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# 2019-12-22 - A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
# Chapter 1, The flowering of human consciousness
[Flowers] provided inspiration to countless artists, poets, and
mystics. Jesus tell us to contemplate the flowers and learn from
them how to live. The Buddha is said to have given a "silent sermon"
once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it.
Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to
the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being,
their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the
most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The
feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that
recognition. Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become
for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred,
and ultimately formless within ourselves.
Since time immemorial, flowers, crystals, precious stones, and birds
have held special significance for the human spirit.
Once there is a certain degree of Presence, of will and alert
attention in human beings' perceptions, they can sense the divine
life essence, the one indwelling consciousness or spirit in every
creature, every life-form, recognize it as one within their own
essence and so love it as themselves.
So when you are alert and contemplate a flower, crystal, or bird
without naming it mentally, it becomes a window for you into the
formless. There is an inner opening, however slight, into the realm
of spirit. This is why these three ... have played such an important
part in the evolution of human consciousness since ancient times;
why, for example, the jewel in the lotus flower is a central symbol
of Buddhism and a white bird, the dove, signifies the Holy Spirit in
Christianity. They have been preparing the ground for a more
profound shift in planetary consciousness that is destined to take
place in the human species. This is the spiritual awakening that we
are beginning to witness now.
This book's main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to
your mind or to try to convince you of anything, but to bring about a
shift in consciousness, that is to say, to awaken. In that sense,
this book is not "interesting." ... This book is about you. It will
[either] change your state of consciousness, or it will be
meaningless. It can only awaken those who are ready. If the
awakening process has [already] begun in you, the reading of this
book will accelerate and intensify it.
If we look more deeply into humanity's ancient religious and
spiritual traditions, we will find that underneath the many surface
differences there are two core insights that most of them agree on.
The words they use to describe those insights differ, yet they all
point to a twofold fundamental truth. The first part of this truth
is the realization that the "normal" state of mind of most human
beings contains a strong element of what we might call dysfunction or
even madness. Certain teachings at the heart of Hinduism ... call it
maya, the veil of delusion. Buddhism uses different terms.
According to the Buddha, the human mind in its normal state generates
dukkha, which can be translated as suffering, unsatisfactoriness, or
just plain misery. [Or discontent, pain, and stress.] According to
Christian teachings, the normal collective state of humanity is one
of "original sin." Sin is a word that has been gradually
misunderstood and misinterpreted. Literally translated from the
ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to
miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to
miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully,
blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering.
The achievements of humanity are impressive and undeniable. No
doubt: The human mind is highly intelligent. Yet its very
intelligence is tainted by madness. Science and technology have
magnified the destructive impact that the dysfunction of the human
mind has upon the planet, other life-forms, and upon humans
themselves. ... A further factor is that this dysfunction is actually
intensifying and accelerating.
It is important to realize, however, that fear, greed, and the desire
for power are not the dysfunction that we are speaking of, but are
themselves created by the dysfunction, which is a deep-seated
collective delusion that lies within the mind of each human being.
You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the
goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to
emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in
your state of consciousness.
Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the common
insight--that our "normal" state of mind is marred by a fundamental
defect. However, out of this insight into the nature of the human
condition arises a second insight: the good news of the possibility
of a radical transformation of human consciousness. In Hindu
teachings this transformation is called enlightenment. In the
teachings of Jesus, it is salvation, and in Buddhism, it is the end
of suffering. Liberation and awakening are other terms used to
describe this transformation.
The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art,
science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction,
its own madness. To recognize ones own insanity is, of course, the
arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. A new
dimension of consciousness had begun to emerge on the planet, a first
tentative flowering. [Religious] Teachings that pointed the way
beyond the dysfunction of the human mind, the way out of the
collective insanity, were distorted and became themselves part of the
insanity.
Those unable to look beyond form become even more deeply entrenched
in their beliefs, that is to say, in their mind.
The dysfunction of the egoic human mind, recognized already more than
2,500 years ago by the ancient wisdom teachers and now magnified
through science and technology, is for the first time threatening the
survival of the planet [or at least the survival of the human race].
A widespread flowering of human consciousness did not happen because
it was not yet imperative.
A significant portion of the earth's population will soon recognize
that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.
What is arising now is not a new belief system, a new religion,
spiritual ideology, or mythology. We are coming to the end not only
of mythologies but also of ideologies and belief systems. The change
goes deeper than the content of your mind, deeper than your thoughts.
In fact, at the heart of the new consciousness lies the
transcendence of thought, the newfound ability of rising above
thought, of realizing a dimension within yourself that is infinitely
more vast than thought.
Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily
means thought forms.
The inspiration for the title of this book came from a Bible prophecy
that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human
history. It occurs in both the Old and New Testament and speaks of
the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of "a new
heaven and a new earth." We need to understand here that heaven is
not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This
is the esoteric meaning of the word, and this is also its meaning in
the teachings of Jesus. Earth, on the other hand, is the outer
manifestation in form, which is always a reflection of the inner.
Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are
intrinsically connected. A new heaven is the emergence of a
transformed state of human consciousness, and a new earth is its
reflection in the physical realm.
# Chapter 2, Ego: the current state of humanity
Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or
remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon
you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into
implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something,
you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is. You
have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a
tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately
unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can
perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality,
less than the tip of an iceberg.
Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected
with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of
which it came. When you look at it or hold it, a sense of awe, of
wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself
to you and reflects your own essence back to you. When you don't
cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous
returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity,
instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth
returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness.
And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self
as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images.
The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things,
people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality
becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of
life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way,
cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love,
creativity, and aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap
between the perception and the interpretation. Of course we have to
use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty--but do we need
to become imprisoned in them?
Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which
isn't very much.
The word "I" embodies the greatest error and the deepest truth,
depending on how it is used.
Most people are still completely identified with the incessant stream
of mind, of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and pointless.
There is no "I" apart from their thought process and the emotions
that go with them. This is the meaning of being spiritually
unconscious.
The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its
conditioning is twofold: It consists of content and structure. In
the case of a child who cries in deep suffering because his toy has
been taken away, the toy represents content. The content you
identify with is conditioned by your environment, your upbringing,
and surrounding culture. The reason why such acute suffering occurs
is concealed in the word "my," and it is structural. The unconscious
compulsion to enhance one's identity through association with an
object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind.
One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes
into existence is identification. I try to find myself in things but
never quite make it and end up losing myself in them. That is the
fate of the ego.
What you identify with is all to do with content; whereas, the
unconscious compulsion to identify is structural. It is one of the
most basic ways in which the egoic mind operates.
Paradoxically, what keeps the so-called consumer society going is the
fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work: The
ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more,
keep buying, keep consuming.
We need to honor the world of things, not despise it. Each thing has
Beingness, is a temporary form that has its origin within the
formless one Life, the source of all things, all bodies, all forms.
When you live in a world deadened by mental abstraction, you don't
sense the aliveness of the universe anymore.
But we cannot really honor things if we use them as a means to
self-enhancement, that is to say, if we try to find ourselves through
them. This is exactly what the ego does.
Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they
can't let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of
"negative growth."
When i was seeing people as a counselor and spiritual teacher, I
would visit a woman twice a week whose body was riddled with cancer.
She was a schoolteacher in the midforties and had been given more
more than a few months to live by her doctors. Sometimes a few words
were spoken during those visits, but mostly we would sit together in
silence, and as we did, she had her first glimpses of the stillness
within herself that she never knew existed during her busy life as a
schoolteacher.
