ESSENTIALS of INNER WORK & LIFE
Presence
Awareness
Consciousness
Observing
Witnessing
Being
Surrender
Love
“Overthinking the essential things of life is not recommended”
— Anonymous
“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains,
but have not love,
I am nothing.”
— The Bible – Corinthians 13:2
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About Inner Work
I wish I could say this is the last time that I’ll be writing about Inner Work (and Life).
But knowing myself, that will probably not happen as long as I am still around.
Unless finally a miracle is going to happen and:
“If it be Your Will, I will speak no more …”
Until that day, I am sure that from time to time I will still remind myself (and maybe you as well) about what is essential to my life.
What do i mean by “Inner Work”
At its simplest, inner work is the willingness to turn attention toward what is happening within us – and to discover what becomes visible when we stop the habit of immediately trying to follow it, act it out or change it.
Inner work does not require a particular belief system.
No special clothes.
No candles or incense.
No Himalayan retreat.
No guru required.
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ESSENTIALS of INNER WORK & LIFE
Presence
I believe that everything real begins with being here & now.
Not yesterday.
Not tomorrow.
Not inside any of the stories that we tend to tell about ourselves.
Here.
Reality is HERE.
Presence means, being here, being now.
Presence is remarkably simple, almost ordinary.
Feeling the chair beneath me. Hearing a sound. Noticing my breath. Seeing what is actually happening in this moment, before the mind turns it into a commentary or a story.
I think that we tend to live most of of our day always one step removed from the actual experience of it. We think about life while life is happening.
Presence closes that gap.
We arrive at the here and now.
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Awareness
Out of presence, awareness arises.
Awareness is presence turned toward itself – the knowing that knows that it knows.
Every thought, sensation and story arises “in” awareness, but awareness itself never becomes a thought, a sensation, or a story.
It’s the screen, never the movie.
I think that we – most people – live entirely inside the film and call the screen “me.”
The first real quantum leap in inner work is not focussing anymore on the content, or working to improve the content of my awareness.
Rather than that it is the recognition that the screen was and is always there, underneath every movie we ever mistook for being our self.
I can be angry and know that I am angry.
I can be afraid and notice that fear is moving through me.
I can have a thought without automatically believing it.
This tiny distinction changes everything.
Awareness creates a little space between what happens and what I do about what happens.
That space is very important and precious, because it is where choice is possible.
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Consciousness
But awareness also raises a deeper question:
What is aware?
If awareness is the knowing, consciousness is the field within which the knowing happens.
Vast, infinite, largely unmapped. Hard to define, harder to put my finger on it.
Consciousness is not produced by the brain, nor the mind.
Where consciousness is located or where it originates is still an open question that scientists and mystic both are asking.
Some call it God, some call it the Tao, some say it is an aspect of the un-name-able.
I think that inner work at its most radical, is an investigation into consciousness conducted using consciousness as the only instrument available.
Thats surely a paradox.
And in my experience, it is a humbling journey.
Good luck, and have fun taking it.
Thoughts appear in consciousness.
Sensations appear.
Memories appear.
Emotions appear.
Even the sense of me appears.
So perhaps consciousness is not merely another thing inside experience.
Perhaps it is the field in which experience appears.
We do not have to solve that mystery of consciousness.
Trying too hard to solve the question of consciousness may be another way of avoiding the experience itself.
Better just to notice.
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Observing
Inner work begins to mature when we become interested in what happens inside us without interfering immediately.
There is anger.
There is sadness.
There is desire.
There is resistance.
There is the little voice that wants to explain everything.
Instead of identifying or wrestling with it, I simply look.
Curiously.
Observation says:
Let me see what this actually is.
And often, simply being seen changes the thing that is being seen.
(Even serious Quantum physicists say so ; )
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Witnessing
I feel that witnessing is a subtle deepening of observing.
The observer in me begins to recognize that experience is not the whole of who I am.
A thought comes and goes.
An emotion comes and goes.
A role comes and goes.
A version of myself appears, lives for a while, and eventually disappears.
Yet something remains present through all of it.
The witness does not judge.
It does not have to improve my personality.
It does not even have to understand.
It simply sees.
There is tremendous freedom in discovering that I can experience something without being completely defined by it.
This is where inner work stops being self-improvement and starts being something closer to an intimacy with existence itself. Including the parts of existence that my personality would still rather not want to acknowledge.
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Being
Eventually all the doing becomes questionable.
Inner work can itself become another project:
I must become more conscious.
I must heal this.
I must transcend that.
I must become a better version of myself.
The spiritual ego is remarkably creative.
At some point we may discover that there is nothing wrong with simply being.
Breathing.
Feeling.
Existing.
Being.
I sense that being is not something we have to achieve.
Perhaps it is what remains when we stop trying so hard to become something.
Being is what remains when the doing finally, fully stops.
Every spiritual tradition that I know of, is pointing at the same mind-blowing fact.
I already am what I am seeking.
And the seeking is often the last thing that stands in the way.
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Surrender
This is the thing most people – me included – bargain with the longest, because it looks very much like loss.
Surrender gets confused with defeat because both involve letting go of control.
Surrender means to open up the grip that we unconsciously have on our life.
Surrender means releasing our insistence that reality must conform to our preferences before we allow ourselves to be at peace with it.
This does not mean that we should stop acting.
Quite the opposite.
We may act more clearly because we are no longer fighting reality at the same time as we are responding to it.
Surrender is the willingness to say:
This is what is here.
Now what?
I am willing and open to be shown.
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Love
And perhaps, underneath all of it, there is love.
Not romantic love.
Not love as a sentiment.
Not some permanent state of pink bliss.
Something much more fundamental.
The felt-sense that arises when presence, awareness, and surrender all come together in the same moment and the separation between self and world dissolves.
Every spiritual tradition that goes deep enough eventually stops talking about methods and practice and starts talking about love.
Not as a virtue to practice but as what’s actually there and has always been there.
It may be the only essential on this list that isn’t a practice at all. It might be what’s left when every practice is finally settled down.
[ I would not dare to define love, but others have done it in beautiful ways. ]
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If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.
And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.c
Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, is not pompous, it is not inflated,
it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury,
it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.f
Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing.
For we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.
At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.
So faith, hope, love remain, these three.
But the greatest of these is love.
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