Water and Stone

The soft power of Awareness and how it can transform the mind

“As a sufferer of OCD and low self-esteem, I have long wondered whether it is actually possible to truly overcome deep-rooted beliefs. Of course you can actively distrust them, disidentify etc., but they are emotional so deeply ingrained that at the end of the day they still feel “true”. Like we're forced to believe them by shame. Is there a trick, a way that really works?”

.

***

.

The trick is there is no trick.

That is what the mind is always in search of, isn’t it?

A trick? A tip? A technique? A strategy?

But what if there is absolutely nothing one can effectively do? What if every method or technique one can learn is nothing more than a coping strategy? A tool for pain management rather than a cure?

What if awareness alone is all that is necessary?

Until one is aware that there is suffering, no healing can begin. Yet, once that awareness dawns, so also does the mind’s desperate desire to find solutions begin. And in its search for solutions, it begins to detract from the very healing process that organically follows the focus of one’s awareness.

There is a famous quote by the Roman poet, Ovid:

“Dripping water hollows out stone. Not by force, but through persistence.”

Awareness is the dripping water. And it uses no force whatsoever.

It is soft, supple and barely noticeable. It lacks the sharpness of the axe or the brute force of the sledgehammer.

Yet, just as a single stream of water gently dripping on stone, will gradually erode it over time and hollow that stone out - so also does awareness have the power to gradually hollow out those rock-like beliefs and crystalline tendencies of the mind.

The real trick is that there is no trick. You simply have to allow awareness to do what awareness does best.

And yet, that is the hardest part, isn’t it? For the mind is powerful and determined. And each time it draws attention towards it, that stream of awareness is shifted away from its previous position. Rather than dripping one drop at a time on a single spot, it ends up dribbling haphazardly all over the rock. And so, the rock does not hollow out. It only ends up wet.

Everyone these days is a self-help expert. If you browse through Substack, you will find countless articles on dealing with ‘trauma’, the ‘inner child’, the ‘mother wound’, how to ‘individuate’, how to ‘heal yourself’ - there is no lack of awareness in these people. They all get, at least intellectually, what their internal dissonance looks like, where it might emerge from and how it impacts them.

And yet, precisely because they are so intellectually aware, they are hampered by that very intellect. Because the hard power of the intellect is no match for the soft power of awareness. And yet, deploying that soft power requires an entirely different approach than we have been enculturated to take.

It requires not attempting to fix anything, nor even trying to understand it. But simply observing it. Silently.

For when you observe something, anything, passively and silently something magical occurs. Your awareness of that thing begins to deepen, and the object of your awareness begins to reveal itself in ways that you cannot anticipate. An alchemical process begins to unfold before your eyes in which changes happen, shifts occur, disparate pieces of information that appeared to have no connection to one another begin connecting in unforeseen ways - the organization and ordering of a higher intelligence unfolds before your very eyes. And you realize that you are not making it happen. It is happening in and of itself. But only because you are aware and that awareness acts as the enabling power for that process to unfold.

Just as the sun does not make flowers bloom and yet without the sun no flower can bloom. So also, awareness is the very source that powers the intelligence of life, mind, self and reality. The steadier the awareness the more deeply these various aspects can reveal themselves and the more congruent and harmonious they grow.

You mentioned you suffer from OCD and low self-esteem. This is familiar to me as I also did for many years. And you are right in saying they are deep-rooted beliefs. They are like weeds that appear small on the surface but have far-reaching networks that connect to other such beliefs, beneath the surface of our conscious minds. And just like the weeds in your garden - simply cutting them has very short-term impacts. It might make your garden look nice for about a week before those weeds return. Simply using the tool of the intellect to deal with these psychological weeds is like using a weed-whacker that trims just the tops. In order to uproot them, you need a different approach altogether. Because when you uproot one weed, chances are you will be uprooting an entire network that you didn’t even know existed!

I have written about my ‘one year on the balcony’ in a number of articles. But I will repeat it here because it is a practical example of the latent power of awareness to integrate the psyche.

When I was 27, I was coming out of a bad breakup in which a very powerful phobia that I had carried my whole life became unleashed and was causing me to suffer profoundly: the fear of abandonment. I was desperately afraid of being alone due to certain traumas I had suffered in childhood. Yet, I had also come to the realization that this was something only I could resolve and no one else. If I couldn’t learn to be comfortable living in my own presence, then life was not worth living.

So, I found myself an apartment which I furnished very sparsely. I had no electronics - no television, no internet. And I began to follow a self-imposed routine that involved going to work during the day and then spending my evenings at home sitting on my balcony doing nothing.

By ‘doing nothing’, I mean literally nothing. I didn’t permit myself to read, to listen to music or even to meditate. The entire purpose was to simply be with myself. To observe silently what came up without attempting to tamper with it in anyway.

For the first six months, the experience was excruciating. To be with myself was the greatest torment I could have imagined. I hated it. I loathed it. On most nights I wanted to scream. There were several evenings that began with me sitting on my chair and ended with me curled up on the ground sobbing hopelessly.

Over time, the agony gave way to boredom. A dull blankness began to descend, and I would spend hours sitting with myself in a sort of opaque stupor with no recollection afterwards of what I had spent my time doing during those hours. That boredom was almost worse than the agony. For the agony had made me feel something. The boredom just made me numb.

Yet, things gradually began to shift around the six-month mark. The dark brooding sentiment began lifting and a new, more stable feeling began to emerge. Although I still didn’t enjoy sitting on the balcony, I had begun to grow accustomed to it and didn’t dread it as I so often had in the beginning. I grew quieter inside. I would often spend hours just watching the trees in the distance and how they swayed in the breeze. There were even brief flashes of joy that chanced upon me on occasion.

Then, gradually, things shifted further. Those small seeds of joy began blossoming within my heart and I began to feel an enthusiasm I had not experienced in a long time. I found myself looking forward to my evenings on the balcony. And when I sat there, I would often feel an aura of well-being descend upon me and fill my entire being from the inside.

That is how love blossomed in my life - love for the world, love for self, love for being. The fear, hatred and mistrust gave way to a profound joy, love and sense of all-is-well.

My fear of aloneness had transformed into a love of All-one-ness.

And here is the kicker…

I didn’t do it.

It was all done for me. Simply by nature of what awareness is and the power it possesses to transform life.

And thy will be done, also. If you let it.

Just as dripping water hollows out stone, so too does awareness hollow out the false rigid structures of the mind.

Not by force. But by persistence.

It was when I realized that my desire to fix the process was the very thing preventing it, that I learned to get out of the way.

All that was required was for me to sit back and witness the magic of water cutting stone.