One day, however, I arrived to find her in a state of great distress
and anger. "What happened?" I asked. Her diamond ring, of great
monetary as well as sentimental value, had disappeared, and she said
she was sure it had been stolen by the woman who came to look after
her for a few hours every day. She said she didn't understand how
anybody could be so callous and heartless as to do this to her. She
asked me whether she should confront the woman or whether it would be
better to call the police immediately. I said I couldn't tell her
what to do, but asked her to find out how important a ring or
anything else was at this point in her life. "You don't understand,"
she said. "This was my grandmother's ring. I used to wear it every
day until I got ill and my hands became to swollen. It's more than
just a ring to me. How can I not be upset?"
The quickness of her response and the anger and defensiveness in her
voice were indications that she had not yet become present enough to
look within and to disentangle her reaction from the event and
observe them both. Her anger and defensiveness were signs that the
ego was still speaking through her. I said, "I am going to ask you a
few questions, but instead of answering them now, see if you can find
the answers within you. I will pause briefly after each question.
When an answer comes, it may not necessarily come in the form of
words." She said she was ready to listen. I asked: "Do you realize
that you will have to let go of the ring at some point, perhaps quite
soon? How much more time do you need before you will be ready to let
go of it? Will you become less when you let go of it? Has who you
are become diminished by the loss?" There were a few minutes of
silence after the last question.
When she started speaking again, there was a smile on her face, and
she seemed at peace. "The last question made me realize something
important. First I went to my mind for an answer and my mind said,
`Yes, of course you have been diminished.' Then I asked myself the
question again, 'Has who I am become diminished?' This time I tried
to feel rather than think the answer. And suddenly I could feel my I
Am-ness. I have never felt that before. If I can feel the I Am so
strongly, then who I am hasn't been diminished at all. I can still
feel it now, something peaceful but very alive."
"That is the joy of Being," I said. "You can only feel it when you
get out of your head. Being must be felt. It can't be thought. The
ego doesn't know about it because thought is what it [the ego]
consists of. The ring was really in your head as a thought that you
confused with the sense of I Am. You thought the I Am or a part of
it was in the ring."
"Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the
Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but
whether you get attached to them, you will know it's the ego. And
you are never really as attached to a thing but to a thought that has
'I,' 'me,' or 'mine' in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss,
you go beyond ego, and who you are, the I Am which is consciousness
itself, emerges."
She said, "Now I understand something Jesus said that never made much
sense to me before: 'If someone takes your shirt, let him have your
coat as well.'"
"That's right," I said. "It doesn't mean you should never lock your
door. All it means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of
far greater power than defending or hanging on."
[Her mother] also mentioned that after her death they found her ring
in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.
One thing we do know: Life will give you whatever experience is most
helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know
this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you
are living at this moment.
The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego
in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the ego
too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile.
At times you may laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by
this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It
isn't who you are.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit," Jesus said, "for theirs will be the
kingdom of heaven." What does "poor in spirit" mean? No inner
baggage, no identifications. Not with things, nor with any mental
concepts that have a sense of self in them. And what is the "kingdom
of heaven"? The simple but profound joy of Being that is there when
you let go of identification and so become "poor in spirit."
Anticonsumerism or antiprivate ownership would be another thought
form, another mental position, that can replace identification with
possessions. [In other words, replacing tangible possessions with
mental possessions, something easily understood in this present time
of digital assets.]
How do you let go of attachment to things? Don't even try. It's
impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no
longer seek to find yourself in them. In the meantime, just be aware
of your attachment to things. Sometimes you may not know that you
are attached to something, which is to say, identified, until you
lose it or there is the threat of loss. If you then become upset,
anxious, and so on, it means you are attached. If you are aware that
you are identified with a thing, the identification is no longer
total. "I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment."
That's the beginning of the transformation of consciousness.
The ego identifies with having, but its satisfaction in having is a
relatively shallow and short-lived one. Concealed within it remains
a deep-seated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of "not
enough." "I don't have enough yet," by which the ego really means,
"I am not enough yet."
As we have seen, having--the concept of ownership--is a fiction
created by the ego to give itself solidity and permanency and make
itself stand out, make itself special. Since you cannot find
yourself through having, however, there is another more powerful
drive underneath it that pertains to the structure of the ego: the
need for more, which we could also call "wanting." No ego can last
for long without the need for more. Therefore, wanting keeps the ego
alive much more than having. This is the psychological need for
more... It is an addictive need, not an authentic one.
Apart from objects, another basic form of identification is with "my"
body.
In some cases, the mental image or concept of "my body" is a complete
distortion of reality. [I would argue this is true in all cases.] A
young woman may think of herself as overweight and therefore starve
herself when in fact she is quite thin. She cannot see her body
anymore. All she "sees" is the mental concept of her body, which
says "I am fat" or "I will become fat." At the root of this
condition lies identification with the mind. As people have become
more and more mind-identified, which is the intensification of egoic
dysfunction, there has also been a dramatic increase in the incidence
of anorexia in recent decades. If the sufferer could look at her
body without the interfering judgments of her mind or even recognize
those judgments for what they are instead of believing in them--or
better still, if she could feel her body from within--this would
initiate her healing.
Although body-identification is one of the most basic forms of ego,
the good news is that it is also the one that you can most easily go
beyond. This is done not by trying to convince yourself that you are
not your body, but by shifting your attention from the external form
of your body and from thoughts about your body to the feeling of
aliveness inside it. No matter what your body's appearance is on the
outer level, beyond the outer form it is an intensely alive energy
field.
What I call the "inner body" isn't really the body anymore but life
energy, the bridge between form and formlessness.
Jean-Paul Sartre looked at Descarte's statement "I think, therefore I
am" very deeply and suddenly realized, in his own words, "The
consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks."
What did he mean by that? When you are aware that you are thinking,
that awareness is not part of thinking.
# Chapter 3, The core of ego
Most people are so completely identified with the voice in the
head--the incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and
the emotions that accompany it--that we may describe them as being
possessed by their mind. As long as you are completely unaware of
this, you take the thinker to be who you are. This is the egoic
mind. We call it egoic because there is a sense of self, of I (ego),
in every thought--every memory, every interpretation, opinion,
viewpoint, reaction, emotion. This is unconsciousness, spiritually
speaking. Your thinking, the content of your mind, is of course
conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background,
and so on. The central core of all your mind activity consists of
certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive
patterns that you have identified with most strongly. This entity is
the ego itself.
The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego
the same structure operates. In other words: Egos only differ on the
surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the
same? They live on identification and separation. When you live
through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is
the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought
and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every
ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and
enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite
thought of "the other." The conceptual "I" cannot survive without
the conceptual "other." The others are most other when I see them as
my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic
pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and
complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, "Why do
you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice
the log that is in your own eye?" At the other end of the scale,
there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between
nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains unanswered, but the
answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it
makes me feel bigger, superior.
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening
itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you
completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought
makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to
identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in
the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people,
is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know
what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people,
either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to
others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern.
Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental
labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego. The ego
loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make
it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in
you, the ego. [Sometimes the fault that you perceive in another] may
be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of
everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another,
you strengthen in yourself.
Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways
not only of going beyond the ego in yourself but also of dissolving
the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of
nonreaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from
the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction.
