Do You Need to Fix Everything before Enlightenment? Cut Through Your Mind's Lies with Self-Inquiry!

The Big Lies Your Mind Tells You

You are not worthy of enlightenment.

You need to learn everything first.

You need to heal yourself completely, and you need to heal the whole universe before you are given permission to finally become enlightened.

The big article about how our minds lie to us.

Why are we talking about how our minds lie to us?

Recently, I was sitting in meditation and practicing self-inquiry by asking myself, "Who am I?" and "Who is seeing this thought or feeling, or whatever comes up?" when this became so apparent.

No wonder our minds lie to us. It wants to stay in control, so it deceives us whenever possible.

I'll tell you everything you don't know about your mind and how to avoid being trapped by your own thinking.

Why Your Mind Says You’re Not Ready for Awakening

Why do we believe the lies our mind tells us?

So the other day I was sitting in meditation, practicing self-inquiry which is basically asking yourself “Who am I?”

The idea is to detach your awareness from being identified with any object, whether it's a thought or feeling, and to turn our attention back to your source, which is Buddha-nature, Christ-consciousness, or enlightened awareness.

Since anything, literally anything, you can become aware of is an object in your mind, it means that it can't be you! It can't be your true Self, no matter what the thought or feeling tries to tell us about ourselves.

So instead of automatically attaching to whatever thought appears in our minds, we examine each thought by asking to whom it actually appears. Instead of analyzing the content of the thoughts, we focus on the context between subject and object. This sounds easy, right?

What you will notice if you do this is that your mind will become very clever, showing you thoughts that are either very deceiving or very disturbing, just in order for you to leave your role as subject and to identify with the thought again. It wants you to keep identifying with thinking because our ego is made up of thoughts, and it wants to maintain control over you. It doesn’t like it if you question its existence with self-inquiry.

This is the biggest conspiracy there is. If you love conspiracy theories, this one is the most important one you'll ever encounter.

The ego doesn’t exist, you are pure awareness, emptiness, but for whatever reason you become unconscious of it. And now you believe the lies your mind tells you. The lie is that you are a limited, separate, small self, in a world full of other limited, separate, and small selves. You are born and you will die. 

And if you become aware of this lie, your mind will now tell you that you need to heal yourself completely. It will insist that you fix yourself because you’re not perfect yet, and you must be perfect before you can attain enlightenment. It tricks us into thinking we have to figure everything out and fix everything before we can become enlightened.

Beliefs That Keep You From Awakening

Our small minds just don’t like uncertainty.

Since our small minds are relative, meaning they have a beginning and an end and come and go, they unconsciously recognize that they are not absolute and therefore not real. It can be compared to an illusion. An illusion appears to be real, but it’s not.

Just try to grasp a thought that you are having; you can’t. The moment you try to grasp a thought, another thought has already entered your mind. Because our small minds, our thinking minds, know they are not real, they seek something to which they can attach. And what it attaches to is a belief pattern. It can be any kind of belief, whether positive, like the idea that something out there will save us, or negative, such as believing oneself to be unworthy. Especially when we have entered into a spiritual journey, our small minds will become absolutely crazy.

It will come up with all sorts of beliefs, trying to delay its own death. It will convince you of anything as long as you believe it, attach to it, and give your power to it. And what can be more powerful than a belief that convinces us to be unworthy of enlightenment?

We feel unworthy of enlightenment. We think we need to heal completely first, fix every aspect of our lives, and figure everything out. Before we do all of that, we believe we can’t awaken to our true nature.

And these beliefs seem so convincing to us. When we look at ourselves and how we behave in the world, we can see the many aspects that are lacking. We notice that we make many mistakes and are not always living up to being perfect. When we compare ourselves to enlightened masters, who seem perfect, we can't help but notice our shortcomings.

As a result, we think we need to fix ourselves before we are worthy of attaining enlightenment.

Let Go of Thoughts to Realize Your True Nature

But what if this is not true? What if this is merely a lie our minds tell us to stay relevant?

Linji, an ancient Zen Master, once said: 'If you want to be no different from the patriarchs and buddhas, then never look for something outside yourselves.'

So, if we want to become a Buddha, an awakened one, we need to shift our attention from looking outside to looking inside. And what is meant by looking outside versus looking inside?

