…accelerating life journey’s unfolding into FLOW
As the digital world moves faster, AI bots such as perplexity.ai provide accessible information that reveals sources for the bot’s response to a query. This information can bump up against dimly understood personal belief systems that have evolved over decades.
Every sentient being is bound by unconscious habits and limiting beliefs that contribute to personal suffering. These habits and limiting beliefs have typically been programmed by parents, school, media and culture.
The queries that anyone can pose to an AI bot will likely be constricted by these beliefs. These limiting beliefs constrain sentient beings to a circumscribed bubble of living that limits their choices. Meditative reflection, however, can enable a dawning awareness of such beliefs and an increase in their permeability for fresh information and insights.
When faced with a persistent problem, issue or dissatisfaction, a key question for meditative reflection is: For this issue/situation/choice, what are my limiting beliefs?
Consider the classic 9 dot problem as a representative example of limiting beliefs. Draw 9 dots on a piece of paper as if you were going to play tic tac toe with a young child. Your challenge is to connect all 9 dots with four straight lines without picking up your pencil. Let these 9 dots be a temporary visual representation of your limiting beliefs about any goal or problem that you have not yet been able to solve.
The only way to solve the problem is to go outside your limiting beliefs. These are unconscious constraints being imposed on the possible solution. The first few minutes of this video illustrate this problem and the solution.
As busy life journeys continue to unfold, the actual choices for what to eat, do and buy tend to expand. Amidst this busyness with life, it can be enormously helpful to simply relax. Relaxation enables the opening up and expansion of awareness.
This emerging awareness can become strategically useful for exploring beneficial options for improving health, wellness and well-being. Fresh choices can arise within the ever shifting space of awareness.
Thoughts about this and that, feelings about a turbulent history and worries about an uncertain future can occupy a busy mind. Letting go of this mental chatter and entering a state of meditative reflection can bring pure awareness to the front of consciousness. Patient practitioners can emerge beyond meditative reflection into a state of bare attention that has been freed from the limitations imposed by restrictive judgments.
As mental chatter, negative emotions and restrictive beliefs are dissolved, the practitioner can enter into a variety of flow states. These states of temporary freedom can be filled with nano-moments of nonjudgmental awareness. A perceptible knowing can arise that fuses these now moments into a holistic process of living freely within awareness.
This awareness can enable the emergence of what has been called primordial wisdom. This is wisdom that has arisen for all beings who have reached advanced states of mindful awareness.
Primordial wisdom, also known as yeshes in Tibetan Buddhism, is the nondual knowing aspect of the nature of the mind. It is considered to be the source and true nature of all reality and ourselves, and is complete in the mind, speech, and body. Here are some other characteristics of primordial wisdom:
- It is beyond karma.
- It is the fabric of reality itself.
- It is the natural condition of the mind, which is empty, free from conceptual ideas, and primordially pure.
- It is the naked, naturally arising wisdom that has always been enlightened.
- It is the view of the Great Perfection beyond the ordinary mind.
Movement from frenetic uncertain choices into a flow state of mindful awareness is enabled and accelerated by meditation. There are many different forms of meditative practice, but they can be distilled into two basic types: one-pointed concentration and insightful awareness. These are two sides of the same coin of consciousness.
- Concentration techniques and practices involve focusing on a single point of awareness. It can be the breath, an affirmation, a repetitive mantra, even a prayer. The repetition brings conscious awareness to a single point of focus. Combining this practice with movement accelerates the purposeful development of conscious awareness. Repetition cultivates the practitioner’s ability to focus consciousness on single points of awareness and hold it there. This meditative practice complements the other side of the consciousness coin — insightful awareness.
- Insightful awareness involves observing the contents of consciousness as thoughts and feelings arise and dissolve, moment by moment. Sitting quietly and observing the breath cultivates breath awareness, as well as awareness of thoughts and feelings. Letting go of thoughts and feelings as they arise cultivates the ability to notice and then let go of whatever arises in consciousness. This practice deepens awareness of karmic insights about responsibility for this or that. Letting go brings the practitioner back to the present moment of awareness.
Concentration, focus, movement, reflection, noticing and letting go. These are practice components that can foster wisdom awareness. As this knowing of what to do when and how emerges from the chaotic turbulence that surrounds most beings, life become easier and more enjoyable.
Beyond enjoyment of being graced with a precious human life, wisdom brings delightful moments of discovery, synchronicity and serendipity. These are experiential messages that meditative practice is yielding discernible results. These beneficial results strengthen practitioner resolve to explore the nature of their own mind. This solitary journey connects practitioners with the essence of their humanity. The pathways may be varied, but the unfolding processes can often be similar.
- As practitioners come to understand the nature of their own mind, long felt resentments can be dissolved into acceptance for what has transpired in the past.
- Long felt resistance to what is and has been, can be dissolved into ready acceptance of impermanent present moments that continue to arise.
- Long felt confusion about one’s own life journey and nature of mind can be dissolved as wisdom arises to clarify the nature of one’s mind.
- Suffering and struggle with what is can be transformed into wise knowing of how life tends to operate, providing clarifying messages about key issues and yielding guidance for subtle choices in critical moments.
Life can become a wondrous journey toward emergence of the primordial wisdom that is available to all. One pointed concentration can become a solid foundation upon which insightful awareness is built. This insightful awareness enables wiser choices that smooth the often perilous and chaotic human journey towards its inevitable destination.
May that destination be a gentle unfolding into that which awaits.
🙏💕🌎
ib