Stop - The Power Of Self-inquiry

The thoughts of your mind follow sight and sound. But what is the eye of your mind? What is the ear of your mind? Join Kosi as she discusses the power of self-inquiry to discover the source of all thought.

Transcript

The power of inquiry is really the gift of Ramana Maharshi,

The power to stop,

The power to see deeper inside yourself and the profound clarity that arises as the fruit of your own inquiry into the source of all thought.

So what is the nature of thought,

What is the nature of mind and ego and why is it easy to say that you can see through mind and ego but the reality in your life is a much much different experience.

The mind follows sight and sound.

Sight and sound is what takes you out into the world,

Out into the endless stories that you weave in your mind.

So the sight of your mind is what you imagine,

What you remember and what you project into the future and the ear of the mind is the conversation that you have with yourself.

So sight,

Sound,

The eye of the mind and the ear of the mind is what pulls you out into your circumstances,

Into your problems,

Into your fears,

Your emotions,

Sadness,

Anxiety,

Stress and certainly in the world today there are many distractions,

Many global events that can captivate your attention and pull you into the fight,

The fight to be right,

The fight to impose your perspective onto someone else,

The power to project your feelings and emotions on someone else or something like a statue,

Right?

And then you set about destroying what you projected onto whatever.

The power of mind to project is simply potent and immediate and fast.

It's so immediate,

So potent,

So powerful,

The power to project but all thought follows sight and sound,

Sight and sound and the power of inquiry is to stop and turn inward to the source of the mind,

The source of the ear of the mind and the eye of the mind,

Right?

And for the teaching to really have any value for you,

You have to actually apply it in your life.

When you are triggered,

It's actually not a negative thing,

It's an opportunity to inquire who was triggered,

Who is upset,

Who is angry,

Who is fighting,

Who is running,

Who is hiding.

So the key word is stop,

Stop running,

Stop hiding,

Stop fighting,

Stop projecting,

Stop remembering,

Imagining,

Dreaming and look much deeper inside your own heart to discover the source of the ear of the mind and the source of the sight of the mind.

So really take a moment to take that in because if mind is constantly following sight,

The eye of the mind is what you imagine,

What you remember and what you see with your physical eye.

So the aspect of mind that follows sight is both an inner experience and an outer experience.

It's an inner and outer experience.

So what you see triggers thoughts.

If you see someone walking down the street that you know,

You wave and say,

Hey,

How are you?

If you see someone that's a total stranger or looks different from you,

Can evoke fear or a sense of panic.

Are they trouble?

Are they going to hurt me?

Right?

So thought follows physical sight and the internal sight of memory,

Imagination and projection.

So this is really potent,

Powerful aspects of mind that are infused with your genetics and your parabdha karma and vasanas,

Which are unconscious tendencies and all of your conditioning,

What you've been taught.

Racism is taught.

It is not a natural phenomenon.

It's based in fear.

Racism is always based in fear,

Even if it appears as rage or an attack,

A verbal attack or a physical assault.

It's rooted in fear.

This person is different from me.

So the us versus them mentality of ego is the root of all fight,

All wars are rooted in the sense of us versus them,

Me and you,

The other,

Right and wrong,

You know,

The paradoxical nature of life.

So this power to stop and examine is the nature of inquiry.

You can inquire into emotion to discover what is the nature of an emotion and how did that emotion that you are feeling get generated in your own mind.

So the mind is powerful.

It is constantly weaving a story about you based on your circumstances,

Based on your feelings,

Your thoughts and perspectives and points of view.

So the mind follows the thoughts that you have in your mind,

Which is the eye of the mind.

And then the sound of the mind,

The ear of the mind is this internal dialogue about what happened,

Which is always in the past,

Always in the past.

So if you're following your mind to the past,

It is digging in the graveyard of negative emotions.

Even if what you remember is a good time,

Or a time that you were laughing with friends,

Moments of bliss,

It's in the past and is dead.

This is why even the most profound realization must be thrown out,

Erased.

Because the true power of realization is right now,

In this moment,

Not in the past,

And not in the future,

Not a future attainment.

It's not about a future attainment of what you are going to get someday.

Certainly the fruit of inquiry is peace,

Calm,

Clarity,

Profound clarity,

Presence.

