Objectivity Is A Spiritual Muscle

The ability to become objective to your thinking mind is a spiritual muscle that grows with exercise. When I went to the gym to lift weights last year for the first time in many many years I did not leave the gym with any obvious gain. My muscles did not show the slightest sign of growing strength but the process of growing strength and tone had begun. How do I know? Because eventually I would come to see the improvement. The continuing exercise accumulated and the results began to show up.

Exercising objectivity to your mind is spiritual exercise that does not usually appear to show any meaningful improvement at first, but with continued exercising the benefits accumulate and one day you will discover that you are gaining control over morbid or incessant thinking and feeling and have developed growing ability to control your emotions and thinking so that you respond less and less to the thoughts and thinking you do not agree with, and more and more to what you know to be right.

In his book "A New Earth" Eckhart Tolle points out a couple of wonderful little spiritual exercises that I have recently begun to incorporate into my daily life with wonderful results. He speaks of God as silence and stillness, which many of us know already, but he also speaks of God as the "no thing" out of which all form, all material things come. For example, sound could not be but for the silence...the "no sound" that surrounds it. A room could not be but for the space, the "nothingness" that allows the room and its contents to be.

So here are the little meditations one can incorporate into ones daily life that will help you grow in ability to come out of your mind and grow more into the Aware Self you are meant to be. I will tell you about them by way of example. This morning, when I awoke and began to look at my mind as is my practice, I also began to listen to the morning birds singing. And what I began to notice was the silence between the notes...the space between the refrains the birds sing. Birds sing a kind of melody of notes, then silence, then more song and if one pays attention to the silences between the notes one finds oneself very quiet and still within as you pay attention to the silence without. You can not be aware of silence and be in your thoughts at the same time.

Also, in the same way that one can be aware of silence, one can also become aware of the space between things. I do this often at the gym while on the stair climber, but it can be done anywhere and at anytime. At the gym I tend to look around with big room whirling with machinery and people exercising, but I pay attention more to the big open space the machines and people are in. I look at the distance of space between the walls, between the machines, between the TV's on the wall, between the huge hanging ceiling lights, between all the people inside the room. I look at the space between my eyes and the digital read-out of the machine I'm on. I look outside the big windows into the sky and see the space that makes the building possible, the space between the building and the trees, between the branches of the trees. And again, like listening to the silence between noises, one finds that one can not be in ones thoughts and be aware of space, the nothing out of which all things have existence, at the same time. And what ones find in meditating like this, in entering the space and silence outside and between thought, is a marvelous imperturbable, quiet peace and joy that grows in direct proportion to the accumulated objectivity to mind regular spiritual exercise develops. Now how beautiful is that?