Reach level Zero to face life’s heat
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When the world around me is boiling, what do you expect me to do?”
— Excerpt from a long letter from a teenager
When the world scorches your senses, when emotions rise to screaming levels, head for level Zero. Of course you can’t head there just like that — you need to have it all rehearsed and ready, like a handy cold towel in an icebox to kill the blazing heat. It’s no coincidence that Zero degrees is where water turns to ice. Imagine a state of iciness, where your boiling sensibilities congeal to a rocklike stillness. That’s the zero state. The mind cannot conceive the concept of the Infinite, but it can chill comfortably in the feeling of Zero, and in a way they can mean the same thing.
Level Zero is also the “Shunya” of Buddha. To the evolved adept it’s a state where mind ceases and Being surfaces. To the rest of us it can be at least a state of no negative feelings.
To get the advantage of level Zero you need to start practising it when you don’t need it — now is a good time. Close your eyes and shut down your face. Switch off your mind into as much silence and stillness as you can. Turn off all visible expression. Imagine a block of ice on your brows, chilling your head and spreading down to the rest of your body.
What do you feel? You suddenly touch a state where you feel nothing. Now learn to move that nothingness around. Think of some incident which disturbed you in the past. Let the icy stillness congeal the emotions into a frozen state of zero emotion. There, you recollect the incident — strangely for the first time with no feeling whatsoever. Repeat this with other incidents. That’s it. End of lecture.
Know that this simple exercise was perhaps the most powerful mind control tool you have ever used in your life. The mind needs a cutting plier that can yank out the nails of toxic emotions embedded in our mind. Yank them and throw them away, for nothing is more useless, more defeating, more damaging than a pile of fatal feelings that pollute our present and destroy our future.
It’s a deep state of rest, where you learn how to refresh, recharge and rejuvenate yourself. Once you get good at this you can take your super cool state into the outside world.
Of course your face isn’t immobile anymore, you laugh and chat with your friends, but something inside is ice cold at zero degrees. That chilled being will teach you so many things about yourself that you never knew. Enjoy.
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