When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion
to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often
be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned
consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. [Interesting
distinction between conditioned and unconditioned consciousness.]
At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself
from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them
into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being [more]
conscious. Another word for non-reaction is forgiveness. To forgive
is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego
to the sanity that is in every human being as her or his essence.
And the ego's greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present
moment, which is to say, life itself.
Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake
or deficiency so that it can be put right. And to refrain from
complaining doesn't necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or
behavior. There is no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is
cold and needs to be heated up--if you stick to the facts, which are
always neutral. [The selection of the facts may not be neutral.]
Whenever you notice that voice [that complains about something], you
will also realize that you are not that voice, but the one who is
aware of it. In the background, there is the awareness. In the
foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. The moment you become
aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego,
but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness.
[Resentment] may also be accompanied by a stronger emotion such as
anger or some other form of upset. In this way, it becomes more
highly charged energetically. Complaining then turns into
reactivity, another of the ego's ways of strengthening itself. [Some
people] are addicted to upset and anger as others are to a drug.
Through reacting against this or that they assert and strengthen
their feeling of self.
A long-standing resentment is called a grievance. A grievance will
also contaminate other areas of your life. For example, while you
think about and feel your grievance, its negative emotional energy
can distort your perception of an event that is happening in the
present or influence the way in which you speak or behave toward
someone in the present. One strong grievance is enough to
contaminate large areas of your life and keep you in the grip of the
ego.
Don't try to let go of the grievance. Forgiveness happens naturally
when you see that it [the grievance] has no purpose other than to
strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.
Complaining as well as faultfinding and reactivity give the ego a
feeling of superiority on which it thrives. When you complain, by
implication you are right and the person or situation you complain
about or react to is wrong. There is nothing that strengthens the
ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a
mental position... For you to be right, of course, you need someone
else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be
right. In other words: You need to make others wrong in order to get
a stronger sense of who you are.
What do doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories all have in
common? They are made up of thought. Thought can at best point to
the truth, but it never IS the truth. That's why Buddhists say "The
finger pointing at the moon is not the moon." All religions are
equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You
can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the
service of the Truth. If you believe only your religion is the
Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. Used in such a
way, religion becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of
superiority as well as division and conflict between people. In
service of the Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps
left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening,
that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.
There is only one absolute Truth, and all other truths emanate from
it. Can the Truth be put into words? Yes, but the words are, of
course, not it. They only point to it.
The Truth is inseparable from who you are. Yes, you ARE the Truth.
If you look for it elsewhere, you will be deceived every time. The
very Being that you are is Truth. Laws, commandments, rules, and
regulations are necessary for those who are cut off from who they
are, the Truth within. They prevent the worst excesses of the ego,
and often they don't even do that.
By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on
each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but
of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego.
One can go so far as to say that on this planet "normal" equals
insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete
identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego.
The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in
others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns
that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect
within yourself. In that sense, you have much to learn from your
enemies. Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another
is also in you. But it is no more than a form of ego, and as such,
it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to do with who that
person is, nor has it anything to do with who you are.
In certain cases, you may need to protect yourself or someone else
from being harmed by another, but beware of making it your mission to
"eradicate evil," as you are likely to turn into the very thing you
are fighting against. Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into
unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic
behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat
your opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you,
or the opponent reappears in a new disguise. Whatever you fight, you
strengthen, and what you resist, persists.
For example, despite the war against crime and drugs, there has been
a dramatic increase in crime and drug-related offenses in the past
twenty-five years. The war against disease has given us, amongst
other things, antibiotics. At first, they were spectacularly
successful, seemingly enabling us to win the war against infectious
diseases. Now, many experts agree that the widespread and
indiscriminate use of antibiotics has created a time bomb and that
antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, so-called super bugs, will
in all likelihood bring about a reemergence of those diseases and
possibly epidemics. According to the Journal of the American Medical
Association, medical treatment is the third-leading cause of death
after heart disease and cancer in the United States.
As I was walking with a friend through a beautiful nature reserve
near Malibu in California, we came upon the ruins of what had been
once a country house, destroyed by a fire several decades ago. As we
approached the property, long overgrown with trees and all kinds of
magnificent plants, there was a sign by the side of the trail put
there by the park authorities. It read: DANGER. ALL STRUCTURES ARE
UNSTABLE. I said to my friend, "That's a profound sutra [sacred
scripture]." And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept
that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid
material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the
recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the
dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond
death. Jesus called it "eternal life."
There are many subtle but easily overlooked forms of ego that you may
observe in other people, and more important, in yourself. For
example, you are about to tell someone the news of what happened. If
you are alert enough, present enough, you may be able to detect a
momentary sense of satisfaction within yourself just before imparting
the news, even if it is bad news. It is due to the fact that for a
brief moment there is, in the eyes of the ego, an imbalance in your
favor between you and the other person. For that brief moment, you
know MORE than the other. The satisfaction that you feel is of the
ego, and it is derived from feeling a stronger sense of self relative
to the other person. Many people are addicted to gossiping partly
for this reason.
The well-known phenomenon of "name dropping," the casual mention of
who you know, is part of the ego's strategy of gaining a superior
identity in the eyes of others and therefore in its own eyes through
association with someone "important." The absurd overvaluation of
fame is just one of the many manifestations of egoic madness in our
world.
# Chapter 4, Role-playing: The Many Faces of the Ego
An ego that wants something from another will usually play some kind
of role to get its "needs" met, be they material gain, a sense of
power, superiority, or specialness, or some kind of gratification, be
it physical or psychological. [Interesting distinction between egoic
needs and non-egoic needs.] Usually people are completely unaware of
the roles they play. They ARE those roles. [Therein the utility of
Karen McLaren's archetypes: bringing those roles to a conscious
level.]
A shy person who is afraid of the attention of others is not free of
ego, but has an ambivalent ego that both wants and fears attention
from others. So the shy person's fear of attention is greater than
her or his need of attention. Behind every negative self-concept is
the hidden desire of being the greatest or better than others. Many
people fluctuate between feelings of inferiority and superiority,
depending on situations or the people they come into contact with.
Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in
you.
In the early stages of many so-called romantic relationships,
role-playing is quite common in order to attract and keep whoever is
perceived by the ego as the one who is going to "make me happy, make
me feel special, and fulfill all my needs." However, role-playing is
hard work, and so those roles cannot be sustained indefinitely,
especially once you start living together. When those roles slip,
what do you see? Unfortunately, in most cases, not yet the true
essence of that being, but that which covers up the true essence: the
raw ego divested of its roles, with its pain-body, and its thwarted
wanting which now turns into anger, most likely directed at the
spouse or partner for having failed to remove the underlying fear and
sense of lack that is an intrinsic part of the egoic sense of self.
What is commonly called "falling in love" is in most cases an
intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to
another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has
nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.
When you play roles, you are unconscious. When you catch yourself
playing a role, that recognition creates a space between you and the
role. It is the beginning of freedom from the role.
Some pre-established roles we could call social archetypes. The
hippie movement that originated on the West Coast of the United
States in the 1960s and then spread throughout the Western world came
out of many young people's rejection of social archetypes, of roles,
of pre-established patterns of behavior as well as egoically based
social and economic structures. They refused to play the roles their
parents an society wanted to impose on them. [Turn on, tune in, drop
out.]
