is effective and leads to love of work. Other times this is ineffective and it leads to robotic and mechanical work that has no love and becomes a chore. We become mice on a hamster wheel. And be back to your limiting ways of thinking and living. Approximately 90% of the time (I kind of made that percentage up) I am speaking in diametric terms. You ask why? Because that “secret” is your capacity to bring your mind from a place of knowing to unknowing. From the unknowing, the uncultivated, we free ourselves of thoughts, past conditioning, limiting beliefs, etc and open our mind to possibility. To surrender is to cease resistance. How much mental resistance do we create just to get out of bed? Our thoughts tell us we’re still tired and many other things. This is all a form of resistance. What would it feel like to be able to use and guide your thoughts rather than like most of us our thoughts use us? One of the problems is we lack a definite purpose. So we change our thoughts based on what is convenient. Your purpose and your intentions are up to you. My goal is for you to live more in that space between the known and the unknown. The known is everything you can explain. The unknown is what you cannot explain. Since we can’t explain something we usually just move on and our brains atrophy and our intuition suffocates. What makes a person authentic is their unusual and unique way of expressing themselves. And how you express yourself it’s based on how you view the world. If you live in thoughts and images in your head all day, you are living from a limited area of your mind. Your authenticity arises not from the past, but exists in the present. The past is known. The present or eternal now is constantly and always right now. The more comfortable you become stretching the more you’ll risk taking a leap of faith and therefore the more excitement your life will bring. Like a child that is excitable and curious to learn about its environment. The thing that makes you forget about yourself, is the thing that brings love. Although our personal experiences and external conditions may be different, our underlying experiences are the same. We are swallowed by the emotions of being human – joy, sadness, grief, delight, anxiety, depression and all the rest. These emotions exist in us all. My goal is to expose these emotions and to create an opening to fall deeper into these emotions, in order to improve our relationship to them. This does not mean to create stories or narratives around them, which is too common and lacks sense. The story and identification we create is something of the head or the psyche. We are interested in getting closer to the objective emotion, without our opinions around them. When you have a strong connection with raw emotion, you have new found energy. How you lead will become genuine. Not scripted and robotic. Some of the philosophies that have inspired me stem from most notably zen buddhism (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind), my past yoga teacher/teachers, J. Krishnamurti, among many other people that could not possibly all be named. Catholicism is my upbringing and through more practical understanding of spirituality, especially through yoga and eastern rooted philosophies I have developed a vastly improved relationship with Catholicism. However I don’t claim to be anything and chose to remain independent yet respectful of all traditions. I am attempting to take mysticism, spirituality, religion, philosophy and roll it into a book that is serious and pragmatic yet playful. This book’s mission is to do 3 things: break us from limiting thoughts, reveal potential, and inspire us to take action in your pursuit of anything worthwhile. If you break something, it creates separation. When a container breaks the inside is revealed. When you can see what was once dark you become a light to yourself. Possessing self knowledge will allow you to inspire yourself. When you can inspire yourself, inspiring others will require no effort. You will lead, in anything you do, with great originality.