And this comes with the willingness to inquire in any moment and every moment,

Any moment and every moment,

To inquire who is seeing this,

Who is the seer,

What sees,

What hears,

What receives the sound of my voice right now.

What is it within you that is receiving this sound?

So really the teaching is very,

Very simple and the application is difficult,

Extremely difficult.

The challenge of a lifetime because the power of mind is so great.

And the agreement between your ego,

Which is the sense of you or the me you feel deep inside,

And your mind,

Which happens faster than the speed of light,

Instantaneously you agree with thoughts that arise in your mind based on inner outer thought.

The inner outer conversation that you're having with yourself and other people,

It pulls you out of the bliss that you are.

So it's no simple thing because this agreement between ego and mind is what generates whatever you're feeling.

If you think a happy thought and agree with that happy thought,

You'll feel happy.

This is why positive affirmations actually work.

It is leveraging the power of your mind to manifest positivity versus negativity.

A positive result comes from positive thinking.

If you're constantly thinking negative things,

What you're doing to yourself is generating negative emotions because you're agreeing with the thoughts in your mind that happen instantaneously.

So these instant agreements must be seen through and the way to see through that is to discover how you suffer.

How does sadness happen?

Does it just happen because of something someone said or someone did?

Or is it what you thought about that circumstance,

What someone said or what someone did that generated the emotion of fear,

Anxiety,

Sadness,

Rage,

The fight,

The fight to be right?

It's very powerful,

The mind and the ego.

And it's rooted in your genetics to survive.

The drive to survive is rooted in this sense of me inside of you and it's that me that agrees with the mind instantaneously.

It can happen so fast that you are not aware how you are creating negative emotions or even happy emotions,

How you are generating it.

It seems like it's coming from outside but it's really the inside story.

It's an inside job,

Right?

So inquiry is really the willingness to take responsibility and the maturity required to take responsibility.

You must develop the maturity to take that responsibility and stop blaming your circumstances on outer things and what the mind thinks about that,

What your mind is thinking about that,

The story that you're weaving in your mind about you and your life and the people in your life and how miserable that can make you.

And it can also make you happy but it doesn't last.

Emotions do not last.

Even if you're incredibly sad and you try to maintain that sadness,

Eventually it will dissipate,

Right?

Like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum,

Crying,

Crying,

Crying.

If you ignore that child,

They cannot maintain that sadness.

And little children will be sad one minute and then laughing hysterically the next.

These very dramatic changes in their perspective,

In their mood.

When you're ruled by your moods and your emotions,

Then you're on this constant roller coaster ride and you're being pulled by the ear of the mind and the eye of the mind,

Right?

Into your troubles,

Into your achievements,

Into your striving,

Into your desires,

The pursuit of pleasure.

But all that stuff falls down when you are willing to stop following the thoughts in your mind,

Whether it's the inner ear or the outer ear or the inner eye or the outer eye of your mind.

So this requires a certain mastery.

If you don't take responsibility,

You will always be a slave to your mind.

And ego and the agreements that happen so quickly in a flash,

In a flash you can go from being happy to really upset.

Somebody said something bad about you and then you instantly weave a story about that and you feel worse and worse and worse.

So the nature of inquiry is stop.

Stop and see for yourself.

What is the mind?

Where do your thoughts come from?

What is thought?

Right?

What is a thought?

And what is it infused with?

Right?

So thought and consciousness are infused together.

And if you're not aware of how your thoughts and how the eye of the mind and the ear of the mind are generating your suffering,

Then you're just constantly on this roller coaster of ups and downs and more and more stories until you really get tired of it.

And you really hear these words on a deeper level and stop.

Stop telling the story about what happened yesterday or what might happen in the future.

What happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow.

And give your attention to this moment right now.

This is where the clarity is.

The presence of your heart is clear,

Pure,

Conscious awareness.

And the more you give your attention to the pure conscious awareness right now,

The more you surrender to now and stop following the gyrations of your mind,

The inner and outer movements of mind,

The happier and happier you will naturally be.

Now is eternal happiness.

The past is dead.

And reprocessing the past does nothing for you except generate more emotion.

So when you give your attention to the past,

It generates emotions.

If you give your attention to the future,

It generates emotions.

Now is free of that polarity.

Now is always free of that polarity.

