The Sway of Contentedness: Contemplation and Mental Culture for Ghosts and Ordinary Folk

In this book, the author deftly and straightforwardly details a simple contemplative method of coming to understand our own mind and egoical self-conception. Using a take on a representationalist model of knowledge and mind, the method requires no special skills or intellectual capacity beyond a relaxed and enquiring outlook. The text avoids any allusion to the mysterious, the arcane, the esoteric or the spiritual, instead adhering to what can be known and verified in direct experience. Resultantly, no belief is required in the least and all new understanding is firmly and unequivocally established. Perhaps the antithesis of any self-improvement guidance, this book neither enhances nor affirms any self-conception. Rather, what is clearly and precisely set out is the means by which the phantasmal self-entity - which is our inauthentic identity - may at first be subdued and later voided. In its place, our authenticity is progressively established, this being free of any egoical, pernicious and naïve narrative formations. The haunting of selfhood with its rapacious acquisitiveness and oppressive egoical control is by stages relinquished. In this way, a calm, reposeful contentedness may be fully realised in the tranquil and authentic ordinariness of a non-dual, or selfless state of being.

The Sway of Contentedness is an engaging exploration of a pivotal yet little known aspect of much of our ordinary activity. This is the subtle influencing - or sway - of a restful emotional state of contentment. Most of us are unaware that the sway is acting upon us in the midst of our everyday concerns, instead being habitually neglectful of it in our engagement with the mundane. In this worldly activity we ignore the very thing, that in any final analysis, we desire most from life: This is to dwell in a psychological and emotional state of tranquillity and contentedness; to be at rest with life as it is.

The sway of contentedness may similarly be given recognition, and with remarkable simplicity too. Once we acknowledge its existence, a comforting calmness remains accessible to us; and more than this, when we look behind the obvious objects of our desires, we see that contentedness itself is what we always sought most from life. So how may we access an inner contentment whilst remaining actively engaged in our working lives, when amongst family, friends and others, or when alone? This question is resolved by discerning what may be thought of as our authentic identity, which is our natural condition prior to the overlay of selfhood and its naïve narrative beliefs. The resolution comes about progressively in the development of our mental culture, and is largely facilitated through a contemplative exploration of everyday activities.