Spiritual Exercises, Dr. David Hawkins, ACIM, Online Conference, Watching the Mind, Meditation

"The value of watchful witnessing is that even just awareness of an ego defect tends to undo it. By surrender and prayerful invocation, Divine Will facilitates transition from the lesser to the greater for the Self effortlessly supports and energizes intention."

Excerpt from pg. 365: Trascending Levels of Consciousness, Dr. Hawkins

Exercise Seven

March 2nd, 2006

Refer to Dr. Hawkins, Eye of the I, pp. 99, Further Observations; Thought and Ideation, Cassette 1b, 15 minutes in

Watching the Emotions

We are told to surrender our thoughts to God, to surrender everything to The Infinite Creator. It is important to discover that surrendering to Peace and Love and Joy is not a loss, but a gain. Once we know this, no one need prod us or encourage us again. We will not think that we need to develop skills or to practice them because instead, we will RUSH to surrender. So let us move towards rushing Home.

A huge part of our work together will be based on developing the skill of watching our thoughts. We started this practice in Exercise Two. We are now going to extend it.

Watching consciousness without judging, without attaching to the drama, without being bedazzled, reveals the self we 'think' we are. It is a self we have not examined. It is a self filled with beliefs that, once seen, will literally drop away.

Watching the mind encourages this dropping-away process because our whole self concept, and thus world concept, begins to unravel when we practice it. The unraveling takes as long as it takes and depends upon many factors [See Dr. D Hawkins work at www.veritaspub.com link to Veritas] but it does occur and with obvious changes in our experiences of our self and our world.

For some, like Ramana Maharshi, who as a teenager, asked himself what would happen to 'him' when his body died, the unraveling is immediate, profound, and everlasting. For others, perhaps like you or me, this unraveling is a life-long endeavor.

This practice noticing your feelings is the natural extension of watching your thoughts. For some, watching thoughts is an alien thing to attempt. When they look inside, they are not obviously dominated by thoughts, but instead are primarily aware of their feeling states. To them the exercise of watching their thoughts is confusing and frustrating.

If this is so for you, carrying out a practice of watching feelings can reveal the lightening fast thoughts, which precede the feeling-states. This exercise will assist those of you who experience life from a feeling context. For those that are primarily aware of thoughts and thinking-ness, this exercise will assist you in unveiling the mental and emotional connections.

Watching the thoughts, watching the emotions, allows me to let go being attached and glamorized by feelings. As I practice this watching, then I know I am not my thoughts or feelings and so I can just let them go. I know I am not my mind, I have a mind. I know I am not my thoughts, I have thoughts. I know I am not my feelings, I have feelings.

EXERCISE

Bring your awareness and your attention, to your emotional self. Sometimes just the act of deciding to notice them seems to turn up the volume on the feeling states.

You may discover that watching your emotions immediately bring up the desire to re-direct your attention. You may hunt out chores to do, or recall the book you have been meaning to read, or you may hunger to watch television, or you may literally hunger to eat. So you may find yourself looking for something, anything - to do. That is just how it is for you. Instead of fighting the 'avoidance feeling', take a deep breath, ask for Divine Help and notice the feeling of avoidance (calibration 125 on Dr. Hawkins Map of Conciousness).

Developing emotional awareness is helpful in learning that we are not our feelings. It is helpful in revealing that we are bedazzled by the drama of thinking-ness which is reinforced by way of its emotional charge. We label that charge feelings. By way of this practice we can begin to learn to disentangle our self from feelings.

Watching the emotional self is like standing on the shore of the great sea filled with thought. You don't want to swim in the great mass of water or you will be pulled into it and lost in its musings. So don't be dazzled or attached to the feelings. They come up and you simply notice them. They fall away as you let them go. You carry on with your day, with your work, with the dialoguing in your life and all its aspects and, at the same time you have the observer running.

If you find yourself becoming a wave, probing into the future, getting caught in a 'what if' or 'I should do or else there will be consequence' stance, return to the shore where the mind's true state is thought-less-ness - Silence. Begin again. Watch your emotions.

Be the observer. And as the feelings from memories, or the feelings from worry, for example, arise within your awareness, let them go by - do not be attached to them. Experience them as impersonal. Do not own them. Do not be the emotion.

Look, notice, and be aware of the feelings arising and falling away. Like waves on the ocean, they spray up and dazzle us, interest us. They naturally fall away when we do not feed them with our attention. In our usual way of being with emotions, we become the feeling. We become the wave and rise up and get thrown back, only to rise up again. It is an exhausting process.

Refrain from judgment, refrain from concluding and instead be willing to let go of the belief that you 'know' what these feelings mean. None of this is necessary or helpful.Instead, let the emotion go.This is active meditation. Watching our mind and emotions is a beginning focus, the end of which is the radical practice of surrendering all thoughts and resultant feelings to the Infinite Creator.

This week, pay particular attention to the emotions that result from the thoughts arising in your mind. A part of your mind records everything. Find that part - the recording, the watcher - and be with it. Thoughts and feelings arise from the field of consciousness, in the place you call your mind, and every nuance, every experience, is recorded. Be the camera to your own thought system. When a thought triggers an emotion, use your budding skill from Exercise two of allowing thoughts to rise up and fall away, to let go of the emotion as well. Practice letting the feelings be of you, rather than believing they are you.

Each emotional knot that is loosened in our minds reveals the inner Peace and Joy already present. We need do nothing to cultivate the Peace and Joy except remove the blocks to its awareness. Watching feelings is simple. It is most important to remind your self of the simplicity of this task. We all know how to watch. We watch sports events, we watch television, or we watch our child at play. That is it. That is how to watch our emotions.

This exercise moves you from an intellectual understanding, to an experiencing of the truth. One stance feeds the ego, and strengthens it, while the other stance allows the ego to fall away.