Knowing Yourself As The Awareness Behind The Voice Is Freedom

Thoughts cause us misery.

We use to identify ourselves with our thoughts.

Freedom comes when we realize we are not our thoughts.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

Think that there are no random events, nor are there events or things that exist by and for themselves, in isolation.

The atoms that make up your body were once forged inside stars, and the causes of even the smallest event are virtually infinite and connected with the whole in incomprehensible ways.

If you wanted to trace back the cause of any event, you would have to go back all the way to the beginning of creation. The cosmos is not chaotic. The very word of cosmos means order. But this is not an order the human mind can comprehend, although it can sometimes glimpse it.

Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which is always as it is.

There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it. Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts.

The mind is cunning. It is incessantly looking for food for its identity.

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking.

When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice–the thinker–but the one who is aware of it.

Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.

Be the Master Gardener.

James Allen describes this process as becoming the “master gardener” of your soul and the director of your life.

Just as a gardener cultivates his ploy, keeping it free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits which he requires, so may a man tend the garden of his mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts, and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts.

Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bad fruit.