This blogspot is a repository for the many sayings and quotes that I have collected in my readings and studies on the path toward spiritual awakening and self-transcendence. May it happen to each of us in this precious human life which we are experiencing. . . .
"The ego is not personal," writes Eckhart Tolle. It has both an individual and a collective identity. And, as dangerous and all pervasive as it is on the individual level, it is on the collective level where it is most insidious. It is collective because it affects us all, and it is insidious because it continually slips under the radar of our consciousness. Unconsciously we go about our day-to-day activity, identified with our internalized thinking, yet tuned out to the madness around us.
"Greed, selfishness, exploitation, cruelty, and violence are still all-pervasive on our planet," Tolle observes. "When you don't recognize them as individual and collective manifestations of an underlying dysfunction or mental illness, you fall into the error of personalizing them."
Watching film footage of the Nuremburg rallies and of the resultant death camps of the Holocaust can we not say that this was an example of a world gone literally mad? Yet what about the greed and corruption that nearly brought down the world financial system in 2008? Was that not also an acute attack of madness? What about the daily traffic jams that clog cities around the globe as our carbon emissions melt the polar icecaps? Yet who amongst us is not sucked into the workaday madness that surrounds us? Is our identification as employees, as townsmen, as citizens, as "haves" or "have-nots" not an extremely potent motivator of our perspectives and behaviour? Are we not all too easily enabled to block out and disregard the harms we are causing to the planet as a whole, simply by the seeming drama of our day-to-day existence?
"You construct a conceptual identity for an individual or group," Tolle points out, "and you say: "This is who he is. This is who they are." When you confuse the ego that you perceive in others with their identity, it is the work of your own ego that uses this misperception to strengthen itself through being right and therefore superior, and through reacting with condemnation indignation, and often anger against the perceived perceived enemy."
"All this is enormously satisfying to the (personal) ego," he notes. "It strengthens the sense of separation between yourself and the other whose "otherness" has become magnified to such an extent that you can no longer feel your common humanity, nor the rootedness in the one Life that you share with each being, your common divinity."
"The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!"
-- Robert Burns -- ("To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with a Plough")
"Mastery of life is not a question of control," observes spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, "but of finding a balance between human and Being."
Our humanity would have us incessantly casting our inner eye backwards and forwards in order to control and tame life, so that our fears and worries are averted and all remorse and bitterness over the past is overcome. Yet, in continual recurrence to this netherworld of past and future ( "I backward cast my e'e. On prospects drear! An' forward, tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear!") we rob ourselves and others of the larger dimension of our Being. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Robert Burns seems wistful, even envious, of the mouse whose nest he has overturned with the plough. The mouse who lives in the Eternal Present knows a dimension of Being unknown to the ploughman who is merely stuck, held prisoner in his unconscious humanity, somewhere between his past and future.
"To do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living that each of us is here to learn," Tolle points out. "You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity."
As Ram Dass observed in his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita: "Whatever karma it is that brought you to this point, it's now your dharma to work with it." To be present to that dharma is to move beyond time-limited humanity and towards eternal Being. It is to be as present as the mouse and not to be enslaved, like the ploughman, to the woeful past and and a fearful future.
". . . (T)hinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence."
-- Eckhart Tolle --
Being free of the smaller self, free of ego, is the transformational goal of all the world's great wisdom traditions. In self-forgetting we awaken to the divinity within each of us, indeed, to the divinity that infuses, pervades and supports all we see. We become whole and realize that we are part of the Whole, rather than isolated individuals.
How is such a transformation of the psyche to be achieved, however? Best-selling author, Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual teacher of no small repute, emphasizes that the key to overcoming the limitations of the ego lies in our present moment awareness.
"All that is required to become free of the ego," he notes, "is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world. And this is also why becoming free of the ego cannot be made into a goal to be attained at some point in the future. Only Presence can free you of the ego, and you can only be present Now, not yesterday or tomorrow. Only Presence can undo the past in you and thus transform your state of consciousness."
With Oprah, co-hosts of "A New Earth"
web seminar. (Available here.)
"Spiritual realization," he continues, "is to see clearly what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away. The Buddha," he points out, "was probably the first human being to see this clearly, and so anata (no self) became one of the central points of his teaching. And when Jesus said, "Deny thyself," what he meant was: Negate (and thus undo) the illusion of self. If the self - ego - were truly who I am, it would be absurd to deny it."
"The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your 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 perception and the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty - but do we need to be imprisoned by them."
The great existential battle is to rise above self-consciousness, and to rid our being of the constant, conditioned inner narrative of the ego. It is this undammed "stream of consciousness" that carries us through an entire lifetime unaware that our real being lies beyond words.
"Neti, neti, neti," goes the Sanskrit chant. "Not this, not this, not this." How, after all, can words possibly describe the ineffable? Spiritual teachers have always taught that the Ultimate is beyond description, and that the incessant voice of the ego is what separates us from the divine. Even when we voice the words in our mind that describe the Ultimate, our words pass like a net through barren waters - catching nothing. "Not this, not this, not this," we realize.
