Grab a brush and start scrubbin'. Or not.

I love analogies! They all have their limits, but they can make things so easy to understand.

I've used an analogy containing a window before. Here's another one.

Picture a window. On one side are your mind and body, which most people identify with as being themselves. On the other side is the shiny presence of the Present moment, i.e. the Oneness of all things.

Now, this window has a problem. It's dirty. In fact, it is so dirty that your mind and body are unable to see any of that light on the other side. For the most part, many people do not even realize there IS any light on the other side. They do not question the dimness.

That dirt on the window is analogous to what we call our "emotional baggage." My own personal technical term for it is "crap."

So what is crap, exactly?

Two monks were once walking through a town. They came upon a woman who was unable to cross a mud puddle on the street. One of the monks saw this and picked up the lady and carried her across and put her down on the other side. Then the monks went on. Unfortunately, this action was against the philosophy of their Order, and the other monk who witnessed this became a bit upset. As they walked, he became more and more upset, until finally about 5 hours later he had to say something to his fellow monk.

"Why did you carry that woman back there? You know that is against our ways!"

The other monk replied, "Hey, I carried her back there, but you've been carrying her for the last 5 hours! "

That's crap. Whenever you have an emotional experience that you do not deal with in the Present, that emotion sticks around and scums up your window.

So, how do you get rid of this crap?

Well, there are two schools on this.

The first school (which is the one in which I did most of my training) says essentially that you need to go after that window with a scrub brush and a bucket of soap. By this I mean that you need to do things, like special exercises or counseling, that are designed to remove the grime. Most of these things involve looking deep down inside yourself, issue by issue, and reliving them to their fullest intensity until you are ready to burst... and then, basically, you do burst... the emotional bubble that is. Every time you build up that emotional bubble and then pop it, you remove some crap. If you spend a while doing this, you will eventually get little rays of light shining through the window from the other side. If you spend many years doing it, you can eventually get rid a lot of the crap, but there is always some left, no matter what you do. More is always forming every day, and there's always these annoying little specks of dirt that are tough to scrape off.

The other school is no easier, but no less interesting. This school says that you have crap. Accept it. The crap is there. It is what it is. What you REALLY need to do is realize that you exist on both sides of the window simultaneously. You are both the outside and the inside, so in Reality, what's the point to the window? There is none. You are the light on the other side, and really there are no sides either. All you have to do is be aware that you exist on both sides of the window. That's IT. The more you pay attention to the part of yourself that exists in the light, the more you will realize that the window is an illusion. When that happens, the crap becomes irrelevant, and it actually drops away on its own, about the same time the window does.

That second school makes it sound a lot easier than it is. Not many people are ready to do that. However, then again, not many people are ready to go the way of the first school either. In my experience, the first school is easier to start out. The only requirement is that you need to know how to talk to your own emotions and your subconscious self. Because of this, there is a lot of prep-work necessary, and the prep-work can take months to years depending on the person (since few people can already converse with their own subconscious.) By contrast, the second school doesn't have any prep work outside of life itself, but the route can sometimes be impossible to follow for people that are especially unconscious and not ready to step outside their illusions.