Now is always free of that polarity.

Now is free of the ear of the mind,

The sight of the mind.

But you have to be willing to stop and inquire.

Inquire into the who is thinking,

Who is agreeing,

Who is fighting,

Who is running,

Who is hiding,

Who is sad,

Who is angry,

Who is this who?

This is not to create a new identity of the enlightened one,

The masterful one,

The special one.

That is not the purpose of inquiry.

It's really to see through the illusion of the past and the illusion of the future and ultimately the illusion of you.

This is the purpose of inquiry.

It's an energy that reveals the energy that you are.

But the veil of your mind is thick.

The vasanas,

The vasanas that are unconscious,

Things that you're not aware of,

Can only be addressed through rigorous inquiry.

To face yourself,

To look in the mirror and stop blaming everyone else and recognize how you are generating your own emotions,

How your mind is weaving a story about the past and wanting to fight to be right about it.

This is the genetic nature of mind.

The genetic mind is the movement to fight,

To push against,

To survive or to run away or hide or seduce,

To get what you want or to get what you think you need.

So the essence of inquiry is to stop and be quiet and intimately examine what is going on inside of you.

How did sadness happen?

How did anger happen?

How did the fight happen?

And stop deeply,

Intimately stop.

Stop telling the story.

Stop the fight.

Stop the running.

Stop the hiding.

Stop the violence.

Stop the fear and the anxiety by looking within your own heart.

Now is pure presence.

Now is clarity.

And the more you realize this on deeper and deeper levels,

The more the vasanas burn,

The karma burns in the willingness to stop.

And this is not always easy,

Especially when you're triggered by someone and you want to prove you're right.

You know you're right and your perspective is right,

So you want to fight.

This impulse to fight is very strong.

It's genetically strong.

So you have to be willing to stop and burn in the impulse,

Not suppress.

Suppressing is tamping down the emotion and acting out as pushing against or fighting.

So in between those two extremes is the burn,

The willingness to stay still,

To not move,

To turn the other cheek,

Which is not easy when you're triggered.

But when you're triggered,

It's a gift because you can look within,

You can stop and say,

Who was triggered?

What happened?

What am I thinking?

What am I agreeing with?

What am I imagining?

What am I remembering?

What am I projecting onto someone else or something else?

The power of mind to project is huge.

And it can happen so quickly,

You don't even realize that you are projecting your own thoughts and emotions onto something or someone else.

So really self-inquiry is kind of reeling things back in,

Like a fishing line,

If you throw out a fishing line and you slowly reel it in,

You're catching the fish,

Right?

Or hopefully catching the fish if you're a fisherman,

Right?

So you're reeling it in,

You're reeling in your thoughts.

They always lead you out into a story,

Whether it's the ear,

The outer ear of the mind or the inner ear of the mind or the inner outer eye of the mind.

It's the story you weave about what you're perceiving with your five senses and what you perceived in the past and what might happen in the future based on your own perception.

So you can see the complexity of this.

The emotions can be very strong.

The fight to be right can be all-consuming,

Seeking revenge,

Seeking to avenge.

This is a powerful movement of mind.

So real change in the world actually comes from the willingness to be still,

The willingness to tell yourself the truth,

The willingness to look in the mirror,

Because the push against,

If you're fighting for peace or if you're fighting for change,

You actually turn into what you're fighting against and there is no peace and there is no change in that movement of mind against.

But when you're willing to stand as now,

In now,

For now,

Not accepting the negativity of the world,

Not a passivity,

But the dynamic moment of now,

Pure presence,

Affects global change.

Stillness is the evolutionary spark that leads to peace,

Freedom,

Love,

And compassion for yourself and everyone.

Be still.

Discover that stillness.

Stop and inquire now,

Right now.

Look in the mirror and see the light that is shining through your face.

You are that light.

You are that eternity.

Om shanti shanti shanti om.

Reviews

Thank you for this. Interrupting the agreement between thoughts and ego is the key concert for me. Very helpful. But even when presence emerges as truth and we rest in being, there is work to be done in this world. Continuing to rest in being while undertaking the work is the challenge. 🙏

loved this talk. great reminder about thoughts creating emotions. worth another listen. 🙏

I hear the words of truth from the awakened consciousness. Very clear and direct. Beautifully done.