13. The Inside Way

Most of the time we are concerned with our outside world. With our body, our family, our job, our possessions, with hobbies, politics, entertainment, etc. We are concerned with the material, the put into form, the facts, the knowledge. This is the outer way. In my book "The Conscious Death" I have called the inner path also a spiritual path. Spiritus comes from Latin and means spirit or breath. It is that which gives life to matter. The outer path deals with the "getting into form". In order that life can arise from the "in-formation", it still has to be "in-spired". Only the combination of information, knowledge with inspiration, experience, leads us to wisdom.

The way inside is neither strenuous nor complicated. It is a very simple and natural way. People have always gone this way. In the age of technology, however, it has gone somewhat out of fashion and fallen into oblivion. Our outer world provides us with an excess of material things and possibilities, a variety of external distractions, so that we lose contact with our inner being. To follow the path within, we do not have to belong to any particular religious community, worldview or ideology, nor do we have to have any particular talents. We don't have to leave our friends and families or give up our jobs and hobbies. We don't have to move to a monastery, to solitude and become an ascetic. But you can't do it without everything. We need the will to do this, we have to create certain conditions and take the time to do so.

I often compare the way to the inside with a marathon. The theory is simple, there are plenty of training plans. The method, running, is not difficult either. Any healthy person can run. However, reaching the goal is somewhat more difficult and usually means a long, regular training. First of all, we must be clear about our goal. What is this blog about when we write about the inside way, the spiritual path? First of all, it is simply about our lives. Our life, as explained in the corresponding article, is an IPO, a consciousness process. The inside way changes this process and with it our lives. Most people try to achieve changes in their lives through changes in the outside world. To are more is to have more. Thus, like our earliest ancestors, they are constantly on the hunt for prey, which nowadays consists of more and more possessions to satisfy more and more pleasures. They always choose what they find pleasant and think it is good for them. But this is often a fallacy. Despite all the changes in the outside world, they always remain what they are. With every problem they solve in the outside world, new problems arise as long as they do not solve the problems at the root, their inner world. The outside world is always created by the inner world. Our consciousness creates our reality. At this root, at the source of our life, our consciousness process, we start in this blog. The methods presented here show us a way to deliberately change our states of consciousness with the goal of not only consciously changing these states but ultimately expanding them. It is about monitoring and controlling our IPO. This means that we are no longer controlled by life, but we control our lives. We update our consciousness to reach an expanded consciousness, a higher level of consciousness and finally the supermental level and experience the state of conscious death.

These methods for the inside way are completely natural and simple, no more difficult than running in the outer world. Each of these methods starts at a stage of IPO. For the input part we will deal with concentration, for the processing with mindfulness and for the output with meditation. The only things we need are our body, our mind and some time.