If you are awake enough, aware enough, to be able to observe how you
interact with other people, you may detect subtle changes in your
speech, attitude, and behavior depending on the person you are
interacting with. [Yes, this was strange to observe when i was a
child.]
Instead of human beings, conceptual mental images are interacting
with each other. The more identified people are with their
respective roles, the more inauthentic the relationships become.
"How are you?" "Just great. Couldn't be better." True or false? In
many cases, happiness is a role people play, and behind the smiling
façade, there is a great deal of pain.
"Just fine" is a role the ego plays more commonly in America than in
certain other countries where being and looking miserable is almost
the norm and therefore more socially acceptable. [That's because of
America's recent history of immigration from many nations. People
who could not understand each other's languages lived in proximity.
So they reverted to a more fundamental language: body language. They
pretended to be "just fine" as a universal way of putting each other
at ease, of expressing "I am not an axe murderer. You are safe. I
wish you peace."]
Many adults play roles when they speak to young children. They use
silly words and sounds. [This is natural, and this is how primates
learn. Other apes also use a "play face" when interacting with their
young.] They don't treat the child as an equal. [You bet they
don't!]
When being a parent becomes an identity, however, when your sense of
self is entirely or largely derived from it, the function easily
becomes overemphasized, exaggerated, and takes you over. [Isn't this
just giving your full attention to the task of parenting as best as
you know how?]
"If you think you are so enlightened," Ram Dass said, "go and spend a
week with your parents." That is good advice. The relationship with
your parents is not only the primordial relationship that sets the
tone for all subsequent relationships, it is also a good test for
your degree of Presence. The more shared past there is in a
relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be
forced to relive the past again and again.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could spare them [your hypothetical
young children] from all suffering? No, it wouldn't. They would not
evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the
external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper. [This matches
Buddha's experience.]
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the
burning up of the ego. When you accept suffering, however, there is
an acceleration of that process which is brought about by the fact
that you suffer consciously. You can accept suffering for yourself,
or you can accept it for someone else, such as your child or parent.
In the midst of conscious suffering, there is already the
transmutation. The fire of suffering becomes the light of
consciousness.
You may be doing all the right things and the best you can for your
child, but even doing the best you can is not enough. In fact, doing
is never enough if you neglect Being.
How do you bring Being into the life of a busy family, into the
relationship with your child? The key is to give your child
attention. There are two kinds of attention. One we might call
form-based attention. The other is formless attention. Form-based
attention is always connected in some way with doing or evaluating.
Form-based attention is of course necessary and has its place, but if
that's all there is in the relationship with your child, then the
most vital dimension is missing and Being becomes completely obscured
by doing, by "the cares of the world," as Jesus puts it. Formless
attention is the inseparable from the dimension of Being. How does
it work?
As you look at, listen to, touch, or help your child with this or
that, you are alert, still, completely present, not wanting anything
other than that moment as it is. In this way, you make room for
Being. In that moment, if you are present, you are not a father or
mother. You are the alertness, the stillness, the Presence that is
listening, looking, touching, even speaking. You are the Being
behind the doing.
You may love your child, but your love will be human only, that is to
say, conditional, possessive, intermittent. Only beyond form, in
Being, are you equal, and only when you find the formless dimension
in yourself can there be true love in that relationship. The
Presence that you are, the timeless I Am, recognizes itself in
another, and the other, the child in this case, feels loved, that is
to say, recognized.
> There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
> --William Shakespeare
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego. The ego may
be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own
little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things
are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is
extremely short-sighted. Most politicians and businesspeople are
clever. Very few are intelligent. [I doubt this.] Whatever is
attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be
eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence
includes. [I don't buy this distinction. For example,
discrimination divides between what is right or wrong for ourselves
in this moment. So it would count as an intelligence that divides.]
All of the above are assumptions, unexamined thoughts that are
confused with reality. They are stories the ego creates to convince
you that you cannot be at peace now or cannot be fully yourself now.
Being at peace and being who you are, that is, being yourself, are
one [and the same thing].
How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment.
The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens.
It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the
present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or
rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey
the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and
happiness: One With Life.
What is reality? Whatever is. Buddha called it tatata--the suchness
of life, which is no more than the suchness of this moment.
To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for
thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take
responsibility for your inner state at any given moment. [In other
words, you must be able to respond to it.] That means now. Ask
yourself, "Is there any negativity in me at this moment?" Then,
become alert, attentive to your thoughts as well as your emotions.
Watch out for the low-level unhappiness in whatever form that I
mentioned earlier, such as discontent, nervousness, being "fed up,"
and so on. Watch out for thoughts that appear to justify or explain
this unhappiness but in reality cause it. The moment you become
aware of a negative state within yourself, it does not mean you have
failed. It means that you have succeeded. Until that awareness
happens, there is identification with inner states, and such
identification is ego.
[That was a profound paragraph. It touches on Buddha's first noble
truth: There is suffering. And then relates it to a tantric/yogic
truth: There is bliss.]
Most people have moments when they are free of ego. Those who are
exceptionally good at what they do may be completely or largely free
of ego while performing their work. They may not know it, but their
work has become a spiritual practice. It comes as no surprise that
those people who work without ego are extraordinarily successful at
what they do.
People unknowingly sabotage their own work when they withhold help or
information from others or try to undermine them lest they become
more successful or get more credit than "me." Cooperation is alien
to the ego, except when there is a secondary motive. The ego doesn't
know that the more you include others, the more smoothly things flow
and the more easily things come to you.
When you are ill, your energy level is quite low, and the
intelligence of the organism may take over and use the remaining
energy for the healing of the body, and so there is not enough left
for the mind, that is to say, egoic thinking and emotion. The ego
burns up considerable amounts of energy.
One of the ways in which the ego attempts to escape the
unsatisfactoriness of personal selfhood is to enlarge and strengthen
its sense of self by identifying with a group--a nation, political
party, corporation, institution, sect, club, gang, football team.
A collective ego manifests the same characteristics as the personal
ego, such as the need for conflict and enemies, the need for more,
the need to be right against others who are wrong, and so on. A
collective ego is usually more unconscious [less conscious] than the
individuals that make up that ego.
Enlightened collectives will fulfill an important function in the
arising of the new consciousness.
# Chapter 5, The Pain-Body
In addition to the movement of thought, although not entirely
separate from it, there is another dimension to the ego: emotion.
This is not to say that all thinking and all emotion are of the ego.
They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you
over completely, that is to say, when they become "I."
The physical organism, your body, has its own intelligence, as does
the organism of every other life-form. And that intelligence reacts
to what your mind is saying, reacts to your thoughts. So emotion is
the body's reaction to your mind. You don't run your body. The
[built-in] intelligence does.
The fundamental difference between an instinctive response and an
emotion is this: An instinctive response is the body's direct
response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand,
is the body's response to a thought.
Indirectly, an emotion can also be a response to an actual situation
or event, but it will be a response to the event seen through the
filter of a mental interpretation, the filter of thought, that is to
say, through the mental concepts of good and bad, like and dislike,
me and mine.
Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference
between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every
thought as if it were a reality. [This can result in a feedback
loop, or in other words, a vicious or virtuous cycle.]
Almost every human body is under a great deal of strain and stress,
not because it is threatened by some external factor but from within
the mind. The body has an ego attached to it, and it cannot but
respond to all the dysfunctional thought patterns that make up the
ego. Thus, a stream of negative emotion accompanies the stream of
incessant and compulsive thinking.
