Qualities...
- Mastery of Thought - thoughts govern us, we shall work to reach a point where no other thought can disturb us as we are so absorbed in our chosen point of focus/attention;
- Control of Actions - resolve to action your own initiative, separate to the impulses from the external world;
- Equanimity - steadfast, even tempered, composed, neither great joy or great sorrow should be allowed to dictate your interactions with the world;
- Understand every being - find the wonderful, the beauty, affirm the good and true, learn tolerance of the negative whilst focussing on the positive;
- Complete Openness - remaining open to the possibility of learning something new, experiencing something different, steering away from judgement and truly listening to what another may bring to meet us;
- Inner Harmony - developed as we work with the first 5 qualities;
- Feeling of Freedom - finding the centre of our own being and working from it, rather than relying on external factors &/or people to determine our course of action in the world.
Exercises...
- Rhythm restores power - work at restoring / introducing rhythm in your own life;
- commit to undertaking certain activities at certain times of the day each day:
- certain meditation and concentration exercises at a certain time each morning;
- review of the day at a certain time and in a certain pattern each night;
- the more regularities we introduce the better;
- bringing natural rhythm into our chaotic human lives;
- Allow peace and tranquillity of mind, think a definite chosen idea or focus on a set object.
- Training, striving for objectivity, cultivating inner strength;
- "students of the spirit must train their thinking so that it can set its own direction and goals. Their thinking must teach itself inner stability and the ability to stick strictly to one subject." (p.114)
- Over a matter of months train ourselves to be able to focus our thoughts on some ordinary everyday object for at least 5 minutes, excluding all unrelated thoughts.
- Meditation of a simple object "What is a pencil made of? How are these materials prepared? How are they put together to make a pencil?" (p.115) etc etc is much easier to stay on point than vast existential questions.
- Observe/consider how little activity in your life stems from your own personal chioces;
- MUST spend some time each day engaging in an activity that arises from within yourself, however trivial;
- Getting used to obeying our own commands;
- Less and less inclined towards the desire of non-essentials;
- Training of the self in desiring the possible in order to be able to recognise and apply strong will forces towards the 'Impossible' in order to transform them into possibilities!
Blackboard, Board, School from pixabay (CC0)
3. Detachment / Imperturbability:
- See goodness in everything, looking for the positive everywhere;
- Ability to empathise fully with joy and sorrow, without being lost to the experience or making expression of our emotions involuntarily;
- Not suppressing justified pain but inconsolable weeping, not suppressing our abhorrence of a misdeed but our blind rage, not alertness to danger but fruitless fear.
- Mental tranquility;
- Do not succumb to self-deception, it is possible to be calm and composed in confronting things in day to day life and yet have our suppressed lack of equilibrium assert itself all the more elsewhere;
- What we may seem to have already is much less important than systematically practising that which we need to acquire;
- No matter what life may have taught us, it is that which we teach ourselves that serves the purposes of spiritual training;
- People who cannot laugh have sa little control over their lives as people constantly provoked to uncontrollable laughter.
4. Positivity:
- "The erroneous, the bad and the ugly must not prevent the soul from finding the true, the good, and the beautiful wherever they are present." (p.117)
- "We cannot consider bad things good and false things true, but we can reach the point where the bad does not prevent us from seeing the good, and errors do not prevent us from seeing the truth." (p.118)
Directory Signposts Hope, from pixabay (CC0)
5. Faith:
- Do not allow your assessment of the future to be dictated by the past;
- Meet each experience with new faith;
- Allow for the possibility of belief;
- Remain open to new experiences;
- Be intent on using every opportunity to learn something new concerning every thing and every being;
- Faith in the possibility that new experiences and ideas will contradict old ones.
6. Inner Balance:
- Formed gradually from the other five qualities;
- Grasp life;
- Progress gradually.
Stones Stacked Balanced, from pixabay (CC0)
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