Where is this peace they keep talking about?

Tranquility and peace is quite hard to find if you keep looking outside for it. In fact I don't think you can find it outside. One has to start looking at what causes the disturbances that prevent peace. One of the things I keep coming back to is this thing called the mind, or more specifically the 'ego', or in yogic terms the 'ahamkara', the thinking faculty.

I keep referring to this part of the mind as the conditioned part of the mind. This presupposes that there may be an unconditioned part of the mind, is there an unconditioned part of the mind? Well here we have to resort to the yoga texts and ask what it is that may lay beyond or behind the 'ego'.

In my experience it is silence or the 'void' that we look into, that lies behind the ego. Without the chattering ego there is silence or what is known as 'the void'.

Now poor old Joe Bloggs is used to this companion along the way. The chattering mind is always reassuring him or chastising him for this that or the other. In some psychological references it is known as the internalised parent or child or tyrant etc. But what we know in yoga is that it is the thinking part of the mind. That is enough to know surely!

Once we realise that this is a conditioned element to our being human, we can maybe start to ponder the idea of changing something. Where do we start? It is such a huge job, or is it?

'You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack!' Talking Heads. Once in a lifetime.

One day, and I'm sure it must happen to most people at some point in your life you may wake up and think, 'What the hell am I doing with my life?". Indeed you may wake up and say to yourself, 'I am very happy with my life and the way things are'. Who is it that is saying these things, is it you? Is it the 'real you'? Is there a real you?

Here we arrive at the old chestnut of self-enquiry which I touched on in the last blog. If you are not interested in 'enlightenment' yet, and there is no reason to suppose that you 'should' be, then what are you interested in? What do you want? These are very important questions.

The problem for me throughout my young life was that I had an uncanny knack for seeing through the complications of life. I saw people struggling and I used to wonder why that just didn't do what they wanted. When I proposed this theory to my elders I was told it was selfish to do what you want. This confused me and I thought because my elders knew better that I 'must' be wrong. And so I began to mis-trust my instinctual feeling of living a simple life. Without going into too much detail, I knew that there 'must' be something more than living a life of struggle and toil, and becoming miserable because of it.

Well here we are now and we are maybe seeing hopefully that the causes of our problems are of our own making. Through the conditioning of our own mind we are living a life of habitual responses more or less. The bookshelves in the local health food shop are full of this stuff!

By sitting and breathing in and out through both nostrils we will start to see our condition. It is usually shown to us in the form of discomfort and pain, physical, mental and emotional. Ouch!

'what am I gonna do about that?' you may say.

I've never met anyone that said they thought doing yoga was easy.

Yoga in the interface of the so-called conscious mind with the so-called unconscious mind.

As you look into yourself you will find good bits and not so good bits about yourself, in other words parts of yourself you like and parts you don't like. The HA (sun) and the THA (moon) of Ha-tha (union), the union of opposites.

Is Yoga or 'Union' or 'Yoking' or 'Bringing-Together' or even 'Integrating', what you really want to be doing? Or would you rather be somewhere else? Be honest with yourself. Once you have decided then get on with bringing into manifestation the thing that you really want, make a commitment to it and see where you get to.