There is a generic term for all negative emotions: unhappiness.
Positive emotions strengthen the immune system, invigorate and heal
the body. But we need to differentiate between positive emotions
that are ego-generated and deeper emotions that emanate from your
natural state of connectedness with Being.
Positive emotions generated by the ego already contain within
themselves their opposite into which they can quickly turn.
Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification
with external factors, which are, of course, all unstable and liable
to change at any moment. The deeper emotions are not really emotions
at all but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of
opposites. States of being can be obscured, but they have no
opposite. They emanate from within you as the love, joy, and peace
that are aspects of your true nature.
Two zen monks, Tanzan and Ekido were walking along a country road
that had become extremely muddy after heavy rains. Near a village,
they came upon a young woman who was trying to cross the road, but
the mud was so deep it would have ruined the silk kimono she was
wearing. Tanzan at once picked her up and carried her to the other
side.
The monks walked on in silence. Five hours later, as they were
approaching the lodging temple, Ekido couldn't restrain himself any
longer. "Why did you carry that girl across the road?" he asked.
"We monks are not supposed to do things like that."
"I put the girl down hours ago," said Tanzan. "Are you still
carrying her?"
Now imagine what life would be like for someone who lived like Ekido
all the time, unable or unwilling to let go internally of situations,
accumulating more and more "stuff" inside, and you get a sense of
what life is like for the majority of people on our planet. What a
heavy burden of past they carry around them in their minds.
[I don't have to imagine.]
Any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen for what it is
in the moment it arises does not completely dissolve. It leaves
behind a remnant of pain. This energy field of old but still
very-much-alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the
pain-body. The collective pain-body is probably encoded within every
human's DNA, although we haven't discovered it there yet.
Every newborn who comes into this world already carries an emotional
pain-body. [Sounds similar to the doctrine of original sin.] An
infant with only a light pain-body is not necessarily going to be a
spiritually "more advanced" man or woman than somebody with a dense
one. In fact, the opposite is often the case. People with heavy
pain-bodies usually have a better chance to awaken spiritually than
those with a relatively light one.
The pain-body is addicted to unhappiness. It may be shocking when
you realize for the first time that there is something within you
that periodically seeks emotional negativity, seeks unhappiness. [I
perceived it as a child. The way i perceived it, people who were too
comfortable became bored and they stirred up drama in order to make
their own lives more interesting. Once their situation was
sufficiently dire, they would either die or stop stirring up drama.]
In most people, the pain-body has a dormant and an active stage. The
pain-body awakens from dormancy when it gets hungry, when it is time
to replenish itself. Alternatively, it may get triggered by an event
at any time. The pain-body that is ready to feed can use the most
insignificant event as a trigger...
It is not so much that you cannot stop your train of negative
thoughts, but that you don't want to. This is because the pain-body
at that time is living through you, pretending to be you. And to the
pain-body, pain is pleasure. It eagerly devours every negative
thought. If that sounds to you like a psychic parasite, you are
right. That's exactly what it is.
If you have ever lived with a cat, you will know that even when the
cat seems to be asleep, it still knows what is going on, because at
the slightest unusual noise, its ears will move toward it, and its
eyes may open slightly. Dormant pain-bodies are the same. On some
level, they are still awake, ready to jump into action when an
appropriate trigger presents itself.
In intimate relationships, pain-bodies are often clever enough to lie
low until you start living together and preferably have signed a
contract committing yourself to be with this person for the rest of
your life. You don't just marry your husband or wife, you also marry
her or his pain-body--and your spouse marries yours. It would be
hard to find a partner who does not carry a pain-body, but it would
perhaps be wise to choose someone whose pain-body is not excessively
dense.
Some people carry dense pain-bodies that are never completely
dormant. Through their reactivity, relatively insignificant matters
are blown up out of all proportion as they try to pull other people
into their drama by getting them to react. Unaware of the pain they
carry inside, by their reaction, they project the pain into events
and situations. Due to a complete lack of self-awareness, they
cannot tell the difference between an event and their reaction to the
event. To them, unhappiness and even the pain itself is out there in
the event or situation. Being unconscious of their inner state, they
don't even know that they are deeply unhappy, that they are suffering.
You can only go beyond it by taking responsibility for your inner
state now. There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet:
human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With
forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power
emerges--the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you
bring in the light.
# Chapter 6, Breaking free
The beginning of freedom from the pain-body lies first of all in the
realization that you HAVE a pain-body. Then, more important, in your
ability to stay present enough, alert enough, to notice the pain-body
in yourself as a heavy influx of negative emotion when it becomes
active. When it is recognized, it can no longer pretend to be you
and live and renew itself through you.
It is your conscious Presence that breaks the identification with the
pain-body. When you don't identify with it, the pain-body can no
longer control your thinking and so cannot renew itself anymore by
feeding on your thoughts. The pain-body in most cases does not
dissolve immediately, but once you have severed the link between it
and your thinking, the pain-body begins to lose energy. The energy
that was trapped in the pain-body is transmuted into Presence. In
this way, the pain-body becomes fuel for consciousness.
Many acts of violence are committed by "normal" people who
temporarily turn into maniacs. Does this mean that people are not
responsible for what they do when possessed by the pain-body? My
answer is: How can they be? How can you be responsible when you are
unconscious, when you don't know what you are doing?
When you can't stand the endless cycle of suffering anymore, you
begin to awaken. So the pain-body too has its necessary place in the
larger picture.
Not all unhappiness is of the pain-body. Some of it is new
unhappiness, created whenever you are out of alignment with the
present moment, when the Now is denied in one way or another. When
you recognize that the present moment is always already the case and
therefore inevitable, you can bring an uncompromising inner "yes" to
it and so not only create no further unhappiness, but, with inner
resistance gone, find yourself empowered by Life itself.
Pain-body and ego are close relatives. They need each other. When
you are completely trapped in the movement of thought and the
accompanying emotion, stepping outside is not possible because you
don't even know that there is an outside. You are trapped in your
own movie or dream, trapped in your own hell. To you it is reality
and no other reality is possible. And as far as you are concerned,
your reaction is the only possible reaction.
When you recognize your own pain-body as it arises, you will also
quickly learn what the most common triggers are that activate it,
whether it be situations or certain things other people do or say.
When those triggers occur, you will immediately see them for what
they are and enter a heightened state of alertness. Within a second
or two, you will also notice the emotional reaction that is the
arising pain-body, but in that state of alert Presence, you won't
identify with it, which means the pain-body cannot take you over and
become the voice in your head. If you are with your partner at the
time, you may tell her or him, "What you just said (or did) triggered
my pain-body." Have an agreement with your partner that whenever
either of you says or does something that triggers the other person's
pain-body, you will immediately mention it. In this way, the
pain-body can no longer renew itself through drama in the
relationship and instead of pulling you into unconsciousness, will
help you become fully present.
Every time you are present when the pain-body arises, some of the
pain-body's negative emotional energy will burn up, as it were, and
become transmuted into Presence. The rest of the pain-body will
quickly withdraw and wait for a better opportunity to arise again,
that is to say, when you are less conscious. The pain-body needs
your unconsciousness. It cannot tolerate the light of Presence.
But it is not the pain-body, but the identification with it that
causes the suffering that you inflict on yourself and others. It
takes no time at all to stop identifying with the pain-body. When
the pain-body is activated, know that what you are feeling is the
pain-body in you. This knowing is all that is needed to break your
identification with it.
Your sense of who you are determines what you perceive as your needs
and what matters to you in life--and whatever matters to you will
have the power to upset and disturb you. You can use this as a
criterion to find out how deeply you know yourself. What matters to
you is not necessarily what you say or believe, but what your actions
and reactions reveal as important and serious to you. So you may
want to ask yourself the question: What are the things that upset and
disturb me? If small things have the power to disturb you, then who
you think you are is exactly that: small. That will be your
unconscious belief.
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If
peace mattered to you more than anything else, you would remain
nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging
people or situations. You would immediately accept the situation and
thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it. Then
out of your alertness would come a response.
Who you think you are is also intimately connected with how you see
yourself treated by others. Many people complain that others do not
treat them well enough. "I don't get any respect, attention,
recognition, acknowledgment," they say. "I'm being taken for
granted." Who they think they are is this: "I am a needy 'little me'
whose needs are not being met." This basic misperception of who they
are creates dysfunction in all their relationships. They believe
they have nothing to give and that the world or other people are
withholding from them what they need. If the thought of lack has
become part of who you think you are, you will always experience
lack. Rather than acknowledge the good that is already in your life,
all you will see is lack. The fact is: Whatever you think the world
is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. You are
withholding it because deep down you think you are small and that you
have nothing to give.
Try this for a couple of weeks and see how it changes your reality:
Whatever you think people are withholding from you--praise,
appreciation, assistance, loving care, and so on--give it to them.
You don't have it? Just act as if you had it, and it will come.
Then, soon after you start giving, you will start receiving. You
cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines inflow. This
was expressed by Jesus: "Give and it will be given to you. Good
measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put
into your lap."
See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on
your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's
shop, biting into a succulent fruit... The fullness of life is there
at every step.
Ask yourself often: "What can I give here; how can I be of service to
this person, this situation?"
Jesus puts it like this: "For to the one who has, more will be given,
and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away."
Many people have a secret fear that they are bad. But nothing you
can find out about yourself is you. Nothing you can know ABOUT you
is you.
Most people define themselves through the content of their lives.
Whatever you perceive, experience, do, think, or feel is content.
What is there other than content? That which enables the content to
be--the inner space of consciousness.
The cosmos is not chaotic. The very word cosmos means order. But
this is not an order the human mind can ever [completely] comprehend,
although it can sometimes glimpse it.
J. Krishnamurti, the great Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher,
spoke and traveled almost continuously all over the world for more
than fifty years attempting to convey through words--which are
content--that which is beyond words, beyond content. At one of his
talks in the later part of his life, he surprised his audience by
asking, "Do you want to know my secret?" Everyone became very alert.
Many people in the audience had been coming to listen to him for
twenty or thirty years and still failed to grasp the essence of his
teaching. Finally, after all those years, the master would give them
the key to understanding. "This is my secret," he said. "I don't
mind what happens."
The most important, the primordial relationship in your life is your
relationship with the Now, or rather with whatever form the Now
takes, that is to say, what is or what happens. If your relationship
with the Now is dysfunctional, that dysfunction will be reflected in
every relationship and every situation you encounter. The ego could
be defined simply in this way: a dysfunctional relationship with the
present moment. It is at this moment that you can decide what kind
of relationship you want to have with the present moment.
Once you have decided you want the present moment to be your friend,
it is up to you to make the first move: Become friendly toward it,
welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes, and soon you will see
the results. The decision to make the present moment into your
friend is the end of the ego. Time is what the ego lives on. The
stronger the ego, the more time takes over your life. Almost every
thought you think is then concerned with the past or future, and your
sense of self depends on past for your identity and on the future for
its fulfillment.
There are three ways in which the ego will treat the present moment:
* As a means to an end
* As an obstacle
* As an enemy
When you treat the present moment as a means to an end, you are never
fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.
When you treat the present moment as a problem, you see life as a
problem and you come to inhabit a world of problems that all need to
be solved before you can be happy.
When you treat the present moment as an enemy, you hate what you are
doing, complain about your surroundings, curse things that are
happening or have happened, have an internal dialog of accusing and
blaming, and argue with what already is.
You cannot make the egoless state into a future goal and then work
toward it. All you get is more dissatisfaction, more inner conflict,
because it will always seem that you have not arrived yet, have not
"attained" that state yet.
When we speak of the elimination of time, we are, of course, not
referring to clock time, which is the use of time for practical
purposes, such as making an appointment or planning a trip. What we
are speaking of is the elimination of psychological time, which is
the egoic mind's endless preoccupation with the past and future and
its unwillingness to be one with life by living in alignment with the
inevitable ISness of the present moment.
Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.
Through it, consciousness (spirit) is freed from its imprisonment in
form. Inner nonresistance to form--whatever is or happens--is a
denial of the absolute reality of form. Resistance makes the world
and the things of the world appear more real, more solid, and more
lasting than they are, including your own form identity, the ego. It
endows the world and the ego with a heaviness and an absolute
importance that makes you take yourself and the world very seriously.
The play of form is then misperceived as a struggle for survival,
and when that is your perception, it becomes your reality.
Form means limitation. We are here not only to experience
limitation, but also to grow in consciousness by going beyond
limitation. There may be limitations in life that you have to learn
to live with. They can only be overcome internally. Everyone will
encounter them sooner or later. Those limitations either keep you
trapped in egoic reaction, which means intense unhappiness, or you
rise above them internally by uncompromising surrender to what is.
That is what they are here to teach. The surrendered state of
consciousness opens up the vertical dimension in your life, the
dimension of depth. Something will then come forth from that
dimension into this world, something of infinite value that otherwise
would have remained unmanifested.
The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to
you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or
event--through anything that happens. That joy cannot COME to
you--ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from
consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are.
When you are seemingly diminished in some way and remain in absolute
nonreaction, not just externally but also internally, you realize
that nothing real has been diminished, that through becoming "less,"
you have become more. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Deny
yourself" or "Turn the other cheek."
This does not mean, of course, that you invite abuse or turn yourself
into a victim of unconscious people. [Is that so?] Sometimes a
situation may demand that you tell someone to "back off" in no
uncertain terms. Without egoic defensiveness, there will be power
behind your words, yet no reactive force. If necessary, you can also
say no to someone firmly and clearly, and it will be what I call a
"high-quality no" that is free of all negativity.
If you don't become speechless when looking out into space on a clear
night, you are not really looking, not aware of the totality of what
is there. You are probably only looking at the objects and perhaps
seeking to name them. If you have ever experienced a sense of awe
when looking into space, perhaps even felt a deep reverence in the
face of this incomprehensible mystery, it means you must have
relinquished for a moment your desire to explain and label and have
become aware not only of the objects in space but of the infinite
depth of space itself. You must have become still enough inside to
notice the vastness in which these countless worlds exist in. The
feeling of awe is not derived from the fact that there are billions
of worlds out there, but the depth that contains them all.
There is something within you that has affinity with space; that is
why you can be aware of it. When you are aware of space, you are not
really aware of anything, except awareness itself--the inner space of
consciousness. Through you, the universe is becoming aware of
itself! What you see, hear, feel, touch, or think about is only one
half of reality, so to speak. It is form. In the teaching of Jesus,
it is simply called "the world," and the other dimension is "the
kingdom of heaven" or "eternal life."
Some years ago when visiting China, I came upon a stupa on a
mountaintop near Guilin. It had writing embossed in gold on it, and
I asked my Chinese host what it meant. "It means Buddha," he said.
"Why are there two characters rather than one?" I asked. "One," he
explained, "means 'man.' The other means 'no.' And the two together
means 'Buddha.'" I stood there in awe. The character for Buddha
already contained the whole teaching of the Buddha, and for those who
have eyes to see, the secret of life. Here are the two dimensions
that make up reality, thing-ness and no-thingness, form and the
denial of form, which is the recognition that form is not who you are.
# Chapter 8, The discovery of inner space
Most people's lives are cluttered up with things: material things,
things to do, things to think about. Space consciousness means that
in addition to being conscious of things--which always comes down to
sense perceptions, thoughts, and emotions--there is an under-current
of awareness. Awareness implies that you are not only conscious of
things (objects), but you are also conscious of being conscious. If
you can sense an alert inner stillness in the background while things
happen in the foreground--that's it! This dimension is there in
everyone, but most people are completely unaware of it.
Whenever you are upset about an event, a person, or a situation, the
real cause is not the event, person or situation but a loss of true
perspective that only space can provide. You are trapped in object
consciousness, unaware of the timeless inner space of consciousness
itself. "I am never upset for the reason I think."
Space consciousness has little to do with being "spaced out." Both
states are beyond thought. This they have in common. The
fundamental difference, however, is that in the former, you rise
above thought; in the latter, you fall below it.
If you are not spending all your waking life in discontent, worry,
anxiety, depression, despair, or consumed by other negative states;
if you are able to enjoy simple things like listening to the sound of
the rain or the wind; if you can see the beauty of clouds moving
across the sky or be alone at times without feeling lonely or needing
the mental stimulus of entertainment; if you find yourself treating a
complete stranger with heartfelt kindness without wanting anything
from her or him... it means that a space has opened up, no matter how
briefly, in the otherwise incessant stream of thinking that is the
human mind. When this happens, there is a sense of well-being, of
alive peace, even though it may be subtle. The intensity will vary
from a perhaps barely noticeable background sense of contentment to
what the ancient sages of India called ananda--the bliss of Being.
Because you have been conditioned to pay attention only to form, you
are probably not aware of it except indirectly. For example, there
is a common element in the ability to see beauty, to appreciate
simple things, to enjoy your own company, or to relate to other
people with loving kindness. This common element is a sense of
contentment, peace, and aliveness that is the invisible background
without which these experiences would not be possible.
Why is it the "least thing" that makes up "the best happiness"?
Because true happiness is not CAUSED by the thing or event, although
this is how it first appears. The thing or event is so subtle, so
unobtrusive, that it takes up only a small part of your
consciousness--and the rest is inner space, consciousness itself
unobstructed by form. In other words, the form of little things
leaves room for inner space. And it is from inner space, the
unconditioned consciousness itself, that true happiness, the joy of
Being, emanates. To be aware of little, quiet things, however, you
need to be quiet inside. A high degree of alertness is required.
If you have a compulsive behavior pattern such as smoking,
overeating, drinking, TV watching, Internet addiction, or whatever it
may be, this is what you can do: When you notice the compulsive need
arising in you, stop and take three conscious breaths. This
generates awareness. Then for a few minutes be aware of the
compulsive urge itself as an energy field inside you. Consciously
feel the need to physically or mentally ingest or consume a certain
substance or the desire to act out some form of compulsive behavior.
Then take a few more conscious breaths. After that you may find that
the compulsive urge has disappeared--for the time being. Or you may
find that it still overpowers you, and you cannot help but indulge or
act it out again. Don't make it into a problem. Make the addiction
part of your awareness practice in the way described above. As
awareness grows, addictive patterns will weaken and eventually
dissolve.
[This reminds me of a story: Surendra, a devotee of Sri Ramakrishna,
would not give up drinking. Sri Ramakrishna suggested that before
drinking alcohol, he should first offer some to Mother Kali, and then
drink it, being careful not to get drunk. Surendra never became
intoxicated again.]
Your inner body is not solid but spacious. It is not your physical
form but the life that animates the physical form. It is the
intelligence that created and sustains the body, simultaneously
coordinating hundreds of different functions of such extraordinary
complexity that the human mind can only understand a tiny fraction of
it. When you become aware of it, what is really happening is that
the intelligence is becoming aware of itself.
As much as possible in everyday life, use awareness of the inner body
to create space. This means part of your attention or consciousness
remains formless, and the rest is available for the outer world of
form. Whenever you "inhabit" your body in this way, it serves as an
anchor for staying present in the Now.
# Chapter 9, Your inner purpose
As soon as you rise above mere survival, the question of meaning and
purpose becomes of paramount importance in your life. ...the true or
primary purpose of your life cannot be found on the outer level. It
does not concern what you do but what you are...
So the most important thing to realize is this: Your life has an
inner purpose and an outer purpose. Inner purpose concerns Being and
is primary. Outer purpose concerns doing and is secondary. Inner
and outer, however, are so intertwined that it is almost impossible
to speak of one without referring to the other.
Your inner purpose is to awaken. Your outer purpose can change over
time. Finding and living in alignment with the inner purpose is the
foundation for fulfilling your outer purpose. It is the basis for
true success. Without that alignment, you can still achieve certain
things through effort, struggle, determination, and sheer hard work
or cunning. But there is no joy in such endeavor, and it invariably
ends in some form of suffering.
Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness
separate. For most people it is not an event but a process they
undergo. The initiation of the awakening process is an act of grace.
You don't have to become worthy first. That's why Jesus associated
with all kinds of people, not just the respectable ones.
Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening
process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What
drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our
civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the
culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man's-land
between two worlds. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the
arising awareness has not yet become fully integrated into their
lives. Inner and outer purpose have not merged.
...the outer purpose alone is always relative, unstable, and
impermanent. This does not mean that you should not be engaged in
those activities. It means you should connect them to your inner,
primary purpose, so that a deeper meaning flows into what you do.
The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for.
Everybody's life really consists of small things. Greatness is a
mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is
that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the
present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness. The
present moment is always small in the sense that it is always simple,
but concealed within it lies the greatest power. Like the atom, it
is one of the smallest things yet contains enormous power.
# Chapter 10, A new earth
If you look within rather than only without, however, you discover
that you have an inner and an outer purpose, and since you are a
microcosm reflection of the macrocosm, it follows that the universe
too has an inner and outer purpose inseparable from yours. The outer
purpose of the universe is to create form and experience the
interaction of forms--the play, the dream, the drama, or whatever you
choose to call it. Its inner purpose is to awaken to its formless
essence. Then comes the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose:
to bring that essence--consciousness--into the world of form and
thereby transform the world. The ultimate purpose of that
transformation goes far beyond anything the human mind can imagine or
comprehend. And yet, on this planet at this time, that
transformation is the task allotted us.
Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments.
This gives rise to fundamental misperceptions, for example. that
there are separate things and events, or that THIS is the cause of
THAT. Every thought implies a perspective, and every perspective, by
its very nature, implies limitation, which ultimately means that it
is not true, at least not absolutely. Only the whole is true, but
the whole cannot be spoken or thought.
As an illustration of relative and absolute truth, consider the
sunrise and sunset. When we say the sun rises in the morning and
sets in the evening, that is true, but only relatively. In absolute
terms, it is false. Only from the limited perspective of an observer
on or near the planet's surface does the sun rise and set. If you
were far out in space, you would see that the sun neither rises nor
sets, but that it shines continuously. And yet, even after realizing
that, we can continue to speak of the sunrise or sunset, still see
its beauty, paint it, write poems about it, even though we now know
that it is a relative rather than an absolute truth.
The notion of "my own life" is, of course, another limited
perspective created by thought, another relative truth. There is
ultimately no such thing as "your" life, since you and life are not
two, but one.
[Death] carries great potential for spiritual awakening... Since
there is very little spiritual truth in our contemporary culture, not
many people recognize this as an opportunity, and so when it happens
to them or to someone close to them, they think there is something
dreadfully wrong, something that should not be happening. ... the
more spiritually ignorant you are, the more you suffer.
[In the West] Most decrepit and old people are shut away in nursing
homes. Dead bodies ... are hidden away. Try to see a dead body, and
you will find that it is virtually illegal, except if the deceased is
a close family member. In funeral homes, they even apply makeup to
the face. You are only allowed to see a sanitized version of death.
[When death is only an abstract concept, we are totally unprepared
for the dissolution of form that awaits us.] When it approaches,
there is shock, incomprehension, despair, and great fear.
It is precisely through the onset of old age, through loss or
personal tragedy, that the spiritual dimension would traditionally
come into people's lives. That is to say, their inner purpose would
emerge only as their outer purpose collapsed and the shell of the ego
would begin to crack open. In most ancient cultures, there must have
been an intuitive understanding of this process, which is why old
people were respected and revered.
We believe that a young child should not have to face death, but the
fact is that some children do have to face the death of one of both
parents through illness or accident--or even the possibility of their
own death.
What is lost on the level of form is gained on the level of essence.
The brain does not create consciousness, but consciousness creates
the brain, the most complex physical form on earth, for its
expression. When the brain gets damaged, it does not mean you lose
consciousness. It means consciousness can no longer use that form to
enter this dimension. You cannot lose consciousness because it is,
in essence, who you are. You can only lose something that you have,
but you cannot lose something that you are.
Awakened doing is the alignment of your outer purpose--what you
do--with your inner purpose--awakening and staying awake. Not WHAT
you do, but HOW you do what you do determines whether you are
fulfilling your destiny. And how you do what you do is determined by
your state of consciousness. A reversal of your priorities comes
when the main purpose for doing what you do becomes the doing itself,
or rather, the current of consciousness that flows into what you do.
That current of consciousness is what determines quality. [In other
words] In any situation and in whatever you do, your state of
consciousness is the primary factor; the situation and what you do is
secondary.
Three ways in which consciousness can flow into what you do:
* Acceptance
* Enjoyment
* Enthusiasm
Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment,
requires me to do, and so I do it willingly. Performing an action in
the state of acceptance means you are at peace while you do it. If
you can neither enjoy nor bring acceptance to what you do--stop.
Otherwise you are not taking responsibility for... your state of
consciousness.. for life.
When you make the present moment, instead of past and future, the
focal point of your life, your ability to enjoy what you do--and with
it the quality of your life--increases dramatically. Joy is the
dynamic aspect of Being. When the creative power of the universe
becomes conscious of itself, it manifests as joy. You don't have to
wait for something "meaningful" to come into your life so that you
can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you
will ever need.
Don't ask your mind for permission to enjoy what you do. All you
will get is plenty of reasons why you can't enjoy it. "Not now," the
mind will say. "Can't you see i'm busy? There's no time. Maybe
tomorrow you can start enjoying..." That tomorrow will never come
unless you begin enjoying what you are doing now.
When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a
misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you
do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it
flows into what you do and thus into the world from deep within you.
You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any
activity that is not just a means to an end. It isn't the action you
perform that you really enjoy, but the deep sense of aliveness that
flows into it. That aliveness is one with who you are. This means
that when you enjoy doing something, you are really experiencing the
joy of Being in its dynamic aspect. That's why anything you enjoy
doing connects you with the power behind all creation.
Here's a spiritual practice that will bring empowerment and creative
expansion into your life. Make a list of a number of everyday
routine activities that you perform frequently. Include activities
that you may consider uninteresting, boring, tedious, irritating, or
stressful. But don't include anything that you hate or detest doing.
That's a case for either acceptance or for stopping what you do.
... Then, whenever you are engaged in those activities, let them be a
vehicle for alertness. Be absolutely present in what you do and
sense the alert, alive stillness within you in the background of the
activity. You will soon find that what you do in such a state of
heightened awareness, instead of being stressful, tedious, or
irritating, is actually becoming enjoyable. To be more precise, what
you are enjoying is not really the outward action but the inner
dimension of consciousness that flows into the action. This is
finding the joy of Being in what you are doing. If you feel your
life lacks significance or is too stressful or tedious, it is because
you haven't brought that dimension into your life yet. Being
conscious in what you do has not yet become your main aim.
Enthusiasm means there is a deep enjoyment in what you do plus the
added element of a goal or a vision that you work toward. When you
add a goal to the enjoyment of what you do, the energy-field or
vibrational frequency changes. A certain degree of what we might
call structural tension is now added to enjoyment, and so it turns
into enthusiasm. At the height of creative activity fueled by
enthusiasm, there will be enormous intensity and energy behind what
you do. You will feel like an arrow that is moving toward the
target--and enjoying the journey.
To an onlooker, it may appear that you are under stress, but the
intensity of enthusiasm has nothing to do with stress. [Except that
it may share some of the same hormonal soup.]
The word enthusiasm comes from ancient Greek--en and theos, meaning
God. And the related word enthousiazein means "to be possessed by a
god." With enthusiasm you will find that you don't have to do it all
by yourself. In fact, there is nothing of significance that you CAN
do by yourself. Sustained enthusiasm brings into existence a wave of
creative energy, and all you have to do then is "ride the wave."
Enjoyment of what you are doing, combined with a goal or vision that
you work toward, becomes enthusiasm. Even though you have a goal,
what you are doing in the present moment needs to remain the focal
point of your attention; otherwise you will fall out of alignment
with universal purpose.
At the core of all Utopian visions lies one of the main structural
dysfunctions of the old consciousness: looking to the future for
salvation. The only existence the future actually has is as a
thought form in your mind, so when you look to the future for
salvation, you are unconsciously looking to your own mind for
salvation. You are trapped in form, and that is ego.
What did Jesus tell his disciples? "Heaven is right here in the
midst of you."
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes a prediction that to this day
few people have understood. He says, "Blessed are the meek, for they
shall inherit the earth." In modern versions of the Bible, "meek" is
translated as humble. Who are the meek or the humble, and what does
it mean that they shall inherit the earth?
The meek are the egoless. They are those who have awakened to their
essential true nature as consciousness and recognize that essence in
all "others," all life-forms. They live in the surrendered state and
so feel their oneness with the whole and the Source. They embody the
awakened consciousness that is changing all aspects of life on our
planet, including nature, because life on earth is inseparable from
the human consciousness that perceives and interacts with it. That
is the sense in which the meek will inherit the earth.
A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you
are it!
author: Tolle, Eckhart, 1948-
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/A_New_Earth
LOC: BL624 .T635
tags: book,non-fiction,self-help,spirit
title: A New Earth
# Tags
book
non-fiction
self-help
spirit
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