Explore Within: A Journey to Inner Peace

By N. T. Hettigei

Explore Within by N T Hettigei is a comprehensive guide to finding inner peace and uses simple focusing techniques to discover inner serenity and true happiness.

The effective practices in this book give you the true happiness experience you are looking for, regardless you are a beginner or a savvy spiritual seeker.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Sages nth Foundation
• Release date: Nov 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798868993244

N. T. Hettigei

N. T. Hettigei is a spiritual teacher, writer, and self-publisher who has shared his true happiness experience with others for the last three decades. He spreads nonviolence and harmony by promoting inner and global peace. With that intention, he founded ancientpath.org in 1992 at the dawn of the internet. He sincerely wishes that his writing, discussion, publications, online presence, and teaching would help others find inner peace and true happiness to resolve the challenges in their lives and the world.

Book preview

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Explore Within

A Journey to Inner peace

New Edition

N. T. Hettigei

Copyright © 2023 by N. T. (Nandasena.T.) Hettigei

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

The author has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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ISBN-13: 979-8-8689-9324-4

Imprint: Sages nth Foundation, 2023

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True happiness is experiencing the bliss of being alive.

- N. T. HETTIGEI

To

My Daughter

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

Explorer

Philosopher

Sage

Noble Heart

Nature

Present

Satisfaction

happiness

Inner peace

Vow

Index of Practices

References

About the Author

From the Author

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Acknowledgments

I owe plenty to others who taught me many life lessons. This includes everyone I interact with either very closely—my fatherly brother, caring wife, and admirable daughter—or at a far distance, such as the teachers of ancient religions and present-day spiritual masters.

I like to acknowledge you, the reader, who had no interaction with me in the past but did interact or will be interacting by reading this book. I sincerely believe that this will help you to live a blissful life. I acknowledge and thank you in advance for your openness, willingness, and determination to make this world a better place. Hence, I take this opportunity to recognize your noble effort to explore within.

My special thanks go to my friends, including the late Michael Nyein of New Zealand who reviewed and edited my original manuscript and provided valuable comments that encouraged me to improve my writing. My heartfelt gratitude goes to my daughter, who encouraged and inspired me to write and helped me complete this book; hence I dedicate this to her.

Further, I am grateful to my friend Chinthaka Indikadahena, for taking the initiative to translate my original book into the Sinhala language. That triggered me to publish this new edition of Explore Within.

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Preface

Most of us tend to be swayed by all that is happening around us, and we rarely have the time to pause, pay attention, and reflect on our innermost responses to our lives. Most of us are unaware that every one of us is born with a noble heart to make us happy every second of our life.

This book offers a simple way to explore your approach to life and unlock the peace within by experiencing true happiness. The practices outlined here benefit each one of us, regardless of the image we have chosen for ourselves. During this voyage of discovery, you will learn to recognize your true nature and how to enrich your life and live blissfully.

While this book’s primary purpose is to enhance your experience of well-being, this is also an attempt to shape a peace-loving society and heal a world divided by petty differences.

You will find certain self-checks and practices to help you discover who you are and your pathway to experience inner peace. It will be helpful to stop reading for a few minutes and do those practices to experience a deeper level of happiness as you enjoy the breathtaking scenery on this wondrous journey.

In addition, I included a few restatements, similes, and pictorial representations throughout the book, hoping they resonate with you to enhance your experience of true happiness.

You may use this book as your lifestyle handbook and refer to it to experience inner peace from time to time. For that purpose, I have included an index of practices at the end of the book. You may repeat the same practice that takes you to experience inner peace, and they are practices rather than exercises. Exercises technically have a start and end, but these practices are for constant experiences. Practice them daily, at least before you go to bed or wake up in the morning. It will elevate your inner peace to experience the bliss of being alive – true happiness.

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Follow Your Bliss

- Joseph John Campbell

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Introduction

The world has gone through a pressing time with the pandemic in the past few years, and I see this as nature’s way of teaching humankind the value of stillness and calmness – inner peace. I intended to give the same message through this book I published in January 2019.

I realized that my first edition’s message was too concise and direct, and many readers may not have received the full benefits. Therefore, I am introducing this new edition with more elaborated explanations and experiences. Also, an index of practices is added as a quick reference guide for your journey to inner peace.

Although this book’s purpose has not changed, this new edition brings an enhanced perspective to my message. I am sharing more examples from my personal experiences to encourage you to try out the specific practices to get a firsthand experience of true happiness which establishes the unwavering state of inner peace.

On my life journey, I wondered why I have a slight smile almost all the time. There has been an unintentional smile in me from the days I remember. Inadvertently, I smile at everyone, including any stranger I meet. Probably, I had it in my childhood as well, since I notice many children, even in this modern-day, reflect bliss with a serene smile on their eyes and faces. I realized this smile expresses our inner peace, irrespective of our petty differences. It became clearer to me when I had firsthand experience of true happiness while meditating in the Stokes Valley Buddhist Monastery in Wellington, New Zealand. The experience of true happiness gives you a profound impact on your view of life and this world. We are interconnected at the core without interference from our minds–our conceptualizing faculty. My heart sees inner peace in others beyond conceptual boundaries, and I respond with a smile. It’s like friends meeting and smiling at each other. On a few occasions, when I smile back as a friendly gesture to people who smile at me, I read a puzzled expression of why are you smiling at me again? Then I realized that I had unintentionally smiled at them first, and they responded with a smile.

Once at work, a co-worker thought I grinned–not smile–at him all the time and kept grinning back at me like an ape encountered another ape.

This hilarious incident of mine may have glinted a smile on your face. Or else you were offended due to speculations in your mind thinking I referred to someone as an ape. Mind you, I am also referring to myself as an ape, and I am not discriminating against anyone here. I trust this incident may have stimulated a slight blissful sensation within you, which is an expression of your inner peace. We bear this inner peace from birth, and my intention here is to elevate that to a higher degree for you to experience true happiness.

To begin with, I like to introduce the approach of the philosopher and author Joseph John Campbell, who lived from 1904 to 1987. He was an American Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and religion. In his works, he covered many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy has been summarized by his often repeated phrase, Follow Your Bliss. He stated the following in his book The Power of Myth:

"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time."

He confesses that he derived this idea from Upanishads–an ancient Sanskrit text–by stating the following:

"Now, I came to this idea of bliss because, in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat-Chit-Ananda. The word Sat means being. Chit means consciousness. Ananda means bliss or rapture. I thought, I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not, but I do know where my rapture is. So, let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being. I think it worked."

His method resembles our journey to inner peace. Here, we usher the bliss that puts us on a path to inner peace. This path has been waiting for us, leading to the life we ought to be living. The two fundamental obstacles to this are friction and clinging created by our enslaved minds. When we overthink anything, we become victims of our own minds, which I call enslaved minds. The enslaved mind keeps us confined to the perception and belief we accumulated from the outside and others’ opinions. The enslaved mind can’t break barriers created by those perceptions and opinions. When we usher in our bliss, those obstacles will