Author: Susan Hawkins

A spiritually-oriented person values all of life’s experiences and sees each one as an opportunity to evolve spiritually. The technique of processing out involves very simple steps that all depend on willingness and the capacity to surrender.

Stay with the feeling and stay focused on it unswervingly. Realize that all pain is due to resistance. The suffering of loss stems from the attachment and specialness.

Be willing to become immersed in and surrender to the feelings without avoiding them. Notice that they come in waves and that surrendering to the most intense waves tends to decrease their emotional severity.

Ask God’s help and surrender the personal will to God.

… Be willing to endure and suffer out the process. If not resisted, it will process itself out and come to an end.

… A helpful source of strength during the processing out of painful emotions is to identify with all of humanity and realize that suffering is universal and innate to the phenomenon of being human and the evolution of the ego.

From Transcending the Levels of Consciousness p. 98-99

A useful decision or choice is to decide to stop mentally talking about everything and refrain from interjecting comments, opinions, preferences, and value statements. It is therefore a discipline to just watch without evaluating, investing worth in, or editorializing, commenting, and having preferences about what is witnessed. … All thinking, from a spiritual viewpoint, is merely vanity, illusion… The less one thinks, the more delightful life becomes. Thinkingness eventually becomes replaced by knowingness.

From  Discovery of the Presence of God: Devotional Nonduality, p. 88-89.

Q: Where is that reality of eternal truth to be found?

A: Begin by accepting the very important statement that all truth is subjective.  Do not waste lifetimes looking for an objective truth because no such thing exists.  Even if it did, it could not be found except by the purely subjective experience of it.  All knowledge and wisdom are subjective.  Nothing can be said to exist unless it is subjectively experienced.  Even a supposedly purely objective material world, if it existed, could be said to exist only because of one’s subjective sensory experience of it.  Even the most rabid materialist is stuck with the fact that in the end, it is only their own subjective awareness that gives it the authority of believability.

From The Eye of the “I”, Ch. 12, pg. 233

Q: How can contemplation be instituted, started, or learned? It is a decision?

A: It is only a matter of awareness.  It is really nothing new and therefore does not need to be learned but only given attention.  A useful decision or choice is to decide to stop mentally talking about everything and refrain from interjecting comments, opinions, preferences, and value statements.  It is therefore a discipline to just watch without evaluating, investing worth in, or editorializing, commenting, and having preferences about what is witnessed.  One then sees the rising and falling away of phenomena and the transitory nature of appearance, which, with ordinary mentation, is conceptualized as a sequence of cause and effect.  It is an informative practice to ‘pretend’ to be stupid, and by the invocation of radical humility, Essence shines forth.  All thinking, from a spiritual viewpoint, is merely vanity, illusion, and pomposity.  The less one thinks, the more delightful life becomes.  Thinkingness eventually becomes replaced by knowingness.  That one ‘is’ does not really need any thought at all.  It is helpful, therefore, to make a decision to stop mental conversation and useless babbling.

From Discovery of the Presence of God, ch. 4, pg. 88-89