Stepping Into Awareness

A moment of spaciousness. No thinking is required at this moment, which wouldn't add anything to it. And be aware of yourself and what's around you. So the consciousness that you are makes this possible, the light of consciousness. If you cannot yet in your daily life, step from thinking into awareness, freedom from thinking for a moment, then you just use one of the portals, inner body, breath, awareness, acute attention to sensory perception. And after a while you can just step out of thinking when it's not needed. Or reduce thinking to just a trickle. And then presence arises and you sense it with the entire energy field. And gradually this power grows in you. The power itself doesn't grow, but its manifestation in you grows. Presence, power grows in you. At first it seems nothing remarkable, even uninteresting. But first you notice it frees you from a lot of turmoil, mind generated. And then it deepens you. Because it is the deeper I, the deep I that emerges, the deep self, the deep I. Don't wait for emergency situations to become present. Don't wait for life to knock you, give you jolt, a shock. Choose it in ordinary moments. Then it grows in you. And when life does something to you, it can only intensify the presence. Instead of taking you out of presence into reactivity, you respond, but don't react. Reaction is from the conditioned mind. Responding is out of presence. As I said before, with reaction, you are at the mercy of events and people. Your inner state is at the mercy of other people, their behavior towards you or in general. And you are at the mercy of what's going on around you. Always like, somebody is nice and somebody is not nice. That's reactive responses, comes out of breath. You can't predict reactions. You can predict in people. If you've lived with somebody for a while, you know exactly how they are going to react. When you say this or when that happens, you learn how they react. You know it beforehand. You can push their buttons if you wanted to. And you know exactly how they're going to react. Totally predictable. Because they are programmed to react in certain ways. That's their conditioned mind. But when they become present, you can't predict anymore how they're going to respond. Because they won't be reacting. Maybe they'll just be there, who knows? And you can't predict how you will respond to certain situations. People sometimes ask, what would you do if this happened to you? I don't know, Sa.