Although we typically view our thoughts and feelings as being on the inside, I don’t think this is true when it comes to meditation practice. Because we can witness and observe our thoughts and feelings, it means they are objects in our minds, which means they are outside of us, the subjects, the observers.

Spirituality is all about getting to know our true Self, not the self we imagine ourselves to be. The self we imagine ourselves to be consists of thoughts and feelings, which are happening on the outside because they can be observed by us. Therefore we need to abandon all mental objects, all thoughts and feelings, in order to realize our true Self.

This sounds easy, but it’s really hard when you are sitting in meditation and all these thoughts come up that say you are not good enough, or you are not ready for enlightenment. Our minds will come up with all sorts of beliefs, and we tend to unconsciously attach to them and believe them. Therefore, we have to be completely radical with this. We have to shift our attention from mental objects back to ourselves.

We need to abandon all ideas we have about ourselves—the good ones that tell us we have made good spiritual progress, and the bad ones that imply we are not good enough. It’s best not to trust your mind, whatever it comes up with. It will always tell you a story that keeps you hooked to your small self, to your illusory sense of being human.

Your thoughts will keep telling you that you are born and that you will die, that you are limited, that you need to be afraid, that you are unimportant, and so on.

It will always find an argument that keeps you hooked and leads you to abandon your spiritual practice. It knows your fears, vulnerabilities, and desires, and will use your weakest points to keep you addicted to your small self.

It knows that it will vanish into nothingness once you see through it. Therefore, we need to be absolutely serious and earnest with our meditation practice. We need to discard all our thoughts and return our attention to our true Self.

And there is an easy way to accomplish this. A spiritual practice known in both Hindu and Buddhist traditions is that of self-inquiry.

Self-Inquiry as a Path to Enlightenment

When you practice self-inquiry, you keep asking yourself who it is that is witnessing all these thoughts and feelings. So whenever you observe a thought or feeling, you just ask yourself, "To whom does it appear?"

Who sees this thought or feeling?

I see this thought or feeling.

Ok, who is “I”?

Whenever the next thought or feeling enters your mind, you do it again. You keep repeating this until you are enlightened.

It’s as simple as that, and there are many cases of enlightened masters who attained enlightenment in this exact way. Many of them did not actively practice this, but they reached a certain point in their lives where the question arose naturally, and they immediately attained enlightenment. Many more, as documented in Zen texts, practiced it for years or decades until they finally got it. So, I think there is great merit in doing this kind of practice.

So, whatever object appears in your mind, turn your attention around by asking yourself, "Who is it that’s seeing this object?" It’s like making a 180-degree turn of your attention, turning it away from the mental object and toward the subject, the witness of the object. And doing it again and again.

Many of you might now ask how to know if you are doing it correctly. There is actually an easy way to tell if you are doing it correctly or not. Whenever your attention lands on something concrete, something definite, something that gives you an answer to the question "Who am I?", you are witnessing a mental object again. When you feel a sense of accomplishment, a sense of security, or a sense of knowing, even if it’s very subtle, you are identified with an object again.

Instead of staying identified with this thought or feeling and trying to get rid of it, you just use it as an opportunity for self-inquiry again. You will see that the mental objects will become more and more subtle, and you need to pay attention not to get attached to even the subtlest object in your mind.

So, whenever your attention lands on something, that’s not it.

Doing a 180-degree turn with your attention correctly will lead you to a place of not-knowing. It’s like throwing a small stone, a pebble, into a deep mountain lake and watching it disappear into the vast space of nothingness, and staying with that nothingness.

Now, if the thought comes up, "I am nothing," your attention has landed on an idea, a mental object, and identified with it. In true not-knowing, who would be there to make such a claim? So be aware of that.

You can do this practice in your everyday life situations. When you are going for a walk, simply ask yourself, "Who is doing the walking?" If you go shopping, ask yourself, "Who is doing the shopping?" If you are talking to someone, ask yourself, "Who is doing the talking?" And just stay with the silence, with the not-knowing that follows the questions.

Slowly but surely, you will lose your attachments to all mental objects, and the capacity to stay in the not-knowing, and as the not-knowing, will increase until it fills the entire universe.

Alright, so much about disregarding all our mental objects and making the commitment to find our true Self, our Buddha nature.

If you have any questions about this, please feel free to reach out.

See you next time! 

Your friend of the way, Bye!