One morning I woke up with a noisy head.
I had all these imagined things I just “had” to do. They included things like ‘go to jiujitsu’, ‘study the Quran’, ‘work on your business’, ‘work out at home’. As I sat quietly after prayer, I noticed that I was stuck in the illusion that doing any or all of these things would make me a better person, and eventually I’d feel better if I did them. And, if I didn’t do them, I’d be a bad person and eventually, I’d feel bad about myself. I could tell I was feeling a bit stress-y – as if all my wellbeing depended on how much or how well I would manage to do these things.
One by one, as I sat with a quiet mind, I started to realise that none of these activities could give me anything or do anything for me. I wouldn’t actually feel any better for them, and they wouldn’t actually make me any better of a person than I am right now. They were all just sources of ‘internal noise’ – things for me to unnecessarily over-think about.
I had been caught, yet again, in the “I’ll be happy when…” ego trap.
One by one, as each illusion dropped in the light of awareness, my mind became more and more quiet, until I was almost buzzing with joyful appreciation of how beautiful life already is, without it needing any intervention from us.
However quiet your mind is right now, it’s good to know that it can become infinitely more quiet. There are infinite depths to this quietude, to this presence.
It’s like back in the day when you would put the radio or TV on and listen, not noticing the static beneath the words… until you would finally get a clear signal and all the static clears up, making everything sound so much better. You really didn’t notice how much static there was, until it was all gone.
I have no doubt that my mental static clearing up this morning, and all these realisations and this new-found quietude was a knock-on effect from a few days earlier, when we had a very powerful Inside-Out Mastermind session. We uncovered that there are actually infinite levels of presence.
The amount of quietude you experience in your own mind is not set. It can increase beyond what you have known is possible.
In order to attain this, you do not need to leave the country and go on a meditation retreat. You don’t need to go to Mecca. In fact, you don’t need to do anything or go anywhere.
The more deeply you realise that your entire experience of life happens through thought in the moment, not some external cause, the more quiet your mind becomes, the less you have to think about, and the more connected you become with the divine.
