To really enter into peace is to die. Not a physical death, but the death of the mental and emotional identity with which we have been masking who we really are for years.
How does this death of the busy mind with its ceaseless thought and the emotionally reactive person we think we are come about?
Our old identity—our false self—dies to the degree that we listen to our true identity and choose to follow it.
The choice is often painful because it is such an unfamiliar way of conducting our lives. It really is like dying.
What has seemed so familiar—all we know ourselves to be—is let go of.
There really is nothing alien to us in this death. After all, we have all been experiencing little deaths all through life. We died to the womb to come into the world. We died to the cradle to crawl on the floor. We died to crawling in order to stand.
The whole of our life long, we are giving up one state in order to move into a more advanced state. Each stage of life is a renegotiation of how we approach life.
The infant doesn’t approach life in the way a young boy or girl of eight or nine does. The eight or nine-year-old doesn’t approach life the same way as a teen beginning to experience romance.
Until the day we depart this Earth, we will be renegotiating how we approach the experiences we are having. We will be dying, over and over, only to rise to a new level of consciousness.
So death is really quite familiar to us, and always it leads into a new state of being that’s more fully “us.”
To enter into the peace that’s already at our center, we are asked to choose between our inner knowing—that felt state of presence, which is the sound of sheer silence, a deep stillness—and the busy voices of thought and emotion.
Each time we choose merely to observe the busyness in our head, instead of thinking that this is who we are, as if it were our identity—as if it were a “problem”—thoug..ht and emotional reactivity lose their grip on us. We die a little.
As the old recedes, the new begins to come through, until it’s loud and clear. It has become our moment-..by-moment reality.
~ David Robert Ord ~
Posted by: LINELLA BRECKENRIDGE
Comments
Post a Comment