Weekly Health/Inner Development Post: Number 12: Mental Experiment Number 1

• Sit down

• Close your eyes

• Observe your thoughts and feelings flowing by like clouds in your head (events of the day, memories, emotions, etc)

• Now ask yourself ´who am I´?

• The mind will say ´me´

• Ask yourself again ´who am I´?

• The mind will say ´me´

• Now realize you are observing the thoughts ´who am I´ and ´me´

• This means you are not these thoughts, because you are observing them

• This is the observer position (basic awareness/mindfulness practice)

• Every time you are caught in thoughts, ask yourself ´who am I´, and bring your attention back to the observer/witness mode

• After a while of being in this observer mode of your thoughts, you start noticing something (depending on how identified with thinking you are, but usually after a couple of days)

• You realize you start identifying less with the thoughts and the ´me´

• You start feeling a void, or tingly feeling, or space around your mind, thoughts, and body

• Stay with this feeling

• Ask yourself ´who is feeling this tingly feeling or space´

• Mind will say ´me´

• Bring your attention back to that tingly feeling/space around you

• After doing this regularly a couple of days, you will notice being a lot less identified with thinking, your small sense of self (the ´I´, or ´me´), and feel a floating relaxed feeling

• Now every time you sit down, stay with this feeling

• Allow this feeling to dissolve into a void or nothingness (follow it down as a spiral)

• If you get caught in thinking again, go back to the ´who am I´/observer part

• Dissolve into this floating feeling of void or nothingness

• You are now basically not in your mind and body anymore

• Congrats, you now realized you are in essence not your mind and body, while paradoxically you also are your mind and body. You are everything and nothing. Doing this mental experiment gives a glimpse of the ´unity experience´ mentioned so often in transcendental and spiritual writings, but experiencing it is the only way to verify this yourself

• Regular practice/repetition will lessen the identification with thoughts, the ´me´, the ´I´, and all the daily noise in your head, while in time providing a first step towards the realization of the unity of all things

• Reading words does nothing. Practice leads to results with these kind of experiments and practices