"Knowledge born of the intellect am I not. By nature Truth eternal am I. I am perpetual immutability. Neither formless nor with form, described by the Vedas as "Not this, not this," free from separation and unity, the true Self reigns supreme."
-- Avadhut Gita I:49-50 --
"When the ocean is searching for you," Rumi says, "don't walk to the language-river. Listen to the ocean, and bring your talky business to an end."
"There is a way between voice and presence
where information flows.
In disciplined silence it opens.
With wandering talk it closes."
"Nothing is either good or bad, but our thinking makes it so."
-- Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2 --
"Thinking acts like a veil," observes the late spiritual teacher, William Samuel. "Look at a flower. We see it now. We behold its form now. We are aware of the flower, right here, right now; but suppose we think about something else while looking at the flower. Think about that big bill that is past due and worry a little. What seems to happen to the awareness of the flower? We are not as aware of it as before, are we? We are looking at it with eyes that hardly see. It seems fuzzy, hardly noticed, but the same rose is there; the same beauty, the same form the same grace and magnificent delicacy is right before us to be beheld and enjoyed, but we hardly see it. We are too busy worrying about the bill. We are too busy thinking."
"The bill is not now," Samuel points out. "All that is now is the awareness of the rose. The rose in all its loveliness is now. The bill is nothing more than a memory that is not in this now-awareness unless we choose to put it there."
"We see that thinking is like a film spread over the eyes; like a mist that covers the whole face of the land, like a veil; like looking at the flower - and everything - through a mirror darkly."
. . . . . . . . . . . .
That it is our thinking that colours our life, that it is our thinking which makes things appear to be "good or bad" is a universal truth, much older than Shakespeare. It is one of the central truths of the ancient Ashtavakra Gita, and it is the central message of modern spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle. "Thinking without awareness, is the main dilemma of human existence" Tolle observed in his best-selling book, "A New Earth."
If one thinks of oneself as free, one is free, and if one thinks of oneself as bound, one is bound. Here this saying is true, "Thinking makes it so."
The man or woman seeking meaning in their life is bound at some time to hear of enlightenment. But what is enlightenment, really? And where are we to find it? At the feet of a guru? Perhaps? At the top of a mountain? Maybe. In a corner bar, a bottle of pills, a love affair or a new car? Highly, highly unlikely.
The enlightened spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen, wrote an entire book called "Enlightenment is a Secret." In it, he remarked:
"Enlightenment is a secret that very few people know about and even fewer understand. Why is it a secret? Because Enlightenment does not exist in time. That why it's a secret and that's why it will always be a secret. Enlightenment is a vision that cannot be held or grasped in any way. Beyond this world it's a mystery that is exploding. A fire that is burning. It's a fire that a person is either going to jump into or run away from. This fire burns beyond the mind. No-time is the place where this secret abides. Realize that and you realize the Self you are when there's no mind and no time. Realize that and cling to that alone as your own Self.
The great Sufi poet and teacher, Rumi, asked us to judge the moth by the worthiness of the candle it immolates itself in. "Enlightenment is not far away," Cohen insists. "It does not need to take time."
Below, two modern enlightened teachers, best-selling author of "The Power of Now," Eckhart Tolle and the neo-Buddhist teacher and author, Adyashanti, tackle the question of just what enlightenment is.
Enlightenment, or the egoless state, "cannot be achieved in the future, or in time," Eckhart Tolle notes. "It is only by looking through it now, that the egoless state is here, now."
"A state that you want to achieve is a mental concept that is endowed with self," he observes. "And, as such, you can never reach it because it is an abstract concept of 'who I want to be,' not realizing you are it already."
"So the egoless state does not lie in the future. It has nothing to do with the future," he says. "You cannot make it into a goal. You cannot make - whether you call it the egoless state, or whether you call it enlightenment - you cannot make it into a goal. 'Goal' implies future," he observes, and "the very entry point into the egoless state or enlightenment is the present moment."
"If you make (enlightenment) into a goal you want to achieve," says Tolle, "you miss the entry point, because you are looking to the future."
"That is the dilemna of all spiritual seekers," he observes. "Because they listen to a spiritual talk or read a spiritual book and say, 'There is such a thing as the egoless state, or the enlightened state, and perhaps I can achieve it too.' And immediately they make it into a goal (and) project it away. It becomes mind, a mental image of 'who' I want to 'be' (in the) future. And (they do) not realize that their very search to actualize that image prevents them from being it, now. Because the entry point is here, (in) this moment only. The ego can only be transcended through accessing the power of the present moment." There is, he says, "no other way."
"Enlightenment is only in the power of the present moment," Tolle notes, "nowhere else. It is only humans who give up the search who realize it is already here. So you have to, one way or another - either because you are totally frustrated with the spiritual search, or because you suddenly see the truth of it - give up the search, as if (enlightenment) is in the future."
