Spiritual Teachings
The ancient dictum”know thyself”points towards essence, your Individuality. Your name, nationality, religion, your opinions, political views, material possessions, likes and dislikes, desires, fears, ambitions, as well as your view of yourself as a success or failure, good or bad — in fact your entire personal history and your thought processes… all that is content. All content is subject to the law of impermanence (as the Buddha already discovered 2600 years ago), and if you try to discover who you are within the dimension of content, you will encounter frustration again and again. Or, as the Buddha put it, you will suffer. You suffer because you derive your sense of identity exclusively from the content of your life.
Everyone wants to be an individual. Awareness of Being is self-realization. Awareness of Being is true happiness.
The core of the spiritual teachings lies the simple practice of living in the present moment. It is true, of course, that everybody already lives in the present moment, but unfortunately they haven’t noticed, and they pretend that past and future are more important than now. In reality, your entire life unfolds in the space of now. Nothing exists outside of the now. That is also the quickest way beyond identity. Thinking about past and future keeps feeding the ego. Past and future have no existence except as thought forms in your mind, and when you become conscious of the present moment, all the old structures of your mind cease to operate. The mind is then no longer your master, but your servant. A new state of consciousness arises: Presence, Individuality. Instead of denying the now — which is ultimately the ego’s denial of life — you accept it, acknowledge it, make it your friend instead of your enemy. When you live in alignment with the now, you embody peace, but you also embody power, the power of life itself. It goes deeper than happiness.
