Overview
What more could a person want than inner freedom? Freedom from fear, hopes, anxiety, interminable questions, hate, love. In so far as this is possible for mere mortals who are not endowed with supernatural powers, a set of practices with associated understanding and knowledge are used to help people achieve inner freedom, and most importantly, freedom from themselves. Here is a brief outline.
Desires
All desires originate from the desire to exist. The two most immediate of these are the desires for food and sex.
Desire Practice
The desires are difficult to see because we have developed buffers so we do not insult the good image we have of ourselves, since all desires are selfish in nature.
The Failed Meditation exercise uses the fact that we fall into daydreams when we meditate. And so we focus on our breathing and sooner or later we will drift into a daydream. The important thing is to try and see what we were daydreaming as we snap out of it.
We can also try to look at what we were daydreaming about during our normal activities, but it is usually more difficult. We have to notice the fact we were daydreaming and then notice the topic of the daydream.
The stories we tell ourselves in our daydreams are always concerned with attempts to gain some kind of advantage, no matter how indirect that might be.
Emotions
Emotional states reflect our survival status at any moment. They manifest with great speed and can be seen as short-cuts. The alternative would be the much slower process of thinking.
Our emotions are pleasant when our survival prospects are enhanced and painful when our prospects are diminished. Again the change in status might be very indirect, such as being ignored by someone we thought was a friend.
Emotion Practices
The key to working with emotions is to realize that they manifest in the body, but are nearly always accompanied by corresponding thoughts. People often mistake the thoughts for the emotion, but by becoming more conscious of the body we can sense our emotional states more acutely.
The main exercise aimed at greater emotional awareness is body sensing. This is simply a process of moving our attention around the body, and consistent practice will bring about a greater awareness of emotional states.
Thoughts
Thinking is primarily driven by our desires, and particularly our desire to exist. Even when thought is focused on the circumstances associated with an emotional state it is still concerned with our survival status, since emotions are directly concerned with survival status.
Thought Exercises
There is a problem associated with observing thoughts, however - they stop when we attempt to look at them. However, with practice, we can establish some distance between our attention and our thinking processes. This distance grows with ongoing efforts directed at thought observation.
Sensations
Our senses communicate the state of the world to us. When running on automatic our sensory impressions are filtered for us and so we only pick up the most intense signals that our senses are giving us, and the signals that get attention are generally those that communicate an increase or diminishing of survival prospects.
Sensation Exercises
Body sensing, as mentioned earlier, is a very good sensation exercise. We can however place our attention on particular sensations, a good example is to place our attention on the sounds we can hear. In our normal state we block out many sounds, the sound of a clock for example, but conscious listening often reveals a wealth of sound we normal miss.
Understanding
Practices such as those considered here, are only part of the story. The larger part of the picture concerns our understanding and this needs to work in conjunction with practice. Without understanding the practices will be largely impotent and possibly result in an awakened idiot.
Obviously, we need to understand the basic dynamics of our physical existence, and particularly our emotional nature, the nature of thought, and our desires. This becomes a very detailed study and is the foundation for inner liberation.
Equally important however is an understanding of our situation, and particularly how we experience the world from a survival standpoint that contains almost no truth in it. So it is little wonder we cannot answer the big questions - our mind has not evolved to answer big questions, it has evolved to provide the best survival opportunities.