Joe

The Untethered Soul

May 3, 2021
, 12:29 pm

In the following video you'll learn to dwell in the present moment and let go of painful thoughts and memories that keep us from achieving happiness and self-realization.

Animated Summary by Philosphize Now

Key Takeaways

1. You are that underlying awareness

If I ask you the question, “who are you?” you might answer with something like I’m Jill or I’m Jack, but that is a very simple answer and it’s not the true reflection of who you are.

You want a much deeper look into who you actually are.

Here is a thought experiment to find out which parts of ourselves are essential to our existence.

Close your eyes and imagine you are in a room with a bunch of people and a piano.

So the first thing let’s see if we are the objects are on us. So obviously if I take away the piano you would have no problem with that. It’s just a piano. It’s got no relation to you.

If I take away other people you should be fine with that too. You’d be like I don’t mind being alone every now and then

Okay, so let’s take away all outside objects, even though everything is now gone you would still exist. You might be a bit afraid or angry that there’s nothing around you, but YOU would still exist.

What about if I take away your name?

Well, most people would be fine with that. It’s just a name anyway. You could change your name and you’d still be the same person.

So we know nothing outside ourselves. So let’s look inside, first…Let’s look at your emotions.

If we took away all your emotions, would you still exist?

I’m sure you can think back to a time when you had no emotions and you still existed and also the act that you can feel the emotion means there’s someone that’s feeling it.

This ability to observe things is known as a subject, object relationship and you can only have a subject, object relationship to something that is separate from oneself.

What about if I take away your thoughts?

Although some might be difficult to imagine, but this one also involves the subject, object relationship we just mentioned.

You can see your thoughts, so therefore they must be separate from you.

I’m sure everyone’s had a time when they were so focused on activity that no thoughts were entering their head, and you still existed, which means that thoughts are also not who we are

So now that we have removed all the aspects of yourself that aren’t your true self, what is left?

Is this awareness that you exist and this is the true answer to the question?

2. Learn to control your inner roommate

So who’s this in a room a tree talking about?

Well, this is that voice inside your head. If you’re not sure about which voice I’m talking about, try saying hello inside your head. It’s that voice.

The first reason why you would like to control this voice is because this voice prevents you from enjoying any moment fully.

Imagine you are walking through a beautiful forest and while you’re walking you realize that you’re not sure if you switched off the stove back at the log cabin.

Now instead of enjoying this beautiful walk through the forest, your mind is preoccupied with whether or not you left the stove on and you don’t get to enjoy fully the beautiful surroundings.

Then after all this worry, when you get back to the log cabin you find the stove was turned off.

So many times the mind worries about things that never happen and waste all this energy on stuff that never actually occurs.

So this is why you need to be able to control your thoughts so that you can fully enjoy those special moments, but also be able to think when you need it.

3. It is impossible to control the outside world. So focus on controlling your inner world

Tom he goes for a walk one day and falls, and a big thorn gets stuck inside his arm. This thorn causes a lot of pain when Tom does certain things.

He has two options here:

Option 1 Would be to remove the thorn and then he could carry on with his life as he pleases.
Option 2 Which is what most people do, is to adjust the whole life around this pain and avoid any situations which creates this pain.

The thorn in this example represents our emotions.

For example loneliness: people will design their whole life around preventing this emotion arising by always being with friends or out in places where other people are. They designed their whole life around avoiding the feeling of loneliness.

So how do we control our inner world and pull out the thorn?

The first step is in understanding what causes negative emotions.

Negative emotions occur when events happen or people act differently to our expectations.

If we then suppress these emotions, this creates a blockage and this blockage then has the possibility of returning when a similar event occurs in the future.

The trick is to allow the emotions to occur and not try to suppress them. This will then not leave any blockages which could recur in the future.

When you have these emotions, do not feel guilty. Just accept it. Otherwise, you’ll just be trading one emotion for another emotion.

The practical way to apply these techniques is to start with something small.

First start with the smaller emotions, such as being cut off in traffic or being late for work, and then work your way up to bigger and bigger events until no event causes you to create a blockage in your system.

Once you can handle any event that happens in your life, then you can start truly enjoying life without the worry of your things not happening the way you expect them to.

4. Use death as a tool for growth instead of fearing it

Most people do know that death could happen at any moment, but we have this false sense of security that it would not happen to us. That allows us to do things which we don’t like or to postpone our desires indefinitely.

So what you do is to remind yourself of the impermanence of this life and use this knowledge to motivate yourself to do the things in life you wish to do. If anything did happen to you, you would have no regrets.

Joe