On Remaining Centered

When we connect to our center, we access the fullness of who we are as an individual spirit. We also connect to the energy source of the universe, from which nothing can be lacking. It could be that we have been energetically starving ourselves but trying to feed the need physically, outwardly. Once we make the decision to reconnect, we have the ability to examine the behavior from a higher place within ourselves. We can look, without judgment, at the thoughts and feelings that occur before and after our indulgences to find a pattern. We may want to keep track of these observations in a journal so that we can go back if we lose our way. [Daily Om]



"All that I have mentioned is outward, but the outward acts upon the inward, and a man’s clothes and his home are the nearest of all things to his soul, and their influence on it is perpetual and therefore incalculably powerful." [Dr. Martin Lings]




As Krishnamurti often emphasized, only a still mind can be attentive. There is a quality of attention and seeing which can bring about an action in oneself so that a radical change can take place naturally, from the inside. I once asked Krishnamurti about the nature of this attention, what he himself called total attention. I said to him, "What I find in myself is the fluctuation of attention." He said with emphasis, "What fluctuates is not attention. Only inattention fluctuates." For him, there was never a compromise with half-measures; it was a matter of total commitment to truth, or nothing at all.



As long as one does not have a centered self, one is fragmented and agitated. Then one is inevitably self-centered because vastness, freedom and compassion cannot be available to a fragmented and disordered self. When one is centered, one naturally sees the limitation of the personal or selfish perspective. Then one naturally wishes to be free of the prison of selfishness. Until then, the notion or effort to be free of the self is merely an idea and a fantasy. When one has awakened senses, a clear heart and an alert mind, one can go beyond thought to an intelligence which is not so personal or self-bound. [Ravi Ravindra]