Tolle and Ram Dass: Mastery of Life

"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."

[Tolle, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," pp. 104, 106-107.] 

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.

[Ram Dass, "Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita," p. 52.]

Thomas Merton: On Action and Acceptance

In his study of Eastern religious and wisdom traditions, a study cut short by his untimely death, the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, delved deeply into the heart of those traditions, finding the common ground that each shares with his own Christian faith  Not surprisingly, in his reflections on Hinduism (taken from his pithy book, "Thoughts On the East") he identifies the relentless pursuit of one's own self-will as the primary obstacle to spiritual growth and lasting happiness.

"The hazard of the spiritual quest is of course that its genuineness cannot be left to our own isolated subjective judgment alone," Merton points out. "We do not simply create our own lives on our own terms. Any attempt to do so is ultimately an affirmation of our individual self as ultimate and supreme. This is a self-idolatry which is diametrically opposed to Krishna consciousness or to any other authentic form of religious or metaphysical consciousness."

"The Gita," he notes, "sees that the basic problem of man is his endemic refusal to live by a will other than his own. For in striving to live entirely by his own individual will, instead of becoming free, man is enslaved by forces even more exterior and more delusory than his own transient fancies. He projects himself out of the present into the future. He tries to make for himself a future that accords with his own fantasy, and thereby escape from a present reality which he does not fully accept. And yet, when he moves into the future he wanted to create for himself, it becomes a present that is once again repugnant to him. And yet this is what he had "made" for himself - it is his karma."

"In accepting the present in all its reality as something to be dealt with precisely as it is," Merton writes, "man comes to grips at once with his karma and with a providential will which, ultimately, is more his own than what he currently experiences on a superficial level, as "his own will.""

"It is in surrendering a false and illusory liberty on the superficial level that man unites himself with the inner ground of reality and freedom in itself which is the will of God, of Krishna, of Providence, of Tao."

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An anonymous writer made the following observations about the challenges and hazards we create in refusing to accept life on life terms, and about the spiritual benefits that come to us when we do:

"(A)cceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation - some fact of my life - unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake. . . . (U)nless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes."

"Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women mere players." He forgot to mention that I was the chief critic. I was always able to see the flaw in every person, every situation. And I was always glad to point it out, be ause I knew you wanted perfection, just as I did. . . . (A)cceptance (has) taught me that there is a bit of good in the worst of us and a bit of bad in the best of us; that we are all children of God and we each have a right to be here. When I complain about me or about your, I am complaining about God's handiwork. I am saying that I know better than God."

Evolution, Karma and The Fourth Way

Karma - the universal law of cause and effect - ensures the one constant we know: the constant evolution of change.  Ouspensky observes the following in his book, The Fourth Way, at page 9:

The evolution of man, if it occurs, can only bethe result of knowledge and effort; as long as man knows only what he can know in the ordinary way, there is no evolution for him and there never was any evolution for him.

One of the early 20th century, Ouspensky's teaching, above, reflects the evolutionary enlightenment taught by modern spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen.