The next step is to continue expanding this relaxed and increased awareness of your body to include within it the awareness of your thoughts and feelings. In other words, bring into your enhanced physical awareness the further awareness of what your mind and emotions are doing in the moment. You watch yourself. You’re to be an impartial witness to the life of your own thoughts and feelings. Let them fly and hop around within you without the slightest concern for their direction or character. Neither resist, nor let yourself be drawn into any of their attention-stealing antics.

Again, all you want to do is watch. Detached self-observation is your aim. So each time it comes to you to realize that you’re no longer watching, but rather that you’ve been captured by a thought or feeling, and are being carried along by it, just quietly withdraw yourself from that temporary psychic wave. Come back to the awareness of yourself in the Present Moment. This part of your practice is the heart and soul of going — and knowing — quiet. You must experience it for yourself. So, as you sit: Let go; give up; go within, and watch. And over and over again, bring your awareness of yourself back into the awareness of the Present Moment.

Pay no attention to what your own thoughts and feelings are trying to tell you the whole time you’re sitting. Which is namely this: “You should give up this worthless, unproductive practice!”

Learn to watch, and drop, these dark inner voices. They don’t want you to succeed and there’s a good reason why: They can not dwell in that silent world you wish to enter, and that wishes to enter you.

So persist! You will prevail. For even as you struggle to stay aware of yourself in the Present Moment, that moment itself, changes. And as it does, so do you.

Slowly, subtly at first, but eventually even beyond those protestations raised by your own mind, the distinction between your sense of self and your awareness of the Present Moment melts away. And as it does, a new, deeper sense of silence floods into you; filling your awareness with itself and, at the same time, with yet another Awareness that the source of this supreme stillness is arising out of your own Being. It washes everything out of its way. And so arrives a quiet mind.