The Translucent Revolution, Arjuna Ardagh

> The word belief originates from the Old English word leof which means, \”to hold dear\”. The Encarta World English Dictionary defines it as \”acceptance by the mind that something is true or real often underpinned by an emotional or spiritual sense of certainly\”. But we only develop beliefs about certain things…
> In other words we hold beliefs about things that we don’t know about from direct experience. Why? Because we are unwilling to stay in not knowing…
> Sometimes people ask \”do you believe in God\”? But what difference does a mental conclusion make? Either we feel God all around us and within us and our heart is open to the Great Spirit creating and connecting all things or we don’t. Believing in what we do not feel creates a plastic, mental world with no nourishment or depth to it…
> Only when we’re willing to be both good and not good and everything in between does our feeling of being separate relax and the goodness of all life begin to flow through us…
> As we will discover, the way to dissolve a belief is to stop resisting both sides of the polarity. When the internal fighting stops there is no longer any need for belief…
> Byron Katie is masterful at unraveling the mind:
As long as we’re at war with our own mind we are at war with the world and with the whole human race. Because as the long as we want to get rid of our thoughts, anyone we meet is likely to become an enemy. There is only one mind, and people are going to tell us what we haven’t dealt with yet in our own thinking. \”you’re fat. you’re stupid. you’re not good enough.\” If you are an enemy to your own mind other people have to become enemies too sooner or later. Until you understand, until you can love the thoughts that appear in your mind, then you can’t love the rest of us. You work with the projector – the mind – not the projected world. I can’t really love you until I question the mind that thinks its sees you outside itself ….
> As soon as we are able to recognize thought as a passing event, we become unglued from it. We can then question its reliability. However translucent we may have become, this process of letting go of a personal reference point always feels like a small death, but it always brings with it a rebirth. Thought and action can occur in completely new ways, as direct  and innocent responses to the present moment, unclouded by the undigested past…
> Knowing this, as the core of translucent practice, we learn to relax the first impulse to react. We relax and we wait. We relax into not knowing. We relax into feeling the disturbance in the body. We relax into feeling the environment as if it were an extension of our own body. We soften into the acceptance of the unreliable nature of the mind, and we surrender…
> Allow yourself to stay in the middle of the mental tension with all its conflicting points view, and feel them all. Give yourself permission to not know; feel the inevitable reality that you actually don’t yet know what to do or say stay with all that and wait, then see what happens. Relax back from the whole thought process, and just wait for the current flowing through all of life to flow through you too.