What Can You Actually Do With A Still Mind?

A story and discussing the emergence of the True Self

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I am teaching a 5-week training program called Guided on cultivating the emergent wisdom I describe in this post starting 5/31. You can find more details here.

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Most people start off meditating just to be less stressed out without ever really thinking much about where it can take them.

I know I did.

In May 2020, I was on a drive to a nearby town to run an errand for my mom. As I was driving, the most interesting thing happened. For the first time outside of my meditation practice, I noticed that my mind was completely blank. There was just emptiness and this lasted for the entire car ride.

Whoa!? I wondered if something triggered in my brain to provide this long period of complete stillness. Would this state become my new normal?

I didn’t really know what to make of the experience.

I read somewhere that the space between thoughts is often a good indicator of how your mindfulness practice is going. One of the difficult things about a measurement like this is tracking progress feels hard and incremental gains can go unnoticed over long time horizons. It can feel like you’re getting nowhere when in reality you’re slightly improving every single week. 

It had been over 7 years since I began my meditation journey and this was the first time there seemed to be some big unlock beyond me simply being a less stressed, asshole. In that moment, it was unclear whether I was merely recognizing the shift that had been made or entering into a new paradigm of mind. I was just happy to have the experience. 

It’s been over 3 years since that happened and my mind has continued to evolve quite a bit. 

Before all this my mind seemed to constantly be working, focusing on the past or future. The default state was to be somewhere else than the now, even in the absence of something material happening in the world around me. The only time I seemed to glimpse total presence was athletics.

Now it kind of feels like the opposite. My mind is mostly quiet and present by default. As life presents itself, things will come into my awareness and the awareness will direct the mind like a master telling its dog to go fetch.

There are still times when unpleasant thoughts come up spontaneously. You learn to simply let them pass through or see them as clues to investigate an imprint in your subconscious instead of becoming enraptured in them.

The awareness creates choice.

Having lived both experiences, the difference is striking. A still mind is by default off and can be directed as needed like a tool. Whereas a busy mind is default on, compulsively thinking when you don’t want it to. In the latter case, it feels like you are more subject to the mind’s unwieldy impulses, more than it being subject to your commands.

Sometimes the events of life collide with some imprint or belief in my subconscious that causes me to get triggered, pulling me out of this blank awareness. This is indicative that there’s work to be done on the subconscious level so that the pattern and energy behind it can soften (more on that here). Eventually, if you do this enough times you will be liberated from being triggered in the future by that particular situation. 

A quiet mind makes the process of sitting with the feeling from the triggering easier and creates somewhat of a flywheel effect. Having a still mind makes it easier to notice the patterns and eventually handle them. With less suppressed energy, which is the substrate creating domineering thoughts, the mind increasingly becomes quieter.

As nice as this greater sense of peace and equanimity is, it’s not the most profound feature with this shift of mind.

What Does Through Me Consciousness Actually Look Like

You may have seen me share this graph before which is a framework I was first exposed to by the Conscious Leadership Group.

In the top right quadrant, there is this notion of Life Happens Through Me Consciousness. It sounds pretty badass, but what does that actually look like?

For me, it expresses itself in a number of ways that coincide with the mind quieting down.

My initial psychedelic experience was the first time I experienced another presence in my awareness that felt very different than my thoughts. It was a loving, gentle voice that I could seemingly converse with. It seemed to know everything and be able to see things so clearly. After the retreat it went away.

As my mind quieted down to feel blanker in everyday life, this gentle presence started to emerge into my awareness again. There are many names for it, but some you might have heard before are the Soul, Spirit, Source or the true Self. It seemed in my case that the emotional clearing and quieting of the conditioned survival mind made way for the true Self to emerge. This also coincided with a shift in identity as the thoughts.

Identified as the awareness, the true Self starts to play the role of guide for your life. It instigates spontaneous guidance as you make your way through the world which for me mostly takes the form of gentle whispers in my awareness. Over time, you can learn to directly query the true Self anytime you want guidance on something. A huge part of distinguishing what is emanating from the true Self vs. the conditioned, survival mind is learning to recognize the difference in texture. This is a skill that requires experimentation and practice to refine.

There’s also the process of eventually trusting it, which again comes back to experimentation and finding verifiable evidence. As you start to walk this road, it becomes clear that this presence has your best interest in mind always. This process is the subject of the course I am teaching in a few weeks called Guided: Unlock, Access and Expand Your Intuitive Power.

When you learn to align to this guidance with your actions, this is one expression of “Through Me” consciousness which I also interpret as living your soul’s purpose or Dharma. Sometimes it almost feels like you as the awareness are an order taker of the true Self. This is balanced with the rational mind which acts more like a servant when you need it vs. the master of your experience.

This phase shift I am describing is the beginning of how the inner and outer worlds begin to harmonize in a more meaningful way.

I’ve noticed a common trajectory amongst people who go down this path that looks like the following:

1. You entirely focused on the outside world to achieve fulfillment

2. You experience crisis or some paradigm-altering experience that helps them see this is not the way to unconditional joy and peace

3. You go hard in the inward direction seeing the outside world as almost futile or less interesting. Often malaise sets in

4. You begin to experience and understand the true Self dynamic and gently enter back into the world

5. You use the inspiration, directives, and creativity from this new source of mind to create in the outside world which becomes an increasingly integrated experience with your inner world

If you’re unfamiliar with what I am describing it can sound quite scary. And to be honest, it is pretty uncomfortable at first. But over time, my experience is that it becomes quite the opposite. With the notion that you are being guided, the pressure to figure things out is no longer dominant or present at all. All you need to do is tune in and trust how you are being led by the inner presence and life itself which surfaces things as needed.

