Hi Nomad (not all who wonder are lost)

You mention that – the reality is that I’m in the present now… the reality is ‘you’ are always in the present. Its the only place ‘you’ can be. When you imagine the future you are bringing the future into the present.

Anyway if I understand, your saying that you can only quite your mind when you are focusing on goals and desire for the future? That your intention of meditation and awakening is to get control or this thing you call ego in order to achieve those desires?

There is a time for everything and this may not be the time worry about process. It may be enough just have started… and being open to learning.

Perhaps a place to start is to come into relationship with the ego. For many the ego is something we are ‘supposed’ to defeat. Its bad… however the ego plays a important role in becoming. Consciousness is a product of the experience tension. Here is a paradox for you – it takes a person with a healthy ego to detach the sense of self from the ego.  A weak ego will experience any attempt at detachment as trying to kill it and it will engage the ‘id’ to fight back.

Try to communicate a experience, to yourself or others without using the word ‘I’. You can’t. Notice that the ‘I’ is a construct of language, a symbol that points past it self to something we don’t quite see. Because we can’t see ‘it’ the error we make is mistaking this construct ‘I’ for the Self . We do this by attaching the ‘I’ to experience, emotions, desires, thoughts… we say and believe ‘I am the experience, I am the emotion = identification and attachment of the the construct of ‘I’  to a illusion which becomes ego – the ego believes ‘I am my ego’. It’s a difference getting to experience the emotion of sadness… and defining the ‘I’ as being the emotion of sadness.

One of the ideas behind meditation is to learn how to observe our thoughts, breathe… in time we notice that the ‘I’ is a constrict, a illusion. As we become mindful of this truth we learn to detach the ‘I’, the ego, from the emotion, thought, experience…  the mind becomes the still point.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Peter.