"Enlightenment," says Adyashanti, "is simply not perceiving through ego. It's not seeing life or any thing - self, others, your tennis shoes, your cat, your dog, your livelihood, anything - it's just not seeing the world, not seeing everything through the distortion called the egoic state of consciousness. "
"That is why," he observes, "(enlightenment) is likened to the natural state. Natural, meaning its not an alternative distorting lens, it's just perception without a lens, without a distortion. Ultimately, that is what enlightenment is. It is perception without distortion."
Cautioning his audience that enlightenment is not an unending blissful experience of what Zen Buddhists call satori, Adyashanti observes that, "in the end enlightenment has very little to do with enlightenment experiences. It is simply not perceiving through the lens of ego."
'There is no doubt, he says, "that it is pretty good not perceiving through the lens of ego, it's happiness, it's peace, it's the end of your search. Not that you find anything, except sanity. Not that you attain anything, except seeing things as they actually are. And that's what nirvana is, seeing things as they actually are."
"Enlightenment," says Adyashanti, "is the unaltered state of consciousness. Consciousness needs no alteration to see that everything is one. Since everything is one, you don't need an unaltered state of consciousness to perceive that everything is one. You need an altered state of consciousness to see that everything is not one."
In his ground-breaking work, "The Power of Now," Eckhart Tolle, an enlightened spiritual teacher, takes the reader through the mechanism by which our conditioned thinking patterns and their concomitant emotional states rule our lives.
The "ego" - our individualized and habitual way of problem-creating, thinking and problem-solving, or what the psychologist/philosopher William James identified as the "stream of consciousness" - is, Tolle teaches, always accompanied by what he calls "the pain-body." Thinking begets the pain-body, the pain-body begets yet more thinking, and so on, down the road of suffering.
Yet, like the Buddha some 2500+ years ago, Tolle also identifies a way out of suffering. End the addiction to, and the identification with, the human ego and the suffering of the pain-body will also abate. In his famous statement, "I think therefore I am," DesCartes was wholly wrong, Tolle says. "I think therfore I suffer," being much closer to the seeming truth.
"There is no ego apart from the thoughts," Tolle notes. "The thoughts, (and) identification with thoughts, is ego. But the thoughts that go through your mind, of course, are linked to the collective mind of the culture you live in (and) humanity as a whole. So they are not your thoughts as such, but you pick them up from the collective . . . most of them."
"So you identify with thinking," Tolle observes, "and the identification with thinking becomes ego; which means, simply, that you believe in every thought that arises, and you derive your sense of 'who you are' from what your mind is telling you (about) who you are."
And so our thoughts breed beliefs and motions, which in turn breed further reinforcing thoughts, beliefs and emotions, all in a psychological whirl which can quickly drive one 'mad' at any given point in time.
Stopping such thoughts is seemingly the only way in which we will break this vicious spiral. And, it is in the portal of what Tolle simply calls "Being" that we are afforded the silence that will break through into the raucous noise of the ego, bringing with it the clarity and sanity which fosters an emotional respite of peace, forbearance, compassion and well-being to a world of 'thought addicts' and 'emotional junkies.'
As the great 20th-century enlightened sage Ramana Maharshi taught:
"The mind is by nature restless. Begin liberating it from restlessness; give it peace; make it free from distractions; train it to look inward, and make all this a habit. This is done by ignoring the external world and removing the obstacles to peace of mind."
The enlightened modern spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, made the observation that Rene DesCartes (the father of the 'empirical rationalism' that drives modern science) got it completely wrong in his most basic statement: "Cognito, ergo summa;" or, "I think, therefore I am."
Objectively, DesCartes' famous dictum may be true; but subjectively, it is perhaps wholly wrong. As Tolle and so many rishis and sages of all ages and continents before him have pointed out, our "thinking without awareness" is the main dilemna of human existence. It is the root cause of all suffering.
Men and women get themselves confused with, caught up in, and identify themselves with, the restless inner dialogue of the human ego and then act upon it, usually to the detriment of others and always to the ultimate detriment of themselves.
Our usual mode of constant egoic thinking combined with an "outer" rather than "inner" religious worldview, and the sure-fire conviction that our exoteric religious beliefs are the only right and valid views, has been the chief source of man-made violence and death for millenia untold, and it continues to be so, as philosopher Ken Wilber has pointed out.
And yet, the "inner" or "esoteric" spiritual path that is present but largely ignored in most wisdom traditions is one of the few - and may be the only - way out of humanity's individual and collective suffering, as Wilber has concluded.
As the renowned Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, observed in one of his letters that makes for the substance of the embedded video (below), the inner, contemplative path, rather than mere intellection and the application of reason, is the essence of all wisdom traditions.
To this effect, Merton notes:
"Oh, my Brother! The contemplative is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim-carrying God in his chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust; that is to say, in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness, in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist."
In explaining what 'contemplation' and the 'contemplative life,' are, Merton notes that contemplation is "a more profound depth of faith; a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images or words, or even in clear concepts." He observes:
"Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant source.
Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that source. It knows the source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond both reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete."
