I am reading Peters Unnecessary suffering book as well as I watched numerous of his latest Youtube talks and podcasts and I attended the recent online workshop; I keep hearing him mention the importance of controlling your thoughts. He usually explains this to mean just stop your thought. Stop doing the thought. There was one youtube video recently a month or so back where someone asked him what does he mean by that and if its like letting go of thoughts versus actually mentally stopping it and Peter said yes. Im now confused because in the book and other media he says to actually try to stop any further thoughts from popping up. To me stopping a thought and letting go of thoughts are two very different things, because the former involves me doing an activity (the stopping of a thought). and usually requires my concentration. The former results in silence for a brief second but its more mentally taxing and the thoughts can come back louder whereas the latter involves a more-so "non-doing", like in vipassana, it involves me not reacting to the thought in my head and remaining equanimous. The thought doesnt stop but sometimes i feel like im less controlled by it. Basically, I need some clarification on this topic. Thanks.

After the EUS workshop: 1. The first thing I got was; waking up the next day with “I am responsible”. It was an insight into my problem of “not being able to choose”. That problem disappeared. The instruction I then gave myself, “to always contemplate from not knowing” opened up the possibility to be active; walk and think without letting that activity distract me from my contemplation. I realized that my body had never distracted me from having an insight or a breakthrough before, so why would my mind distract me? It’s just there. It’s happening as by itself, while there is room for not knowing what its is. That was a cool thought that helped me a lot. 2. Then I came across the concept of “open waiting” and at a certain point the “me” disappeared completely. It became clear, by an apparent deep relaxation of the body that there was no one here. That it was complete and absolute immediately, and that it can never be an experience because it already is as it is. It was a “jezus-f**king-hell” moment lol. A lot of the ideas, sentences, reminders or explanations I had been reading/ hearing about make sense. Like that ‘there is no proces’, or that ‘stuff is not real’ this whole “consciousness babble” that was always interesting to me, but would never bring me into this. Duh..Of course everything is referenced to me! It IS me.” The “me” story shows up as a contraction in the body, always trying to know, to figure out, to have an answer. It is endles, always 'going' somewhere lol and I could call it in itself ‘suffering’ because it is always looking for something else. At the moment it seems silly to dive deeper into the stuff I am NOT conscious of what it is, but not resisting it either. Hanging out. “Open waiting” is a good description. Let’s see where this goes. Thanks Brendan for the facilitation, Peter for the materials and participants for their sharing! Guido

Hello Consciousness Path people, Reaching out to people in Australia, New Zealand, Asia & Pacific regions on this Consciousness Path. I'm looking at building an Increasing Consciousness Group (ICG) on Zoom with the purpose of helping grow this work, create events, live more effective lives and increase our Consciousness. Would you be interested participating in something like this? If you haven't already, please check out Calendar · The Consciousness Path and Classroom · The Consciousness Path for weekly facilitation and information get the ball rolling and grow in this together. Cheers, Robert Australia