It kind of feels like moving from the paradigm of having a paper map where you only felt comfortable when you had each step charted out, to becoming at ease with google maps which just tells you to turn when you need to.

When you first encounter this phase of experience, there is likely a concern that following this new presence means abandoning everything you enjoy in life.

What if I am told to forego money, success, and indulge in life’s pleasures?!

This transformational conflict is a normal phase of this paradigm shift.

But what’s so interesting is that the more you work with it, the more you see that it actually aligns more closely with what truly nourishes you. The outcome might look different than what you have been conditioned to desire, but access to the feelings which are the more fundamental thing you were chasing proves to be superior and more reliable.

There’s more ease, peace, and joy without such conditionality. It’s not that you don’t have hard things happen, but that you experience these with much more grace because you recontextualize challenging experiences as opportunities to strengthen this divine connection. The positive evidence in how you feel further substantiates that your deepest identity is not your conditioning. This makes letting go of those parts of self easier.

With this connection intact, there is much more room for creativity and spontaneous support to come into your awareness. This feels like being in flow.

Our society uses the word intuition to characterize these emergent knowings and bouts of insight. I see it more like your antenna is now just plugged into your true Self or Source and able to receive information. I guess calling the emergent insights and directives in our awareness “true Self pings” would confuse a lot of people at this point in time.

When you follow these authentic, spontaneous impulses that are broadly in alignment with your true Self’s direction, I interpret this as another form of “through you” consciousness.

A skeptic would look at this and say well isn’t that just neural connections creating things in your brain that surface as ideas?

When I hear this, it just means that this person has not had enough experiential evidence of what I am talking about. You don’t need to rationalize things when you just know through experience. The only thing I can compare it too is what you may experience in altered states on psychedelics: the insights are clear and you just know they are true. It’s just like that, but you’re not on substances. You can get to a point where you just increasingly have access to this in your everyday experience.

When you start to experience impossible synchronicities and a feeling of perfectly timed flow as you follow the guidance, it becomes more obvious that this is not the work of random neural connections. Instead you see that you are part of an interconnected system and your are connected to a part of mind that extends beyond your historical exposure.

A simple example that comes to mind is I recently wrote out some directional goals for myself over the next few months. One of them was to find additional mentors. A day later, I was guided to create a podcast with someone I knew. I followed the guidance, published the episode, and the next day an old mentor of mine texted me that I haven't really talked to in 5 years about the podcast episode. We are catching up this week and it seems like we are now on the same path based on our messages.

At first, something like this might seem like a pleasant surprise, but after about 10 instances of something like this happening, your reality model of random coincidence starts to wash away. You see that there is a more fundamental substrate of reality and begin to enjoy exploring it. Events like this happen again and again which only spur the motivation to keep going on your search for the truth to life’s biggest question: what is this?

So What Do You Do With A Blank Mind?

Besides being peaceful and working on patterns, my answer is hanging out with the true Self which is the deeper you!

Sometimes it's an active exercise and others it's more emergent. In all cases, it’s more creative, dynamic, and loving than when I was just encountering the world as my patterns. 

A quieter mind also crates space to begin the experimentation process of taking more reality authorship (manifestation). I am still very much exploring this concept and I have written more about my experience with manifestation here. The increased coherence between my inner world and outer world suggests that we (consciousness) create that which we see. 

I know the word manifesting can be triggering because there are a bunch of people just trying to make money selling manifesting or loud people on TikTok that don’t really accurately describe the requisite conditions.

Tibetan Buddhists discuss the state of co-emergent awareness which I interpret as non-duality. There is no “you” and just open space. From this place, they believe everything becomes manifest which means everything that you are experiencing is from your own mind. Reality is a projection. Hence, manifestation is not something you do. It just is even now when life may appear less than ideal which means there is likely things at play in your subconscious undermining your experience.

Most of my shifts in experience have been on a continuum of exposure to gradual embodiment. Therefore, with ample clearing of the subconscious mind, one can not only notice the increased coherence between reality and mind, but also experiment with it more boldly with intention setting. I am not too focused on this relative to the continuous purification of the subconscious which seems to be the precursor to enhanced coherence.

After reading this, you might be asking so do I need to meditate for 7 years and have a still mind before the true Self can emerge? I’m not quite sure that’s the right way to look at it. It’s always been there. It may only come through in flashes and many of us have not been trained to recognize it. When we set the intention to move our focus in this direction and do the work required, it just starts to come through with greater ease, consistency, and potency. At least that is my experience.

I’m sure there are many other emergent features and abilities that can come online with a still mind that remain underemphasized in our culture. I’m just having fun exploring it all and seeing where it takes me!

If the process of working with intuition and the emergence of the true Self sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to check out the Guided Intuition Program. I can’t guarantee you’re going to have an immediate experience of everything I just described here, but you will have the knowledge and tools to begin to step forward in that direction. For me, it’s been the best investment in my life experience I have ever made!

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If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