Everyone loves to be in the company of someone who is deep, and no one likes the company of a shallow person. Since we have to live with ourselves everyday, and we take our mind with us wherever we go, we have to connect to our own depth of consciousness to be really happy with ourselves.
Much of our life is spent living on the surface level. From there we cannot see beyond ourselves. When we are living for the satisfaction of our ego, our life is very unfulfilling even if we fulfill all our ego goals. We need to slow down the racing mind so that it stops making so much noise. Often the answers to our questions are right in front of us, but we don’t see them because we are blinded by our ego.
Ego blinds us and ego binds us. It ties us down to our daily routine of self-gratification, frustration, annoyance, blame, and shame. All of these negative experiences exist on the surface only. We need to look deeper to find the cause of our unhappiness and instability. If our happiness is unstable we are definitely going to be insecure. We cannot secure happiness and peace of mind by following the whims of our mind or the dictates of our ego. So long as we are driven by selfish ego-motives, we will remain in self-delusion.
Beneath the ordinary state of consciousness lies our subconscious mind. These two: the ordinary conscious mind and the subconscious mind determine the experiences of all ordinary people. Deeper than these states of mind, and beyond them, is the super-conscious state. When the mind is connected to the state of Pure Consciousness, this is called the super-conscious state of mind.
To establish the mind in the superconscious state requires work. It does not happen by osmosis; in other words, it doesn’t just happen on its own. We need to practice the state of super consciousness. This means we need to:
- Practice being peaceful
- Practice being compassionate
- Practice being a good listener
- Practice inner quietude
- Practice self-control
- Practice patience
- Practice simplicity
- Practice, practice, and practice
We become deep when we practice the depth of consciousness; we do not become deep by just hearing about it or reading about it.
The depth of consciousness is the state of Being. When we are in the core of our being, we are in our center and we are balanced. We lose our balance only when we are off center. A human being who is uncentered is living on the surface level and is shallow. We cannot be happy when we are shallow, because shallowness is not our real nature. Shallowness is the nature of a mind left unattended. When the mind is left to do whatever it wants to do, it is not going to do what it needs to do. We need to tend to our mind the way a gardener tends to his garden.
We need to keep our boundaries to protect our life. If our mind has no boundaries we will not be able to save ourselves from our own ego. People become insane only because they haven’t sanitized their own mind. Our sanity is rooted in our inner balanced state. When we lose our center we lose our balance, and when we lose our balance we lose our sanity.
The way to stay balanced is to center our mind on the wisdom of consciousness. We do this by being in the company of the Wise, attending satsang (wisdom-gatherings), self-study and introspection (inner-inspection), and performing all our duties in the spirit of dispassion. Dispassion means: compassion without any attachment. Dispassion is a state of being; it is NOT a state of disinterestedness, lack of concern, or other form of false detachment.
Dispassion is the quality of a deep human being. The depth of consciousness is characterized by dispassion. The depth of consciousness can only be known through the practice of dispassion. OM