The Secret I Found Out Later

Have you ever experienced that feeling when you felt so peaceful and calm all of sudden and joy and happiness rose in you without any reason? And you couldn’t explain why it felt that way. I used to get that feeling a lot when i was a kid. It usually happened right before i go to sleep during the night. I’d just lay in my bed waiting to fall asleep and listening to the sound of passing cars in the distance and barkings of my neighbors’ dogs. And that’s when the state of peace and happiness hits me out of nowhere. It was a peace that passed all understanding.
Later in life, I found out that these rare moments are called Saturi, a glimpse of what’s like to be in a thoughtless state. In those moments, what i didn’t realize was that my mind stopped thinking completely for a brief period of time and that’s why it felt so wonderful. Without knowing, I created a momentary gap in the incessant thinking in my mind and that’s why the world around me became more vibrant and real. My experience of life was direct and alive. I was fully present in my experience.

As we grow up, we begin to identify more and more with our thoughts and that’s when life becomes more and more lifeless. The reason is we are perceiving and experiencing life through the screen of thoughts. Let’s take this analogy. If you were to wear a rubber gloves and touch someone’s skin, you would never feel the realness and aliveness of the skin of the person. Why? because the rubber is between you and the skin. Thought is just like that. It’s between you and the reality of life preventing you from fully experiencing it. When you perceive life only through thoughts, you’d never feel the realness of it.
Thoughts are there to serve as second-hand representation of life and everything in it. They enable us to communicate with each other and navigate through life’s challenges. When we were kids, our thinking mind hadn’t developed much so, we thought very little except when we needed to think. That’s why we felt so alive and happy as kids. Very few individuals know of it.
As adults, we begin to deaden life through conceptualization of our minds which in turn, makes it impossible for us to feel the aliveness and freshness of life as we felt when we were kids. While kids see a bird as it is and fascinated by it, most adults only see their thought of a bird. Don’t get me wrong. Thinking is a very powerful and useful tool but only, when it’s needed. Just like everything in existence has a duality, thinking too, has a very dark side to it. The quote below from Eckart Tolle, beautifully illustrates what i’m trying to say here.
Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, ‘what a pretty flower,’ but that’s just a mechanical mental labeling. Because they’re not still, not present, they don’t truly see the flower, don’t feel its essence, its holiness just as they don’t know themselves, don’t feel their own essence, their own holiness.
People don’t truly see life for what it is but only their mechanical mental labeling of it. True happiness, peace and joy only rise when the mind is still, that is to say when we are not continuously thinking, judging and interpreting the present moment. It’s the most important of secret of life! Everything in life is neutral which means anything is neither good or bad. It’s as it is. Only thinking makes something good or bad and when our thinking mind interprets something as bad or undesirable, it makes us suffer and vise versa.